Reconceptualising the Lessons from Martin Luther’s Reformation for the Pentecostal Movements in Southwest, Nigeria
The Protestant Reformation was a religious reform movement that swept through Europe in the 1500s. It precipitated a chain of events that occasioned the missionary zeal of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The influence of the Reformation over every subsequent movement in Christendom is definitive, formative, and fundamental. As a result, scholarly volumes and research on the Reformation and its attending implications have never been in short supply from the fifteenth century till date. In the contemporary context, studies on Luther’s Reformation are burgeoning. However, in the African Christian context studies examining the implications of Luther’s Reformation on specific denominations with the thesis on the need for reforming the Christian faith are scant and hard to come by. This paper therefore attempts to reconceptualise the lessons of Martin Luther’s Reformation in the context of Pentecostal movements in southwestern Nigeria. Using historical and analytical approaches, the paper gives a chronological analysis of Martin Luther’s Reformation, its underpinning theologies and the implication for contemporary Pentecostal movement in southwestern Nigeria. The paper argues that reconceptualizing the lessons of reformation into the socio-religious terrain of Nigerian Pentecostal Movements entails refocusing the attention of the church to the core issues of reformation which essentially is the return to true Apostolic Christianity.
Keywords: lessons, luther’s, martin, movements, nigeria, pentecostal, reconceptualising, reformation, southwest