c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Christianity in many of its forms and denominational faces is exploding across the continent of Africa, says documentary filmmaker James Ault.

In Ghana, for example, the number of churches is doubling every few years, he says.

In Zimbabwe, Christian ministers are regularly casting out demons and bringing healing, stability and comfort to people of all ages.

And meanwhile, says Ault, Pentecostalism in Uganda has taken off and is given much of the credit for a miraculous stemming of the AIDS epidemic there.

“The power and vitality of the Christian movement in Africa is beginning to be seen on the world stage,” said Ault, who spoke recently at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Mich..

“Christianity can no longer be identified as a religion of the West, where in 1900, 83 percent of all Christians lived.”

Ault, who owns a film-production company in Northampton, Mass., was in Kalamazoo to offer a look at his latest project _ a work in progress that chronicles the spread of Christianity in Africa.

The documentary was shot over a three-year period. So far, Ault has edited 250 hours of filming down to 21/2 hours of rough cuts.

Using the working title “Toward a New Christianity: Stories of African Christians in Ghana and Zimbabwe,” the film features all-night prayer meetings, healing services, ceremonial dances and interviews with prominent African church leaders.

About 60 people, including students, teachers and others, had a chance to preview the rough cuts on a recent night at Kalamazoo College.

“The religious sense is deep in Africa,” Ault said in an interview after the screening. “Religion is like a skin. They wear it wherever they go.”

Of great interest and concern to Ault is how religious fundamentalism and evangelicalism shape belief into a vehicle for personal transformation and social change.

His previous documentary, “Born Again,” took an in-depth look at a fundamentalist church in Worcester, Mass. It was featured on PBS and won a Blue Ribbon award from the American Film Festival.

Recently Ault came out with “Spirit & Flesh,” a book that provides a first-person account of his relationship with members of the church in Worcester.

Among other things, he writes in the book about the ways in which fundamentalism has made an impact on conservative politics and subsequently on America’s political process.

“In the wrenching reversal of American politics toward conservatism over the past quarter-century, no institution has been more decisive than local fundamentalist or evangelical churches,” Ault says.

“Week in, week out, thousands of such churches across the nation educate members on issues of the day, arousing and directing their political outrage and concern.”

The book combines aspects of Ault’s life as the son of a United Methodist minister with what it took to establish trust so members of the Baptist church would allow him and his camera crew access to their lives.

“He undermines (in the “Born Again” documentary and his new book) the stereotypes and gives a much more complex sense of what the appeal of fundamentalism is,” said Bob Stauffer, a Kalamazoo College sociologist.

“The people he gets to know and describes are thoughtful and have integrity,” Stauffer said. “He relates how this type of Christianity adds meaning, relevance and solidity to their lives.”

Educated as a sociologist at Harvard, Ault began his research at the Baptist church basically as an atheist. But, he says, the venture became much more than a scientific exercise. Although he never accepted the fundamentalist call for salvation, the Methodist faith of his earlier years was bolstered.

The making of “Born Again,” he writes, helped him tap into talents he had lost and allowed him “to find a childhood faith revived, reuniting me with my parents around the ultimate things of life.”

In his earlier work, Ault says, he tried to examine and explain a conservative religious movement that then and even now has been misunderstood by many.

With the film on Africa, he is expanding his focus and looking at how Christianity is profoundly influencing countries still escaping colonial influence.

He is also, by showing stories of personal transformation, trying to reveal some of the stability and moral order that Christianity provides.

Pentecostal churches in Uganda, for example, have played a big role in educating people about AIDS as well as convincing them to curtail their sexual practices.

Ault did not film in Uganda, but he does see events there as examples of how “revival is becoming a means of establishing moral order. Christianity is adding to the continued development of society.”

Among other things, he says, his new documentary explores the ways in which Christianity is becoming increasingly African, emphasizing healing, for instance, or dancing as a spiritual discipline.

Helping to shape African Christianity are traditional beliefs in demons and the reality of the spirit world.

Ault’s new film, for instance, shows a young Methodist woman who believes that hateful relatives have placed a curse on her life.

In one scene, members of her church surrounded her in prayer, laying hands on her and demanding the curse be removed.

Afterward, the woman says she feels calm. In subsequent scenes it looks as though her terror, depression and guilt have been lifted.

Among church leaders who appear in the film is Bishop Peter Sarpong of the Catholic Church in Ghana. Sarpong, says Ault, has been a pioneer in introducing African culture into Christian worship.

Churches in the documentary range from those founded by Western missionaries to independent African churches to the “new Pentecostal churches who have brought charismatic Christianity to new heights among Africa’s most urban people,” Ault said.

In promotional material, Terence Ranger, a professor of African history at Oxford University, says that what he has viewed of the unfinished documentary is “the most penetrating and informative material I ever seen on African Christianity.”

Now that he has captured a look at Christianity in Africa, Ault hopes to film Africans who have come to this country and have set up churches that express much of the same energy he encountered in Africa.

“Could the Holy Spirit be at work here?” Ault asked of the growth of African-style Christianity. “I can’t know as a social scientist if this is true. But we can’t deny it.”

(Chris Meehan writes about religion for the Kalamazoo Gazette in Kalamazoo, Mich.)

MO/PH END RNS

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