Peter Anim and the Asamankese prayer group that started Ghanaian Pentecostalism
It began with a magazine. In the early twentieth century, Peter Newman Anim, a young man in the Gold Coast, read The Sword of the Spirit, a periodical from the Faith Tabernacle in Philadelphia that taught about faith and divine healing. Inspired, he formed a prayer group around 1917. Historians now credit Anim and his group in Asamankese with starting classical Pentecostalism in Ghana.
Anim and Faith Tabernacle
Anim was born in the Gold Coast in the late nineteenth century and was educated in Presbyterian schools. He suffered from illness for years and believed he was healed through prayer, which drew him to teachings about divine healing. Anim’s group affiliated for a time with the Faith Tabernacle, an American movement that stressed holiness and healing through faith rather than medicine. It was not itself Pentecostal, but it prepared the ground.
Spirit baptism
According to church histories, members of Anim’s group experienced baptism in the Holy Spirit, with speaking in tongues, before the first Pentecostal missionaries from Europe arrived. This made Asamankese, in the Eastern Region, a birthplace of Ghanaian Pentecostalism.
The group made contact with the Apostolic Church in Bradford, England. In 1937, the Irish missionary James McKeown arrived in Asamankese to work with them. His arrival marked the beginning of a long and influential ministry in Ghana.
The Church of Pentecost
A dispute soon arose. McKeown fell ill with malaria and accepted medical treatment, which some in Anim’s group saw as a betrayal of their teaching on divine healing. Around 1938 and 1939, the movement split. Anim’s group became the Christ Apostolic Church, while McKeown’s followers continued in a separate line. McKeown’s work eventually led to the Church of Pentecost, now one of Ghana’s largest denominations. The Christ Apostolic Church also grew and spread.
Anim led the Christ Apostolic Church for decades, with a period of enforced retirement in the late 1950s before he was reinstated in 1960. He died in 1984.
Healing and medicine
The debate over medicine that split Anim’s movement from McKeown’s continued in African Pentecostalism for decades. Some churches taught that believers should rely only on prayer for healing. Others accepted medicine as God’s gift while still praying for healing. Today most Ghanaian Pentecostal churches accept medical treatment, but the emphasis on divine healing remains strong in their worship and preaching.
Ghana’s Pentecostal churches now fill stadiums and broadcast on television. Their roots go back to a sick young man reading an American magazine and gathering friends to pray in a small Eastern Region town.
