Long before Ghana’s Pentecostal churches filled stadiums, a former Presbyterian named Peter Newman Anim was leading a small band of believers in prayer and divine healing. Today he is widely called the father of Pentecostalism in Ghana.
From Boso to Asamankese
Anim was born on 4 February 1890 at Boso in the Gold Coast, now Ghana, and grew up in the Basel Mission, later the Presbyterian Church. Around 1917, after reading The Sword, a magazine of the Faith Tabernacle Church in Philadelphia, he embraced its teaching on divine healing and began a healing ministry. His group took the name Faith Tabernacle.
Anim’s movement grew and settled at Asamankese in the Eastern Region, which became its headquarters. In the 1930s he affiliated with the Apostolic Church of Bradford in the United Kingdom and asked it to send a resident missionary.
McKeown’s arrival and the split
That request was answered in March 1937, when the Irish missionary James McKeown arrived to work alongside him. The partnership did not last. A dispute arose after McKeown accepted treatment at a hospital in Accra for malaria, which many in Anim’s strict divine-healing movement saw as a lapse of faith.
The two men went separate ways. Anim’s followers became what is now the Christ Apostolic Church International, while McKeown’s work grew into what eventually became The Church of Pentecost.
A lasting legacy
Anim died on 7 February 1984, aged 94. Historians of African Christianity place him and McKeown together as the pioneers of Ghanaian Pentecostalism. The emphasis on prayer, healing and the work of the Holy Spirit that marked his small fellowship at Asamankese runs through much of Ghanaian Christianity today.
Sources: Wikipedia: Peter Anim Newman; Wikipedia: Christ Apostolic Church International; The Church of Pentecost.
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