The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Examining the Authority of Church Leaders in African Christianity
Open accessAbstract
It has been said that the missionaries came to Africa with the mindset that Africans were without culture or at best, they had an evil culture that must be completely eradicated. They rejected anything African so as to introduce the Western culture which they considered enlightened. However, whatever teaching that the then missionaries and church leaders later introduced, would have to be processed through African cultural lenses. By that, the people applied their own cultural concepts to the teachings they received. This paper examines how cultural concepts of the authority of leadership help the African Christian to situate and interpret the teachings and practices of the universal church from their own perspectives. Authority is defined and examined from the perspectives of legitimacy and functionality. The question of who has the final authority in the church is also discussed to strengthen the corporate leadership practised and offer some solutions to challenges of in-fighting within the leadership of congregations. Keywords: authority, legitimacy, functionality, consent
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The source backs part of the claim, not all of it — or backs it for a different population, condition or comparison.
In the citing paper
“In practice, this means working closely with the laity, who often serve as board members with advisory roles in decision-making and see to it that pastors lead the implementation of these decisions (Gbekor 2020:372).”
From Empowering church leaders for service in Africa: Situational Holistic Pastoral Ministry paradigm (2025) · cites this paper as Gbekor 2020:372
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 7
- Asamoah-Gyadu, J. K. African Charismatics: Current Developments within Independent Indigenous Pentecostalism in Ghana. Accra: African Christian Press, 2005. · DOI
- Asante, Emmanuel. Issues on African Traditional Religion, Humanities, Ethnicity and Development: Impact on African Christianity. Accra: SonLife Press, 2017.
- Barnes, Elizabeth. “Ordination” in New and Enlarged Handbook of Christian Theology edited by Donald W. Musser and Joseph L. Price. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003.
- Gbekor, Christian F.W. “The Impact of African Religion and Culture on Christian Leadership in Ghana” in The Bible,Cultural Identity, and Missions edited by Daniel Berchie, Daniel K. Bediako and Dziedzorm R. Asafo. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.
- Knighton Ben. “Christian Enculturation in the Two-Thirds World,” in Global Christianity. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401204323_005 · DOI
- Sackey, Brigid. ‘Recognising Other Dimensions of Epistemology: Conceptualisation of Abosom (“Deities”) in Ghanaian Experience’ Research Review of the Institute of African Studies 16(1), 2000. https://doi.org/10.4314/rrias.v16i1.22888 · DOI
- Worley, Robert C. A Gathering of Strangers: Understanding the Life of Your Church. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press,1983.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Empowering church leaders for service in Africa: Situational Holistic Pastoral Ministry paradigm
Hove, R. (2025) · In die Skriflig/In Luce Verbi · doi:10.4102/ids.v59i1.3131 · Cited by 3
Metadata
- Authors
- Gbekor, C. F. W.
- Affiliations
- Global Theological Seminary, Accra Ghana
- Corresponding author
- Gbekor, Christian F. W.
- Venue
- E-Journal of Religious and Theological Studies
- Publisher
- Noyam Publishers
- Published
- 2020-11-10
- Pages
- 364-373
- ISSN
- 2458-7338 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3102587287
- Cited by
- 2
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2023: 1
- FWCI
- 1.82
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- E-Journal of Religious and Theological Studies (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Religious studies › Christian Theology and Mission
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Religious studies › Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Religious studies › Contemporary Christian Leadership and Education
- Keywords
- African Christianity, legitimacy, functionality, consent, Westernization, congregational leadership, corporate leadership
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
