The transnational network of Newfrontiers

Newfrontiers is an example of an independent charismatic or neo-charismatic church movement.Footnote ¹⁸ Neo-charismatic groups emerged worldwide during the 1970s and 1980s, drawing from already established Pentecostal and charismatic traditions but standing outside their denominational structures.Footnote ¹⁹ Newfrontiers was birthed through pastor Terry Virgo's visiting ministry in churches across the southern English counties of East Sussex, West Sussex, Kent and south-east London during the 1970s, before being formally established in 1980. At its roots was an ideology that centred on the theme of ‘restoration’. Like a range of neo-charismatic groups, Newfrontiers adopted an ecclesiology which centred on restoring the five-fold ministries of Ephesians iv. The Bibles of Newfrontiers leaders would have fallen open at this chapter, so regularly did they expound its verses referring to Apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers and evangelists. From the New Testament, such leaders concluded that these were the offices around which the Church was to be organised and that they were to be populated with individuals ‘anointed’ by the Holy Spirit to fill them. As such, there was no room for any structure deemed ‘denominational’, nor democratic processes in church government.Footnote ²⁰ This, however, was only one facet of the restoration they sought. Beneath it was an adventist hope for the ‘restoration of all things’, or the final establishment of God's kingdom on the earth. While believing that this would be consummated only at Christ's second coming, leaders who adhered to this ideology held that the Church, restored to the enduring pattern of church life set out in the New Testament, would also be the agent of its progressive realisation in the present age.Footnote ²¹ It was this spirit of recovery and restoration that earned Newfrontiers and other like-minded British movements the collective title of ‘British Restorationism’.Footnote ²²

British Restorationism, however, by no means originated in isolation. The theological development of the churches and pastors that comprised it was influenced by visits to and from a group of American charismatic pastors, known as the ‘Fort Lauderdale Five’, who influenced their adoption of controversial ‘shepherding’ practices.Footnote ²³ Older transatlantic influences from the North American ‘Latter Rain’ movement were also apparent, as was the role of transnational Brethren networks between Britain and New Zealand.Footnote ²⁴ Yet British Restorationists sought to establish their local credibility, resisting suggestions that they were the outposts of an American movement and insisting that their ideas about apostleship had not originated externally.Footnote ²⁵ Indeed, there was an ambivalence about American Christianity as a cultural force among British Restorationists and a concern about the conflation of the Gospel with the ‘American way’ by its more ‘outrageous’ figures.Footnote ²⁶

Despite attention to these North American connections, scholarship on British Restorationism has generally neglected its overseas links, but a few important studies have shown that groups like Newfrontiers had a missional vision that extended far beyond Britain.Footnote ²⁷ At first, this vision was the partially concealed background to efforts by Virgo and his ‘apostolic team’ to establish Restorationist principles in churches overseas but, by the mid-1980s, contact with more evangelistically active groups and reported prophetic visions moved world evangelisation firmly into the foreground.Footnote ²⁸ Church planting began its unrelenting ascent on their agenda and complemented the movement's existing practice of ‘adopting’ already established congregations. Between 1986 and 1991, at least twenty-two new churches were planted by leaders associated with Newfrontiers, including five in India and Cyprus.Footnote ²⁹

The movement's accelerating expansion was facilitated by regular conference events and the transnational circulation of media that promoted its Restorationist ideology. Restoration Magazine (1975–92), the Newfrontiers magazine (published under various titles between 1980 and 2011), sermon recordings and books like Virgo's seminal monograph, Restoration in the Church,Footnote ³⁰ moved through networks of travelling pastors and international post into the hands of local leaders in Switzerland, South Africa and Kenya, to name just a few. Members of Virgo's apostolic team spoke overseas regularly and their early itineraries included France, Hungary, Spain, India, Nepal, Mexico, the United States and South Africa. The leaders who received them most warmly tended to be those who had already started to think in similar ways, who were frustrated with ‘traditional church life’, who had Reformed leanings, or who otherwise found attractive the combination of Reformed theology, biblical exegesis and charismatic practice that characterised Newfrontiers. Initial contact often led to attendance at one of the movement's flagship events in the UK – the Downs Bible Weeks (1979–88), Stoneleigh International Bible Weeks (1991–2001) and the Brighton leadership conferences (1996, 1998, 2000, 2002–11) – with the travel costs of those from poorer nations often funded wholly or in part by British churches.Footnote ³¹

Through multi-directional visits by pastors and attendance at conferences by leaders (and sometimes whole churches), transnational friendships grew and so did the number of churches associated with Newfrontiers.Footnote ³² Indeed, Newfrontiers and other Restorationist groups placed a premium on informal, intimate and warm friendships within churches and between church leaders. This was another facet of the New Testament pattern of church life that they sought to restore in the face of the ‘cold formality’ that they perceived in the historic denominations.Footnote ³³ Indeed, joining Newfrontiers was not a formal process – for this conjured the spectre of denominational institutionalism for Restorationists – but a process of growing friendship and partnership in a shared mission.Footnote ³⁴ As the historian Dana L. Robert has shown, networks of friendship and the regular face-to-face interactions that facilitate them provide a rich context for multi-directional exchange in World Christianity.Footnote ³⁵ This was true for Newfrontiers. By 2010 ‘British’ Restorationism was a misnomer for its ideology and belied the formative ‘glocalising’ processes that had occurred between leaders and congregations in the global North and global South who mutually constructed each other as friends, even family.

Patterns of glocalisation: South Africa

That something changed between early articulations of the Restorationist principles of Newfrontiers and later ones is immediately clear through a comparison of their ‘vision and values’ documents. Despite resistance to formal membership processes, pragmatism dictated that an informal statement of beliefs be penned for churches wishing to partner with the network. In May 1993 this took the form of a ‘discussion document’ that listed thirteen characteristics that a church working in partnership with Newfrontiers should have had.Footnote ³⁶ Another document, published in 2010, modified this to seventeen, of which two additions stood out. Among established commitments to the final authority of the Bible, male eldership in the Church and loving church relationships, the first spoke of the importance of a ‘church which is serving and empowering the poor within its own ranks and beyond’. The second called for a ‘church that wholeheartedly embraces the New Testament teaching of the one new man, demonstrating love and respect between the races, cultures, and sexes’.Footnote ³⁷ Both reflected encounters between the founding ideology of the movement's British leaders and the socio-political contexts of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa. The first was influenced by voices from South Africa in the late 1990s and did much to increase the traction of the movement in the global South.Footnote ³⁸

The second addition, however, went to the heart of the movement's relational nature. The phrase ‘one new man’ invoked the second chapter of the Apostle Paul's letter to the Ephesians, which argued that ‘the dividing wall of hostility’ between Jew and Gentile had been broken down by Jesus Christ ‘that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace’.Footnote ³⁹ By 2010 this had become the proof text for Newfrontiers leaders to argue that bringing reconciliation between races and cultures in a single body – the Church – was central to the restoration of New Testament church life.Footnote ⁴⁰ The statement also referred to the importance of mutual respect between the sexes, although this was an uncommon spin on an idea which has not been uncovered in any earlier discussions of the topic.Footnote ⁴¹

The prior absence of racial reconciliation from the Newfrontiers statement of values spoke to the network's roots in England's southern counties. It was not that this would have been objectionable – Newfrontiers leaders supported reconciliatory efforts in South Africa, as will be shown – but race relations rarely confronted the network's largely white British constituents at close quarters. The United Kingdom had domestic and imperial histories of racism and the racial inequalities of British society were highlighted by a series of riots in inner-city areas like Brixton, Toxteth and Handsworth in the early to mid-1980s.Footnote ⁴² However, not only were these inner cities removed from the Sussex heartlands of the network, but the outlook of Newfrontiers leaders had echoes of a longer British tradition, encapsulated in media and diplomatic discourse, that constructed Britain as an egalitarian and tolerant nation and located problems of race relations primarily in South Africa or the American South.Footnote ⁴³ Some Christians and initiatives, like the British Council of Churches’ Joint Working Party of black-led and white-led churches in the late 1970s, had begun to challenge this, but during the 1980s racism continued to appear only as a South African problem in the pages of the Newfrontiers magazines.Footnote ⁴⁴ The only reflexivity in their reflections on South African and British socio-politics regarded not race, but the troubles in Northern Ireland, which were cited as a reminder that the British should not lecture South Africans about getting ‘their house in order’.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, the network's growing connections on the African continent – particularly in apartheid South Africa – would gradually bring the issue of racial reconciliation to the fore.

Relationships between Terry Virgo, his team and South African Christians dated to the summer of 1982 when Derek Crumpton, a South African renewalist leader, visited the Downs Bible Week. Virgo found Crumpton to be ‘delightful’ and the friendship that emerged between them saw Virgo invited by Crumpton to speak at a conference in East London on the principles of Restorationism in September 1983.Footnote ⁴⁶ On this trip Virgo established another link with what would prove to be the most enduring South African node of the Newfrontiers network: the newly founded Vineyard Fellowship in Wynberg, Cape Town. Its minister, the flamboyant Englishman Graham Ingram, had been a Baptist minister in Lusaka, Zambia, before moving to South Africa where he founded the new, independent charismatic fellowship. A former pastorate of Ingram's in the UK had recently entered Virgo's orbit and, on account of positive feedback from his former congregants, Ingram invited Virgo to preach at the new church after Crumpton's conference.Footnote ⁴⁷

Virgo's visit did not represent the first transnational flow of Restorationist teaching to reach the new church; the writings of Arthur Wallis, a former member of the Brethren who played a key role in the emergence of British Restorationism, had already reached them.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, Virgo was the first to establish what David Adams, a young white South African and soon to be elder of the new congregation, described as a ‘heart connection’ with the church. Virgo's teaching immediately resonated with the Restorationist ideas that were already influencing them and regular subsequent visits saw the friendship strengthen as Virgo and other English pastors spent days with the Vineyard Fellowship at a time. These visits especially showcased what Adams saw as Virgo's ‘fatherly’ way of caring for people.Footnote ⁴⁹

These trips also provided a context for direct contact between English leaders and the apartheid system. This was especially the case for a two-week visit to Cape Town by fifty English church members from eighteen churches in 1987, the purpose of which was to support the Vineyard Fellowship in practical acts of service and evangelism in the impoverished black township of Khayelitsha. Interviewed years later, two of this group, who spent their days working in the township, recalled returning to the ‘palatial’ home of their white hosts from the church to be served dinner by house servants.Footnote ⁵⁰ As one participant, Gary Welsh, reflected, the juxtaposition of wealth and privilege with poverty, seeing ‘Whites Only’ signs in public spaces, and witnessing the suffering of black and ‘coloured’ South Africans, did much to bring the injustice of the system home.Footnote ⁵¹

However, despite these encounters, senior British leaders refrained from commenting extensively on the politics of apartheid. Their rejection of racism was apparent in their hopes, expressed in the pages of the Newfrontiers magazine, for racial reconciliation in South Africa, but stronger denunciation of the apartheid system or engagement in the politics of the transnational anti-apartheid movement were largely absent.Footnote ⁵² Magazine reports of their visits to South Africa tended simply to refer to the ‘complex’ situation in the country, preferring to detail their growing friendships with Christian leaders and powerful encounters with the Holy Spirit than to discuss politics.Footnote ⁵³ This undoubtedly reflected, at least in part, a concern to shun any semblance of colonialism and avoid lecturing new-found friends on their internal politics, something that was latent in reminders to British readers that ‘we in the UK know nothing of the tension under which South Africans live’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Nevertheless, at times there were hints of reticence toward the wider anti-apartheid movement. On the subject of international sanctions, for example, one magazine article by an English leader gave privileged voice to the ‘bitter’ complaints of South African civil servants about their harmful and destabilising effects, with no effort to offer alternative views on the issue.Footnote ⁵⁵ Combined with occasional language that suggested sympathy with South Africa as ‘world opinion’ sought to ‘impose its political will upon’ and ‘ostracise her’, a reader may have been forgiven for inferring a preference for Thatcherite ‘constructive engagement’ over the more radical politics of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement.Footnote ⁵⁶

Another reason for the relative silence of British Newfrontiers leaders on politics, however, was a powerful preoccupation with restoring the Church and world evangelisation. That there were alternative political trajectories to which the Restorationist ideology could lead was apparent in contemporaneous and stinging condemnation by Bryn Jones, another Restorationist pioneer, of racism, Margaret Thatcher's support for the South African government and British immigration policy debates.Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet Jones was something of a pioneer and was notably more confrontational and post-millennial than other strands of British Restorationism.Footnote ⁵⁸ Newfrontiers leaders contrasted this outlook throughout the 1980s and early 1990s to their primary and overriding concern for the restoration of the Church. This constituted an indirect strategy for social and political change. As Terry Virgo wrote in 1987, God had ‘been restoring His church in order to make her a flexible and powerful vehicle for the extension of the gospel’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Churches modelled on the New Testament pattern were ‘a world-changing instrument in God's hand’ and, as they multiplied and reached out evangelistically, the world would be transformed.Footnote ⁶⁰ In other words, behind the hope of British Newfrontiers leaders that God would ‘build His church and heal … [the] land’ – whether in the UK or South Africa – was a belief that the former would be causative of the latter, at least in part.Footnote ⁶¹

This outlook did not preclude some social involvement by Newfrontiers-associated churches in the UK, for the Kingdom of God was believed to mandate compassionate work with the poor and oppressed. However, this did not extend past meeting immediate material needs to confrontation with the structural causes of poverty and oppression. Indeed, the Newfrontiers Magazine carried cautions against too much ‘direct political action’ by churches, criticising the ‘Moral Majority’ in the United States for precisely this and for blacklisting fellow Christians who, following their ‘God-enlightened conscience[s]’, came to different political conclusions.Footnote ⁶²

In South Africa this meant that British Newfrontiers leaders participated in compassionate evangelistic outreach in South African townships, supported township congregations financially, preached earnestly about the restoration of New Testament Christianity and urged prayer both for revival and for South African churches to be ‘beacons of light … [walking] wisely without compromising their faith’.Footnote ⁶³ Their apoliticism was not straightforwardly the withdrawal from the world into individual piety, prosperity theology and spiritual warfare that characterised some Evangelical and charismatic groups in South Africa – not least major congregations like Ray McCauley's Rhema Bible Church in Johannesburg or Hatfield Christian Church in Pretoria.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nevertheless, British Restorationism, as expressed by Newfrontiers, lacked the ideological basis for direct political confrontation with the social order and echoed a wider tendency to emphasise spiritual and ecclesiastical renewal as the key to political change. Charismatic renewal in South Africa, for example, had coupled the global renewal movement's penchant for denominational reconciliation with racial reconciliation yet, despite lyrical accounts of the reconciliatory work of the Holy Spirit at the avowedly multi-racial South African Renewal Conference in 1977, it typified the focus on spiritual renewal in the hope that this would ‘effect ripples of change’ in South African society.Footnote ⁶⁵ Pentecostal leaders like Assemblies of God minister Nicholas Bhengu also tended to favour, even embrace, racial reconciliation, while focusing on ‘spiritual problems’ and shunning politics in the belief that this would ultimately lead to social and political liberation.Footnote ⁶⁶

However, the growing relationship between the Vineyard Fellowship and Newfrontiers coincided with a move away from this type of apoliticism at the Vineyard which had far-reaching implications for the glocalisation of British Restorationism. At the church, there was occasional frustration at the conservative stance of British leaders on the socio-political implications of the Gospel.Footnote ⁶⁷ The friendship with Newfrontiers was valued for the care that was shown to the church, the relief it offered from the international isolation that some South African Christians felt and the teaching and financial support that flowed through it.Footnote ⁶⁸ Still, Graham Ingram had arrived to minister in South Africa anticipating that he would need to ‘challenge the [apartheid] system’.Footnote ⁶⁹ His new church, which had a largely white and middle-class constituency, drew together young South Africans who were increasingly determined to confront the status quo and, as they put it, ‘be part of God's solution’ in the country.Footnote ⁷⁰ In some instances, Ingram played a key role in sensitising their consciences to the injustice of apartheid.Footnote ⁷¹ Also, as with some other neo-charismatic churches which came to take a more radical line on political involvement, the church drew significant numbers of students from the nearby University of Cape Town who, black or white, often inclined towards greater political radicalism.Footnote ⁷² Siviwe Minyi, a young and politically aware black student at the University of Cape Town who joined the church in the later 1980s, was just one example.Footnote ⁷³

As protests and violence, beginning in the Vaal Triangle near Johannesburg, led P. W. Botha to declare a state of emergency in July 1985, a new sense of urgency propelled this young church, as well as other churches influenced by Restorationism, toward action.Footnote ⁷⁴ There was no developed theology of political action but these Evangelically-inclined leaders naturally turned to the pages of the Bible to (re)interrogate the political implications of the Gospels and the limits of the obedience to government described in Romans xiii.Footnote ⁷⁵ The writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his role in the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany, which had been an inspiration to the anti-apartheid activist and former Dutch Reformed Church minister Beyers Naudé, were also influential in their reflections.Footnote ⁷⁶ While remaining true to their Evangelical convictions, they sought to learn from activists in the South African Council of Churches and at least one elder was influenced by liberation theology while studying for a theology degree at the University of South Africa. Publications by Allan Boesak, the influential activist, minister and later moderator of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, also had an influence and Boesak reportedly met with Terry Virgo and elders from the Vineyard Fellowship in 1987.Footnote ⁷⁷

Action did not flow neatly from theological reflection but, as these disparate influences converged, occurred in tandem. Although there was no clear-cut strategy, evangelistic outreach started into the townships of Cape Town, particularly Khayelitsha, and a regular Sunday meeting commenced there in September 1986. The church also appointed its first black pastors to oversee congregations in Khayelitsha and Langa – Fanie and John Mthwana.Footnote ⁷⁸ Gradually, action moved beyond compassionate, multi-racial evangelism; the church participated in political marches, publicised its anti-apartheid stance in South African newspaper adverts, participated in sit-ins over housing conditions in Gugulethu township and confronted the police force over concerns about police brutality.Footnote ⁷⁹ They even engaged with the controversial issue of financial restitution, paralleling a wider debate about reparation payments for church complicity in racism that had intersected directly with the transnational anti-apartheid movement at the World Council of Churches’ consultation on racism in Notting Hill, London, in 1969.Footnote ⁸⁰ Embracing the idea of restitution, the Vineyard Fellowship took a ‘restitution offering’ which was used to build a church in Khayelitsha. Some who had purchased their homes using a government subsidy for first-time white South African buyers investigated whether they had made any profit under the scheme and gave this away in a similar fashion.Footnote ⁸¹ By the early 1990s the leadership was encouraging its white members to attend the township congregations to establish a truly multi-racial church, with some white members coming under black leadership.Footnote ⁸²

Crucially for the glocalisation of British Restorationism, the Restorationist ideas that had been transmitted to the Vineyard Fellowship began to be adapted in ways that placed far greater emphasis on racial reconciliation in this environment. During the 1980s and early 1990s church members recalled that New Testament passages including Ephesians ii were common proof texts in theological arguments for racial reconciliation at the Vineyard and like-minded South African congregations. Indeed, Siviwe Minyi recalls that the Vineyard was where his pre-existing political commitment to reconciliation was first given a theological underpinning through teaching on such texts.Footnote ⁸³ A key development in the process of adaption was the arrival of Simon Pettit, an English leader from the Sussex heartlands of the network, to take over the leadership of the Vineyard Fellowship from Graham Ingram in August 1990. Despite their warm relationship with Newfrontiers, the Vineyard elders had been considering whether a close relationship with a movement based in the UK – South Africa's former colonial ruler – was appropriate in the political circumstances and the invitation to Pettit did not go undebated. However, these considerations were overridden by a prophetic word and a time of prayer that left them convinced that Pettit was the right man.Footnote ⁸⁴

Simon Pettit had a deep interest in the marrying of politics and theology, having studied both as an undergraduate, and embraced the existing efforts of the church which soon changed its name to Jubilee Community Church.Footnote ⁸⁵ He was also deeply committed to the Restorationist values of Newfrontiers and, by 1993, began to publish articles in the Newfrontiers magazine that argued from Ephesians ii that ‘colour and culture are irrelevant to our fellowship and partnership in the gospel’. This principle, he contended, was a ‘key element in the restoration of the Church’.Footnote ⁸⁶ As his wife, Lindsey, argued, racial reconciliation and the building of multi-racial congregations was ‘a distinctive of the New Testament church’.Footnote ⁸⁷ British Restorationism may have arrived in South Africa lacking an explicit commitment to racial reconciliation, but it was ‘refracted’ by the opposition of local Christians to apartheid and their desire for interracial healing.

This refracted wave of Restorationist teaching travelled onward, but it did not find a quick reception in the English counties where it originated. Pettit was a rising star in the movement and transmitted it not only through the Newfrontiers magazine, which had an international circulation of over twenty countries by the late 1980s, but also through overseas preaching trips.Footnote ⁸⁸ In this, he was a ‘bridging figure’ between South Africa and other contexts.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, his seminar at the 1996 Brighton Conference on ‘cross-cultural mission’, during which he argued that reaching across ethnic and racial divides was a major theme of the New Testament and should be central to the purposes of the Church, was clearly not as well-attended as he would have liked. Pettit described the topic as a ‘Cinderella subject’ in Newfrontiers and joked that the English home towns of most of the network's senior leaders tended to be overwhelmingly white and middle-class with little opportunity for the practical outworking of such ideas.Footnote ⁹⁰ Parallel seminars on topics like ‘cell church’, ‘building a team’ and the ever-exotic theme of ‘spiritual warfare’ were more popular.Footnote ⁹¹ This speaks to a ‘resonance factor’ in processes of glocalisation that has been identified in the changing practices of other world religions.Footnote ⁹² The reception of this new aspect of Restorationist teaching from South Africa, or any global flow, depended on the extent to which it could find relevance in a given local context.

Outside the southern counties, however, these ideas did start to find traction. Newfrontiers was now expanding in the United Kingdom more widely and cities like London, where thirteen new churches were planted or adopted between 1990 and 2000, offered a new and more racially diverse theatre of operation.Footnote ⁹³ Indeed, the audio cassette of Pettit's seminar was retained in the Newfrontiers Archive partly because it had been kept by the leaders of King's Church London, and donated to the collection. Pettit's teaching on being ‘one new man in Christ’ was also cited by the leader of the same church, Steve Tibbert, as part of the theological basis of their effort to reach across racial lines in their diverse south London surroundings. Pettit preached there at least once in the early 2000s and its leaders visited Jubilee Community Church. Gradually, the church transformed from a white English congregation of 150 attendees in 1995 to a congregation that had no majority ethnic or racial group in 2016 and, at 1,400 attendees, was one of the largest Newfrontiers churches in the United Kingdom.Footnote ⁹⁴

Patterns of glocalisation: Ghana

The modified Restorationism of the South African nodes of the network also began to move through south-south connections to influence other African leaders. The most notable example comes from Accra, Ghana. City of God Church in Accra had been planted by Dr John Kpikpi, a young Ghanaian academic and his English wife, Alexandra, in 1992 and gradually entered the Newfrontiers orbit. Kpikpi's connection with the movement originated in 1986 when he had studied for a PhD in Brighton and became a member of Terry Virgo's home church in the town. Here, he imbibed the Restorationist values of the movement and returned to work them out in a Ghanaian context. When Simon Pettit took on oversight of the growing number of Newfrontiers churches in sub-Saharan Africa from his South African base in the 1990s, he soon drew Kpikpi into closer relationship with the movement.Footnote ⁹⁵ Kpikpi recalls the ‘chemistry’ he had with Pettit and a warm relationship formed that saw Pettit visiting Kpikpi's church and Kpikpi being invited to preach at conferences organised in Cape Town.Footnote ⁹⁶ By the early 2000s, and following a prophetic word at the Stoneleigh Bible Week, Kpikpi had taken on oversight of the growing number of Newfrontiers churches in West Africa.Footnote ⁹⁷

Kpikpi's early life and ministry had been characterised by a growing awareness of Ghana's inter-tribal tensions. His own prejudices were gradually challenged as a young man by a series of friendships with members of other tribal and racial groups, none more influential than that formed with Alexandra, the Englishwoman he would meet and marry during his studies in Brighton. The cross-cultural experience of attending Virgo's church along with the emphasis it placed on the grace of God and the acceptance of sinners through Christ were also formative. These influences converged in Kpikpi's increasingly hostile attitude to the tribal divisions of African society upon his return to Ghana which coincided with the climax of a period of recurrent ethnic violence in the country's Northern Region.Footnote ⁹⁸ In this context, Kpikpi began to reflect that the tensions between the Ewes and the Twis or the Nanumbas and the Konkombas were as serious as the racial tensions he had become aware of in British society. He began to teach that the Church was ‘God's New Tribe’, hosting a conference in Accra on this theme in 2001 and publishing a book with the same title in 2003.Footnote ⁹⁹ Lamenting tribal division as a source of instability and a hindrance to economic development in Africa, Kpikpi was preaching a message of reconciliation that was manifested in a single community – the Church – in parallel to Pettit.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

If Kpikpi's message was not instigated by transnational influences from the South African nodes of the network, emerging as it did from his own experiences and context, it was nevertheless shaped by them. David Adams, one of the founding elders of the Vineyard Fellowship, was among those who read and advised Kpikpi on the draft manuscript of God's new tribe.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Pettit himself was present at the conference in Accra on this theme in 2001 and wrote a foreword to the book warmly endorsing the ideas therein.Footnote ¹⁰² Kpikpi explicitly cited Jubilee Community Church as an exemplar of a church ‘seeking to become a non-racial, multi-cultural church’ and as the ‘New Tribe of God in Cape Town’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Indeed, Kpikpi reflected that his experience of belonging to the Newfrontiers network had shaped his evolving theology of racial reconciliation and his understanding of what it meant to be one new man in Christ: ‘As we have interacted with Americans, Australians, British people, Dutch people, French people, Germans, Kenyans, Indians, Mexicans, Nigerians, Romanians, Russians, Sierra Leoneans, South Africans, Swiss people, Togolese people, and Zimbabweans we have grown in our knowledge and experience of what it means to be part of God's called out ones who are being formed into one people.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Kpikpi's emphasis on ‘God's new tribe’ was a clear adaption of the ‘one new man’ trope and represented a further refraction of Restorationist teaching in a West African context. While drawing on New Testament passages such as Ephesians ii, Kpikpi also located a wider narrative of integration and unity in the Christian Scriptures. Kpikpi began his argument by observing that, in the book of Genesis, God called Abram to leave his country, his people and his father's household or – in Kpikpi's retelling of the story – his ‘tribe’, to become the seed of a new tribe.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ He went on to develop his argument using the story of Ruth, the Moabite woman who remained committed to her Jewish mother-in-law in the face of great hardship and thus took her place not only in the scriptural salvation narrative but, in Kpikpi's view, presaged the coming together of different peoples and tribes as a single community in Christ and his representative on earth, the Church.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ As such the ‘gospel makes it unacceptable to build different churches for different races’ in racially diverse places, he argued, moving beyond the Ghanian context to cite the example of mono-ethnic and mono-racial congregations in Europe and the USA.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In this, Kpikpi echoed a longer history of concern about the ‘ghettoisation’ of Christians in European cities but, rather than calling for co-operation between ‘black-led’ and ‘white-led’ congregations, advocated for the total integration of Christians as a biblical mandate.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Again, this adapted flow of teaching began to travel onward from Ghana. It was transmitted back to the United Kingdom, not only in Kpikpi's book and in magazine articles by Ghanaian leaders, but also in Kpikpi's keynote session at the Brighton International Leadership Conference in 2003.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Kpikpi used the opportunity to challenge the predominantly white gathering of leaders in the following terms: ‘You need to plant churches which reflect the structure of your population. I mean, when I look round here there aren't enough black people in your congregations … Why should it be like that? … What God is calling us [to do] is to build churches that reflect the multi-coloured wisdom of God in the whole nations.’Footnote ¹¹⁰

This emphasis from leaders in the global South on racial and tribal reconciliation began to resonate more widely in the Newfrontiers network from the early 2000s onward. As Kpikpi's challenge hinted, churches associated with the network were increasingly working in racially and ethnically diverse contexts like London.Footnote ¹¹¹ The network was also now growing much more rapidly outside the United Kingdom. Between 1996 and 2000 the number of churches outside the UK had doubled while growth within the UK had been around 12 per cent. In the mid-2000s and possibly earlier, the network passed the milestone where its non-British nodes outnumbered those within Britain.Footnote ¹¹² Correspondingly, there was a marked increase in concern with ‘cross-cultural ministry’ and this was reflected in the rising number of Newfrontiers magazine articles and training courses addressing the issue.Footnote ¹¹³

In this context, the movement's senior English leaders began to embrace teaching on racial reconciliation far more explicitly. In a discussion of church planting in 2003, for example, Terry Virgo echoed the theme of Kpikpi's book. Stressing that church planting was about establishing ‘God's community in the earth’, he explored the nature of this community first with reference to the story of Abraham through whom ‘God established a new tribe’. Continuing the resonance, he wrote that through Christ, ‘all nations were invited to join this international tribe, God's alternative society, a people with a different citizenship’, or his ‘new community on the earth’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ More widely, ‘one new man in Christ’ became part of the Newfrontiers lexicon and continued to be transmitted through the network; discussions of multi-cultural worship by South African leaders invoked the concept and church planters working in Vancouver, Canada, made reference to it as part of their vision.Footnote ¹¹⁵

By 2010 the inclusion of the ‘New Testament teaching of the one new man’ in the statement of the seventeen values of Newfrontiers represented the widespread take-up of this emphasis not just in Britain but across the network. Each value was explained by a short accompanying article included with the statement and Kpikpi authored the piece on this subject.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Notably absent was a contribution from Simon Pettit, who had died suddenly in January 2005. In an illustration of how fundamental this commitment had become, another article about the importance of loving, intimate relationships within churches – another foundational Restorationist value – also made substantial reference to Ephesians ii as a foundation for the ‘gospel distinctive’ of churches that are loving, multi-ethnic and multi-racial communities. That it was written by Indrajeet Pawar, an Indian leader, reflected further both the onward spread of this idea and the growing role of indigenous leaders in the originally British movement.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Investigations of its continued refraction in new local contexts, not least in the myriad and uniquely challenging locales of the Indian subcontinent, await further study.

In conclusion it would be easy to be too sanguine about the progress of racial reconciliation and inclusion in a church network like Newfrontiers. This article has shown that, as Newfrontiers expanded, its founding Restorationist ideology was widened as it was transmitted to the global South and, from there, onward, back to the UK, and on again. This process of multi-directional exchange was not a straightforward one. It was polycentric, involved south-south as well as north-south connections and, initially, was constrained by the lack of resonance refracted waves of Restorationist teaching found in the movement's homeland. Through it, the building of multi-racial and multi-ethnic congregations became a central component of Newfrontiers’ ideology, but it is not this article's intention to suggest that all, or any, Newfrontiers churches have successfully worked out the practical implications of the ‘one new man’ discourse. At least in the UK, writings by black church leaders show the ongoing challenges of this, both in Newfrontiers and beyond.Footnote ¹¹⁸ These cannot be ignored and ongoing scholarship is exploring the practical implementation of this discourse in local churches.Footnote ¹¹⁹

What this article does claim is that this process of transmission and adaptation between localities demonstrates the shaping and re-shaping of Christian beliefs and practices in a globalising world. As Andrew Walls wrote of the southward shift of Christianity's heartlands, ‘Christian mission in and from Africa is likely to widen the theological agenda … [and] the consequent benefit could be of more than African significance.’Footnote ¹²⁰ This, in microcosm, is visible in the refraction of the Restorationist ideology of Newfrontiers – that is, it was subject to multiple processes of glocalisation – through a series of local African contexts. By 2010 the British Restorationism of Newfrontiers, insofar as it was ever uniquely ‘British’, was a much broader set of ideas shaped by a wider chorus of voices. As neo-charismatic networks continue to grow rapidly in the early twenty-first century and navigate a world riven with enduring injustices and inequalities, much scope remains for scholarly exploration of multi-directional exchanges, the ‘Ephesian moments’ they underpin and the transformations that they may reap in World Christianity.Footnote ¹²¹