Assistant Professor, World Christianity, Yale Divinity School

Kyama Mugambi (PhD) is Assistant Professor of World Christianity at Yale Divinity School. He specializes in historical, ecclesial, social, cultural, theological, and epistemological themes within African urban Christianity. His most recent book, co-authored with Prof. Mark Shaw, Christians in the City of Nairobi: An African City and the Future of World Christianity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), offers a broad overview of how Christian expressions respond to and challenge the secularizing forces of the modern city. His book, A Spirit of Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya(Baylor University Press), has been hailed as a singular contribution to the fields of mission studies, world Christianity, and intercultural theology. Kyama Mugambi is the faculty lead for Yale MacMillan Centre’s Project on Religion and Society in Africa. The project engages critical religious inquiry into the connection between religion and societal well-being, and how the flourishing of persons and societies can be promoted on that basis.

This seminar explores the elements of oral liturgies among Pentecostals in Africa. As one of the fastest-growing expressions of Christianity on the continent, Pentecostals make up a third of the continent’s 730 million Christians. This seminar explores themes such as orality, identity, kinship, hope, and creativity that emerge from the multi-disciplinary study of pneumatic worship in these communities. The seminar invites participants to think together about how these themes might inform discourses on World Christianity.