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This study presents the religious dynamics of the Wolaitta Kale Heywet Church in southern Ethiopia from 1937 to 1975. On the basis of detailed research from within southern Ethiopia, E. Paul Balisky demonstrates that the indigenous extension of the Wolaitta Christian movement into southern Ethiopia, through the instrumentality of her evangelists, helped Wolaitta regain her own religious center and subsequent identity after centuries of various forms of colonialism and imperialism.
Wolaitta Evangelists broadens one's understanding of how an imported model of Christianity provided religious answers to the ideals of a particular Ethiopian society and continues to motivate her members to evangelize. The evangelists who went to people of similar culture and worldview were successful in effecting social change. To ethnic groups who had moved beyond their former primal religions, and to those of disparate culture, the evangelists were those who scattered the seed and impacted the religious, social, economic, and political life of southern Ethiopia. Wolaitta Evangelists tells the story of how missionary activity played a role in Wolaitta once again becoming a people.
About the author
Paul Balisky, together with his wife, Lila, served with SIM in Ethiopia, 1967-2005. During his missionary career he was involved in church planting, supervising various development projects in southwest Ethiopia during the 1974-1991 Marxist regime, instructing at various levels of the Ethiopian Kale Heywet Church's theological schools, and most recently teaching at the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology, Addis Ababa. His PhD thesis, supervised by Professor Andrew Walls at the University of Aberdeen, Wolaitta Evangelists: A Study of Religious Innovation in Southern Ethiopia, 1937-1975, was published by Pickwick Publications in the American Society of Missiology Monograph Series in 2009. Paul and Lila now make their home in Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada.
