Nenilava, Prophetess of Madagascar: Her Life and the Ongoing Revival She Inspired

About the Author\nJames B. Vigen is a retired ELCA pastor living in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Vigen served as a missionary in Madagascar from 1978-1996, where he served as an evangelist and later a seminary director and professor. Vigen has also served as a pastor of an ecumenical, English-speaking congregation in Stavanger, Norway, and an adjunct professor at the School of Mission and Theology of the Norwegian Missionary Society. Vigen authored the articles on the Fifohazana and on Madagascar for the Dictionary of Luther and the Lutheran Traditions (2017).\nSarah Hinlicky Wilson is Associate Pastor at Tokyo Lutheran Church and Visiting Professor of the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France. She co-hosts the podcast Queen of the Sciences: Conversations between a Theologian and Her Dad. She is the author of A Guide to Pentecostal Movements for Lutherans (2016).\nBefore she was baptized or knew anything about Christ, young Nenilava was called by Jesus to preach and exorcise in his name. At the age of twenty, newly married to a Lutheran catechist, she heard Jesus prompting her to intervene in a case of demon possession, and from there her ministry spread like wildfire. She spent the next sixty years of her life traveling around her native Madagascar, proclaiming Jesus’ victory over sin, guilt, and evil, and bringing countless people to faith.\nIn this book, her firsthand account of her early ministry, as told to a Malagasy pastor, appears for the first time in English. Complementing the immediacy of her narrative, former missionary in Madagascar, James B. Vigen, recounts the last thirty years of Nenilava’s life and describes the extraordinary impact of this illiterate peasant woman on African Christianity. Sarah Hinlicky Wilson concludes the book with a far-reaching exploration of demon possession, healing from illness and sin, emergent offices of ministry, and the relevance of Nenilava for Western Christianity.