This story from PBS' Religion and Ethics Weekly documents the rise of what are termed "reverse missionaries"--immigrant Christians to the West (in this case Nigerians to America) who start their own churches.  The term 'reverse missionary' is pretty misleading as these groups have largely (though not entirely) only had success with their own immigrant populations.  Reverse missionary is meant to imply that Christianity is dead (or dying) in the West and these individuals see themselves as missionaries bringing Christianity back to the lands from which it was missionzed to their countries.   

Here is the longer interview with Prof. Dana Robert.

"Their beliefs are different.

Oh, yeah. One thing we’ve seen is that Pentecostalism has swept all over the world in the last several decades, so the immediacy of the supernatural, the emotional worship style, the focus on lifestyle and holiness, these are things that American churches have gotten soft on. Maybe in the 1800s there was a lot more exuberant religion, using the church for setting morality and boundaries, but that’s what happening in these new churches in the US today.

They believe the devil is behind homosexuality, among other things.

That’s why it’s a paradox that these are such highly educated people, but their substratum of African traditional religion has a very vigorous spiritual life of spirits, evil spirits, ancestors, and those are real problems for them, so there’s a way in which their worldview, their cosmology has to deal with living spirits if only to fight those spirits. That’s largely what’s happening here, that things that are perceived as evil or negative have to be vigorously fought in the church, and that’s consistent with African traditional religion.

It’s not the American religious tradition. Actually, it is if you scratch deep enough. If you scratch it’s only been a few generations since North Americans believed in these spirits".

Now there are a number of things going on in this section that integral theory can help contextualize and understand. 

For background, I suggest a quick glimpse here and here which give a summary understanding of the concepts I'll be deploying in this post.  

On one level, Prof. Robert is correct that there is a "substratum" of indigenous (West) African religious belief that includes spirit entities and the like.  Though, as she also notes, this is not foreign either to the Western mindset.  What she is describing in other words is a structural-stage (or worldview) of development. In this case, the early mythic-concrete and (even earlier) magical-animistic structures of development commonly found in tribes and clans the world over, throughout human history.  In the pre-Chrsitian West African tradition it is often called Olumare, a religious system that included a pantheon of deities with a high mountain god at the apex.  The obvious parallels to The Biblical cosmology and theology explain the speed with which Christianity has flourished in those areas.

When Prof. Robert says that it is very odd (to us post-mythic Westerners) that such supernatural belief systems could coincide wtih such educated people she is referencing what in integral terms is called (multiple) lines of development.   

The idea here is that there are various intelligence streams in our beings, some of which develop at different levels.  The fact that contemporary individuals can segregate their work mind and life from personal religious beliefs is a testament to thi fact.  In this case, these individuals are basically separating their cognitive and action intelligence (see p.3 of link for summary graph) from their faith development line (studied by James Fowler).  They are very "modern" (i.e. formal operational) in their daily work lives, accepting things like regular mathematics, computers, 9-5 work logic, the corporate hierarchy, and all the rest, while still believeing in mythic realities in their faith worldview line. 

In fact we see a spread of value systems going from magical-animistic (spirits) to mythic (conventional "family values"), to modern ("prosperity gospel"). They are budding American nationalists (from Nigeria remember), believing that God has a special destiny for America (where have you ever heard that before?), they are very secular minded, emphasizing money (with the pastor talking about 401Ks in the sermon!!!), and tend to see their religion as a matter of social confromity, inner experience, and individual betterment.

This church is expressing the classic kind of faith described by Max Weber as The Protestant Ethic leading to the Spirit of (Early Modern) Capitalism: thirftiness, hard work, sobriety, and the like. In fact, the daily life is so regularized, so disciplined (what Weber called worldly asceticism), so tightly controlled, so much emotional pressure sets in that the worship services on Sunday are (jsut about) the only place to let off the steam....and the result is the "emotional" kind of worship described and seen in the video.  

In other words, for all the talk of this being some very strange and exotic form of religion in America, it is actually a quite prototypical form of Christianity.  It preaches the prosperity gospel, treates religion as a matter of individual inner experience and outer social conformity.  It sees The Bible as kind of blueprint fos social transformation.  It's a religion of and for immigrants trying to move on up in the world.  It's a form of civic American religion.   

There would be no great criticism of wealth, of the call for justice for the poor, likely no great prophetic stances against various American interventions overseas. 

Can you explain the entrepreneurial zeal of the Redeemed Christian Church? They want to grow, and they are growing.