African Initiated Churches

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African Initiated Churches — also called African Independent or African Indigenous Churches — are the Christian bodies of sub-Saharan Africa that arose under African founders and leadership rather than European mission control. The name covers thousands of distinct congregations and several large denominations, and what links them is less a shared doctrine than a shared origin: each began when Africans took the practice of Christianity into their own hands.

The movement grew out of the mission churches and away from them. Some early breaks, the so-called Ethiopian churches of the late nineteenth century, were secessions over control and dignity — African clergy founding their own churches on an essentially Protestant pattern, refusing white oversight while keeping mission theology largely intact. The larger and more distinctive wave came later and turned on the Spirit. In the Niger delta and Yorubaland the Aladura churches — the word means “owners of prayer” — formed around prophecy, faith healing, and revelation, among them the Cherubim and Seraphim societies and the Christ Apostolic Church. In the Belgian Congo, Simon Kimbangu’s brief public ministry in 1921 — ended when the Belgian colonial administration arrested him and sentenced him to death, a sentence commuted to life imprisonment — gave rise to the Kimbanguist Church, today numbering in the millions; Kimbangu died in prison in 1951, some thirty years later. Across southern Africa, churches called Zionist and Apostolic — the Zion drawn remotely from a healing movement in Zion City, Illinois — wove baptism in rivers, white robes, drumming, and dance into a faith centred on the curing of the sick.

These churches take seriously what the mission churches tended to deny: that the world is dense with spirit, that illness and misfortune have spiritual causes, that dreams and visions carry instruction. Practitioners hold that the Holy Spirit speaks directly through prophets, that prayer and sanctified water heal, and that ancestors and witchcraft are realities the gospel must answer rather than dismiss. Worship is participatory and often ecstatic. Figures such as Isaiah Shembe, founder of the Nazareth Baptist Church among the Zulu, were regarded by their followers as bearers of a distinctly African revelation.

Scholarship has argued for a century over what to make of this. Early observers treated the churches as syncretism or as a stage on the way back to paganism — a verdict later study has largely overturned, reading them instead as a genuinely African appropriation of Christianity, comparable to the way the faith was once reshaped by Greek or Germanic converts. The label “syncretism” is now used cautiously, since the churches themselves insist they are Christian and biblical, and read their own practice as obedience to scripture rather than a blend of two religions. Where exactly Christianity ends and indigenous religion begins, in any given congregation, is a question the movement does not pose in those terms and outside observers answer differently.

Numbering well over a hundred million adherents, the African Initiated Churches are among the largest expressions of Christianity to have grown outside the control of any older church. On the reading that overturned the older verdict, they stand as perhaps the clearest modern case of a world religion remade in the idiom of the people who received it.

→ Related: Christian Mysticism