Concept

African Initiated Churches

Intro

African Initiated Churches (AICs) are churches founded by Africans, in Africa, without a European or American mother church in control. Some broke away from missions in protest at racism, others grew from the ministry of an African prophet, and many stress prayer, healing, visions and the power of the Holy Spirit. They range from fully orthodox Protestant bodies to movements that have drifted from historic Christian teaching. Together they are one of the clearest signs that Africans made Christianity their own instead of simply receiving it.

Zion City Moria, headquarters of the Zion Christian Church in Limpopo, South Africa, at dusk. Photo: JMK, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons), resized.

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In full

The initials AIC are read in several ways: African Independent Churches (stressing freedom from foreign control and money), African Initiated or Instituted Churches (stressing who founded them), and African Indigenous Churches (stressing their cultural roots). The movement began in earnest in the 1890s and expanded rapidly through the twentieth century.

Scholars have classified AICs in different ways. The Swedish missionary-scholar Bengt Sundkler, in Bantu Prophets in South Africa (1948), distinguished "Ethiopian" churches, which kept mission doctrine and worship but rejected white control, from "Zionist" churches, which centered on prophecy, healing and the Spirit. Later scholars such as Harold Turner and David Barrett (Schism and Renewal in Africa, 1968) widened the analysis across the continent, and West African "Aladura" (praying) churches became a third standard category. Allan Anderson and Ogbu Kalu have since traced the links between AICs and the later Pentecostal and charismatic explosion.

Theologically, AICs force two questions that every account of Africa and Christianity has to face: how far African Christians may express the faith in African forms, and where contextualization becomes syncretism. AICs supply examples of both.

Main types

Why AICs arose

1. Racism and paternalism in missions. Mission boards were slow to ordain Africans and quick to override them. The sidelining of Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther around 1890 drove Nigerian Christians toward independence. See Christianity and Colonialism in Africa.
2. Reading the Bible for themselves. Vernacular Scripture let Africans see that the Bible had much to say about healing, dreams, prophecy and spiritual powers, which many missions downplayed. Lamin Sanneh and Kwame Bediako treat AICs as a fruit of translation. See Missionary Translation and African Languages.
3. Spiritual need. Missions often answered questions about witchcraft, illness and evil spirits with Western medicine and skepticism. AICs met them with prayer and power encounter.
4. Culture. AICs used African music, dance, drumming, dress and leadership patterns in worship.
5. Specific crises. The 1918 influenza pandemic, for example, spurred prayer and healing groups in Nigeria that grew into Aladura churches.

Assessing AICs theologically

AICs cannot be judged as a single block.

• Much is biblical and fruitful. Many AICs hold the historic creeds, read the Bible seriously, pray fervently and evangelize widely. Their emphasis on the Holy Spirit's power anticipated the global Pentecostal movement, and Pentecostal scholars such as Allan Anderson see them as part of the same family. See Pentecostalization of Global Christianity.
• Some practices raise questions. Critics point to rules of ritual purity borrowed from the Old Testament, the use of holy water, candles and objects, and heavy dependence on prophets' visions. Defenders reply that many of these have biblical precedents and function as signs, not magic.
• Some movements have left orthodoxy. Where a founder comes to be treated as divine, or as the Holy Spirit, the church has crossed from contextualization into a different faith. The later Kimbanguist teaching is the most discussed case. See Simon Kimbangu.

Byang Kato and other African evangelicals warned against syncretism, while Kwame Bediako and John Mbiti tended to read AICs more positively, as authentic African expressions of the gospel. The disagreement maps onto the wider debate at African Traditional Religion and Christianity.

Today

• Some AICs are among the largest churches in their countries, such as the Zion Christian Church in South Africa, whose Easter gatherings at Moria draw very large crowds.
• The Organization of African Instituted Churches, based in Nairobi, links many AICs ecumenically.
• Since the 1970s many young Africans have moved from older AICs to newer Pentecostal and charismatic churches, which share their focus on the Spirit but use more contemporary forms. See African Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity.
• Membership estimates vary widely and depend on definitions; no single reliable continental figure exists.

Scholarship

Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record.

• David B. Barrett, Schism and renewal in Africa (1968). Open Library
• Bengt Sundkler, Bantu prophets in South Africa (1948). Open Library

See also

• Simon Kimbangu, founder figure of the Kimbanguist Church
• William Wade Harris, whose converts formed the Harrist Church
• Samuel Ajayi Crowther, whose treatment pushed Nigerian Christians toward independence
• African Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, the AICs' successors and cousins
• Pentecostalization of Global Christianity, the global movement AICs anticipated
• African Traditional Religion and Christianity, contextualization and syncretism
• Christianity and Colonialism in Africa, the colonial setting that produced many AICs
• Africa and Christianity, the master hub