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What are African Independent Churches? |
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The terms African Independent or African Instituted Churches (AICs) are used more or less interchangeably for a large number of different Christian churches across Sub-Saharan Africa. These churches share a common positive respect for African cultural values that are reflected in their worship and belief systems or theologies. African Independent churches are usually loosely defined as those churches started by Africans. A definition that has proved acceptable to the OAIC is:
African founded churches which claim the title Christian in that they acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord, and which have either separated by secession from a mission church or an existing African independent church, or have been founded independently as new initiatives under African leadership.
Recent estimates put the total number of members of these churches at 55 - 60 million across the African continent.
Although AICs date back to the last decade of the 19th century, they began to be founded in considerable numbers from the 1920s onwards, as Christian responses to many different challenges affecting the African continent at that time and subsequently. Some churches (known as ‘nationalist’ / Ethiopian / ‘African’) sought to invoke God’s power and to use church and school structures in support of African nationalism. Others (Zionist / Apostolic / Spiritual / Aladura churches) were spiritual counter-movements to some of the demands of modernity and capitalist economics. In these latter type of churches the Holy Spirit acted and acts as a unifying and cleansing force to safeguard African integrity in the face of the destructive effects of colonial society and some of the negative effects of globalization. Both types of churches, and a third, the more recent ‘African pentecostal churches’, have sought to reasserted the claim that control over morality and values should be exercised by the local community and that external powers should not limit access to God. AICs also emphasize that the humane values of African communality – ubuntu, undugu - are also fundamentally Christian values. These two themes, local ownership and ubuntu, continue as strong motivating factors in AICs to the present day. Most AICs have a strong faith in the power and gifts of the Holy Spirit to lead the church and protect God’s people against evil.
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