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What are African Independent Churches?

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.[1]   Although AICs date back to the last decade of the 19^th century, they began to be founded in considerable numbers from the 1920s onwards, as Christian responses to many different challenges affecting the continent at that time and subsequently. Some ('nationalist’ / Ethiopian / ‘African’) churches sought to invoke divine power and to use church and school structures in support of African nationalism. Others (Zionist / Apostolic / Spiritual / Aladura churches) were spiritual counter-movements to 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 or negative effects of globalization. Both types of churches, and a third, the more recent ‘African pentecostal churches’, have sought to reassert local ownership of community morality and access to the divine, and to claim that the humane values of African communality – ubuntu  - are also fundamentally Christian. These two themes, local ownership and ubuntu, continue as strong motivating factors in AICs to the present day.