Healing, Prophecy, and an Argument About the Name

Healing is the engine. Across very different churches the pattern repeats: a person is ill or afflicted, the mission church offers medicine and a sermon, the indigenous specialist offers a remedy the convert has been told to abandon, and the prophet church offers prayer, water, a diagnosis in spiritual terms and a community that takes the affliction seriously. The Aladura churches went further than most and for a period rejected both hospital medicine and traditional remedy in favour of prayer alone. Historians of these movements have generally treated the healing offer, rather than doctrine, as the main reason for their growth.

Prophecy does the second half of the work. A founder who hears directly does not need the sanction of a mission board, and the churches that grew fastest were those that could name a living source of authority in the community itself.

The name is contested and the disagreement is substantive. Independent stresses separation from mission control. Indigenous stresses African origin. Initiated stresses that Africans began them rather than merely took them over. Instituted stresses that they are churches with structures and not movements. All four abbreviate to the same three letters, which is convenient and slightly misleading, and different writers use different words on purpose. The atlas uses initiated and records that the choice is not neutral.

Sources African Reformation: African Initiated Christianity in the Twentieth CenturyAllan H. Anderson with Aladura: A Religious Movement Among the YorubaJ. D. Y. Peel