Aladura, Yoruba for one who prays, names a family of African Initiated Churches that emerged among the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria beginning in the late 1910s, distinguished from mission Christianity by its emphasis on prayer, prophecy, visions and faith healing over imported sacraments and clergy hierarchy. J. D. Y. Peel's 1968 study, still the classic account of the movement, traces its roots to a prayer group of Anglican laymen formed at Ijebu Ode during the 1918 influenza epidemic, emphasizing divine healing and protection through prayer rather than medicine.
By 1922 that group's practices had diverged far enough from Anglican norms to force a separation, producing the Faith Tabernacle congregation and setting the pattern the wider movement would follow: a prayer centered revival breaking away from an established mission church rather than starting from nothing. The movement's decisive expansion came through the prophet healer Joseph Babalola, whose mass divine healing revival from 1930 onward drew converts across Yorubaland and beyond, and whose followers formally organized as the Christ Apostolic Church by the early 1940s.
Two related but doctrinally distinct movements developed alongside Babalola's: the Cherubim and Seraphim movement, founded by Moses Orimolade Tunolase and the visionary Christiana Abiodun Akinsowon in the mid 1920s around a doctrine of continuing revelation, and the Church of the Lord, founded by Josiah Olunowo Ositelu in 1925 and formally inaugurated in 1930 at Ogere Remo. Together with the later Celestial Church of Christ, these four churches are the movement's main branches.