Bengt Sundkler surveyed the independent churches of South Africa in the 1940s and found that they divided broadly into two streams. The Ethiopian churches had separated from mission bodies over African leadership and otherwise kept mission doctrine and forms. The Zionist churches, which drew their name and some of their early practice from an American healing movement based at Zion City, Illinois, had built something different, and healing stood at its centre. A Zionist prophet diagnosed the cause of an illness, which was understood to lie in a spiritual disorder, a broken relationship, or the malice of another person, and then prescribed a remedy from a repertoire that included prayer, the laying on of hands, immersion in running water, blessed water taken by mouth, ash, and cords or cloth worn on the body.
The prohibitions came with the therapy: pork, alcohol and tobacco were refused, and in many churches so was medicine. Sundkler's reading was that these churches had recovered a role the mission churches had abandoned, the diagnosis and healing of affliction as a religious rather than a technical matter, and that this was the principal reason for their growth. The Zion Christian Church, founded by Engenas Lekganyane in 1924 and now the largest of them, kept the healing centre and the dietary discipline and built around them the annual Easter gathering at Moria that draws hundreds of thousands.