The Zion Christian Church belongs to a broader family of movements scholars call African Initiated Churches, congregations founded and led by Africans rather than by European or American missionary organizations, a category David Barrett's landmark 1968 survey estimated already ran into the thousands of distinct movements by the mid twentieth century. Within that family the Zion Christian Church belongs to the Zionist stream, which traces its name and early theology to the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church founded in Zion, Illinois, whose missionaries reached South Africa in the early twentieth century, though the church that grew from that contact developed its own distinctly Southern African theology, liturgy and leadership within a generation.
Zion Christian Church worship blends elements recognizable from that Pentecostal and holiness era missionary Christianity, including a strong emphasis on faith healing, with Southern African cultural forms, distinctive brass band music and ordered processional dance, and with a biblical Israelite self understanding that draws parallels between the church's own history and Old Testament narrative. Members are identifiable in public by a uniform including a metal star badge. The church operates under hereditary leadership within the Lekganyane family, whose succession has at points been contested, most visibly in a mid twentieth century split that produced a rival branch, a pattern of leadership schism common among large African Initiated Churches.
The church is best understood on its own terms as a distinctly Southern African Christian tradition, neither a survival of precolonial religion nor a simple transplant of missionary Christianity, but a new synthesis from the encounter between the two under colonial conditions.