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African Independent Churches (AICs) are members of a grassroots Christian movement which draws its values and beliefs from African tradition and the Hebrew and Christian

Scriptures. They stand for a prolongation of many African traditional values into the Christian faith. They are numbering up to, some 60 million members across the continent and in the African Diaspora; they are separated into thousands of different denominations. The greater parts of these denominations are very small, and opposed to system of government, but there are a small number of large churches with membership numbering in the millions. Members of AICs are by and large drawn from the poor and less knowledgeable populace of the rural areas and the informal urban settlements (shanty-towns or slums). The potency of the churches lies in their spiritual and social capital, which is strongest at the grassroots.

The churches variously acknowledged as African Independent, African Instituted, and African Initiated Churches, it can simply be called by the acronym ‘AICs’. AICs are churches established in sub-Saharan Africa by Africans during the late 19^th century and the 20^th century. They share a scheming revelation rooted in the African traditional understanding of men and women in the world, which has been taken up and developed in and through their Christian faith. For most AIC founders their stumble upon the Christian gospel and the Hebrew and Christian scriptures occurred during the period of western colonialism. In their inventive and exclusively African appropriation of the faith, AICs were furthermore one of the earliest expressions of African nationalism.

Undeniably they sought constantly to oppose the colonial and missionary institutions brought from Europe, and many of their associated values, such as individualism, secularism, and the consumerism of capitalist society. However, they are still responsible for spreading the gospel in the African continent.

AICs can be assembled for effortlessness into three categories: ‘nationalist’ or

‘Ethiopian’ churches, which believed they were mandated by God to work politically and in other ways to remove from power colonial rule; ‘Spiritual’churches, otherwise known as Zionist, Apostolic, Roho, Akurinu, and Aladura churches, in which the gifts and power of the Holy Spirit are notable in a close symbiosis with African culture; and more newly, indigenous African pentecostal churches, which furthermore focus on the Holy Spirit, but are orientated more to contemporary globalized humanity. All these churches are fundamentally oral communities of faith, by and large defiant to bureaucratization and the systematization of faith in written texts. In this perspective at least AICs bear a resemblance to pre-modern societies. Numerically at the present time their adherents number some 60 million on the African continent and in the diaspora.

AICS are miscellaneous in their forms, structures and beliefs. In this piece examples are drawn across the continent, concerning Organization of African Instituted Churches. The AICs’ perception of poverty is both material and spiritual. Poverty is attributed to

exploitation, and to a crash in relationships; to the work of evil spirits, and to the breakdown of Christians to maintain the blessings from God that are their due.

Characteristic attempts of AIC members to haul up themselves out of poverty are savings and credit schemes, where well-trusted principles of reciprocity support people to start small businesses. Such initiatives transmit well to the AICs’ thoughtful of justice as relational and political rather than legal. In the AIC background justice may be defined as the widened appliance of love. Without a doubt some AICs, whose members’ own faith can be exceedingly legalistic, draw a comprehensible difference between God’s law of the Spirit, and the law of the State. The legal systems inherited from colonialism are seen as foreign and unapproachable, the tools of the authoritative elite. Such systems have in history marginalized AICs as institutions, over and over again denying their right to put in order legally. Members of AICs similar to many other poor people often twist thus to more easily reached forms of justice, even where such forms are themselves ‘illegal’.

How then can AIC members be authorized to partake in and make claims on a legal system that they over and over again look upon with distrust or despair? Individuals and groups working to lessen poverty will frequently build up to a point where they can make legal claims for the release of services and for justice for orphans and widows at the village level. Development beyond this level is comparatively sluggish. Little will be achieved by legal empowerment at the macro-level until there is a more considerable social change. This should comprise an indigenization of alien legal systems as a precondition to the successful legal empowerment of the poor, among other reforms. The undertaking is disheartening, but cannot be postponed.

Initially a lot of Africans accepted Christianity, but they did not for all time hold in their arms the messengers who brought Christianity to the continent. As early as the eighteenth century, there was an instance of the Kongolese prophet Beatrice Kimpa Vita who developed an African Christian movement that opposed some of the teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic missionaries in the Kongo.

By the late nineteenth century all the way through the continent, there were African Christians who determined to break away from missionary churches and form their own churches. Over the past century, there have been wide varieties of African Christian movements, some of which are to a certain extent different from one another.

Nevertheless, in spite of these differences, scholars call these churches African Independent Churches (A.I.C.) since all of the churches established self-sufficiency and self-rule from mission churches.

There are several inter-related reasons why Africa Christians decided that it was indispensable to form churches that were independent from mission churches:

Racism: often times, missionaries were guilty of mistreating African Christians. A number of missionaries acknowledged the prevalently held impression that Africans were not intellectually or culturally equal to Europeans. These attitudes were a incredible insult to African Christians and disturbed the efforts by educated African Christians to get hold of leadership positions in the mission churches. Some African Christians believed that the only way that they could attain positions of church leadership was to depart from the mission churches and form their own independent churches free from racism and in which there would be African leadership.

Rejection of African culture and religious beliefs/practice: several missionaries acknowledged African cultures and religions to be primitive and pagan. Accordingly, these missionaries tried to compel African Christians to discard most of their cultural and religious beliefs and practices. When African Christians read the Bible, they did not interpret what they read as reproving all or most of their cultural and religious beliefs and practices. In reality, some African Christians believed that there are connections between the practices documented in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible and their own cultural and religious practices. Faced with continued missionary opposition to adapting Christianity to African culture, some Christian leaders determined to go away from mission churches and form their own independent churches that integrated features of African cultural practice that they felt were not in agreement with Christianity.

There is a broad multiplicity of belief and practice among A.I.Cs. Undeniably by 1980, there were more than 7,000 different independent groups with a membership of more than twelve million in Africa. In the face of differences between A.I.C.s, scholars who learn these movements divide the A.I.C.s into two wide-ranging groups.

I. Ethiopian Independent Churches: despite their name, the Ethiopian independent