The Transfer of Protestant Mission Churches to African Christians

The transmission of Western Christianity and eventual transplantation of Western churches in Africa are well documented in writings on the history of Christianity in Africa, but what is less studied is how Western mission policies helped to transform Western Protestant churches into African churches. The result of Western missionaries preaching did not only make possible the assimilation of the gospel by Africans but it enabled African Christians to create church structures to suit their religious, spiritual and existential socio-cultural contexts and needs. Thus this chapter submits that Christianity in African is not just the story of what Western missionaries did or did not do nor is it about the ecclesiastical structures they built, but how African Christians use both the gospel message and the structures through which the message was preached to make Christianity an African religion. A key Western Protestant church that blazed the trail was the Anglican Church planted in Nigeria and in other African countries through its Church Missionary Society (henceforth CMS). The Anglican Church formed a genre of churches in Africa called orthodox churches. The other genres were the Western Pentecostal churches, represented by the Assemblies of God, and the Western congregational/evangelical churches, represented by the Sudan Interior Mission churches, that evolved into Association of Evangelical Churches of West Africa (today called Evangelical Church Winning All, ECWA).