Movements of reformation, renewal, and innovation have historically accompanied the spread of Christianity to different parts of the world. This is particularly true of the British Empire, where colonized peoples interrogated, challenged, reinterpreted, and assimilated Christianity. Sometimes the vehicle for challenge was an established mission church, but at other times it was a new religious movement. In colonial Africa and New Zealand independent churches took many forms: challenges to mission denominations; spirit churches that addressed health concerns; religious movements that responded to land conquest; and millenarian movements that appeared to challenge the colonial state.
Colonized peoples challenged mission Christianity in the late nineteenth century through the founding of independent churches. The racist and domineering leadership of many European missionaries and their condemnations of African cultural practices often precipitated these first painful schisms. Some splits took place before colonial rule. In Nigeria cultural and leadership disputes precipitated African breakaways from Methodist, Anglican, and Baptist missions in Yoruba areas of the Niger delta. In 1888 David Brown Vincent split from the American-sponsored Baptist Church in Lagos to establish the Native Baptist Church. Africanizing his name to Mojola Agbebi, he challenged Baptist doctrine forbidding polygyny and argued for an autonomous African church freed from the ‘apron strings of foreign teachers’. Several years later a breakaway from the Church Missionary Society (CMS) primarily stemmed from its treatment of Bishop Samuel Crowther, one of the few Africans in a leadership position. European missionaries marginalized and humiliated Crowther before his death, and the CMS hierarchy refused to select an African as his successor. Disaffected members challenged Crowther’s persecutors by establishing the United Native African Church. In both cases the disputes had nothing to do with doctrine or liturgy; the new churches were mirror images of the mission churches but with one important difference: they had African leaders.
In southern Africa, where white settlers intruded more directly on black lives, there were hundreds of schisms. In 1892 at Kilnerton Institution near Pretoria, Mangena Mokone, who sought ‘to serve God in his own way’, left the Methodist fold after acrimonious disagreements with European clergy over paltry wages for black ministers, the Church’s persistence in segregating meetings of blacks and whites, and the unwillingness of white clergy to allow their black counterparts in leadership posts. By naming his group the Ethiopian Church, Mokone embraced one of the clearest expressions of identification with an African home of early Christianity. After Mokone learned of the African American African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) through a relative studying at Wilberforce, an AME college in America, he, Jacobus Xaba, and James Mata Dwane journeyed to the United States in 1895 to meet AME officials and returned to implant the Church in South Africa. In 1898 the AME solidified its base in South Africa when Bishop Henry McNeil Turner’s whirlwind tour of the Cape Colony and Transvaal doubled the number of AME members. Numerous congregations, schools, and an annual conference were established. However, Turner could not prevent the restless Dwane from returning to mainstream Christianity a few years later to found the Order of Ethiopia, a semi-autonomous branch of the Anglican Church. The AME was not in fact an independent church, and its mission philosophy differed little from European missions. AME missionaries assumed that African Christians desired to acquire Western skills and education as an essential part of becoming civilized, but were convinced that African American clergy could do a much better job than Europeans. Indeed, the AME founded a number of schools in South Africa and sponsored about 100 southern African students for higher education, mostly in African American colleges in the United States. The AME strove to displace, not expel, whites, but their activities were still regarded as a distinct threat to the control of European missionaries, who appealed to colonial officials to bar AME missionaries from entering their territories. Although AME bishops sought to demonstrate that they were in fact loyal to the British Crown and not spreading a gospel of revolution, AME ministers were invariably branded subversives and identified with seditious ‘Ethiopianism’. In Barotseland in Northern Rhodesia, Willie Mokalapa broke with the Paris Evangelical Mission Society (PEMS) over his pay and conditions of service and joined the AME in 1903, winning the support of the local Lozi elite and Lewanika’s ruling family through the AME’s emphasis on education. However, PEMS missionaries successfully lobbied the British South Africa Company to issue a proclamation prohibiting other AME missionaries from entering the territory. The AME did not reappear in Northern Rhodesia until the 1930s, when it attracted considerable support from educated Africans in rapidly growing copperbelt towns.
Cultural misunderstandings underlay an acrimonious split in Kenya between Kikuyu Christians and the Church of Scotland Mission (CSM) and the American-sponsored African Inland Mission (AIM). The white missionaries derided certain elements of Kikuyu culture as ‘incompatible with Christianity’, particularly the circumcision ceremony, a rite of passage for teenage boys and girls. Although the missionaries decided that male circumcision could be performed by hospital doctors, in the late 1920s they fiercely condemned female circumcision as barbaric and ‘sexual mutilation’ and demanded that church members forswear it. Colonial officials, who had studiously avoided taking a position on these issues, enacted a law in the early 1920s that restricted female initiation periods to two months—a measure whose real intent was to ensure that the flow of labour to white farms was not interrupted by ceremonies. However, when the controversy intensified later in the decade, officials tried to moderate mission policy by limiting the oath against female circumcision to teachers and allowing those who rejected the circumcision prohibition to have access to schools.
Most Kikuyu valued circumcision ceremonies for bringing initiates into the larger community as adults and reinforcing patriarchal dominance. Banning them was further proof that colonizers planned to expropriate more Kikuyu land. The prohibitions touched off a mass exodus from the missions and split Kikuyu church members into the minority kirore (‘fingerprint’), who were prepared to sign the oath, and the Agikuyu karing’a (‘pure Kikuyu’), who rejected the pledge. Dissidents withdrew their children from mission schools and refused to attend church. A stanza of ‘Muthirugu’, a popular protest song of the time, encouraged secession.
I am going to break all friendships The only friendship I shall retain Is between me and Jehovah.
They established the African Independent Pentecostal Church and the Kikuyu Independent School Association in 1934, and explored ways to address a glaring weakness in their new church’s structure, how to ordain their own clergy. A few years later a solution was found through Archbishop Daniel William Alexander of the African Orthodox Church (AOC) of South Africa, whom dissidents persuaded to visit Kenya and to ordain individuals to lead the independent church.
Cultural issues also shaped the formation of Maori churches in New Zealand, but, unlike African independent churches, most Maori churches defined themselves as complementary to established mission denominations. Because mainstream missions established separate Maori church wings under European control, the independent churches embraced a liberatory message and carved out space for personalized styles of worship. However, many of their congregants still retained membership in their original churches. The Church of the Seven Rules of Jehovah, founded in the late 1890s, peaked during the First World War. It opposed tohunga (Maori religious figures consulted on matters of well-being and illness) and strove to unite all Maori tribes under one Christian institution. Recognizing the Church of England as the mother church, it patterned its worship services, building styles, clerical hierarchy, and observance of a Sunday sabbath after the Anglicans. However, because Maori culture did not sanction eating the body and drinking the blood of a divine figure, the Church did not celebrate the Holy Sacrament.