Zionist church | South African Religion & History (2024)

Zionist church, any of several prophet-healing groups in southern Africa; they correspond to the independent churches known as Aladura (q.v.) in Nigeria, “spiritual” in Ghana, and “prophet-healing churches” in most other parts of Africa.

The use of the term Zion derives from the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion, founded in Chicago in 1896 and having missionaries in South Africa by 1904. That church emphasized divine healing, baptism by threefold immersion, and the imminent Second Coming of Christ. Its African members encountered U.S. missionaries of the Apostolic Faith pentecostal church in 1908 and learned that the Zion Church lacked the second Baptism of the Spirit (recognition of extra powers or character); they therefore founded their own pentecostal Zion Apostolic Church. The vast range of independent churches that stem from the original Zion Apostolic Church use in their names the words Zion (or Jerusalem), Apostolic, Pentecostal, Faith, or Holy Spirit to represent their biblical charter, as for example the Christian Catholic Apostolic Holy Spirit Church in Zion of South Africa. These are known in general as Zionists or Spirit Churches.

The churches were introduced into Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in the 1920s by migrant workers returning from South Africa; endless schisms and new foundations followed. In the mid-1980s the largest was the African Apostolic Church of Johane Maranke, which claimed about 260,000 adherents in Zimbabwe and many others in surrounding countries.

Since the 1920s the racial and political concerns shared with Ethiopianism (an earlier movement toward religious and political autonomy) have declined, especially in South Africa; the better established Zionists have become Ethiopian in type, or more like white evangelical or revivalist churches. These tendencies are apparent in the two largest South African groups—the Zion Christian Church (founded 1925), whose membership is estimated at 80,000 to 600,000, and Limba’s austere Church of Christ (founded 1910), which had about 120,000 members in the 1980s.

Zionist churches include the following features: (1) origination from a mandate received by a prophet in a dream, vision, or death-resurrection experience; (2) a chieflike head, often called a bishop, who is succeeded by his son and who is occasionally regarded as a messiah. Women also figure as founders and leaders; (3) security received by the church’s possession of its own holy place, such as a New Jerusalem, Zion, or Moriah City as headquarters; ownership of land in the reserves and sometimes in white areas; organization of farms and other economic activities; (4) healing, through confession, repeated baptisms, purification rites and exorcisms, especially at “Bethesda pools” and “Jordan rivers”; (5) revelation and power from the Holy Spirit through prophetic utterances and pentecostal phenomena; (6) ritualistic and Africanized worship, with special garments and innovative festivals, characterized by singing, dancing, clapping, and drumming; (7) a legalistic and Sabbatarian ethic, which includes taboos against certain foods, beer, and tobacco and which does not admit Western medicines but tolerates polygamy; and (8) repudiation of traditional magic, medicines, divination, and ancestor cults; the Christian replacements for these traditional practices, however, are sometimes similarly used and interpreted.