African-initiated churches

Churches founded in Africa and now planted across the US diaspora.

Redeemed Christian Church of God, Celestial Church of Christ, Cherubim and Seraphim. Mostly Pentecostal or Aladura in worship; kept separate because their origin and governance are African, not American.

Churches born in Africa — the Redeemed Christian Church of God, the Cherubim and Seraphim — now planted across America's cities: mission flowing in reverse.

Heritage

African-initiated churches arose across West Africa in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the Aladura ("praying people") movement in Nigeria produced the Cherubim and Seraphim (from 1925) and the Celestial Church of Christ (founded 1947); Pentecostal bodies followed, above all the Redeemed Christian Church of God, founded in Lagos in 1952. Immigration since the 1980s planted their parishes across US cities — the RCCG maintains parishes throughout North America and a Redemption Camp campground in Texas. This taxonomy keeps the family separate because these churches' origin and governance are African, not American.

Theological family

Mostly Pentecostal or Aladura in worship: Spirit baptism, healing, prophecy and prevailing prayer; the Aladura streams add white garments, revealed hymns and disciplined ritual prayer. Trinitarian throughout.

Who decides what

Seated in Africa — the family's defining trait: General Overseers and international headquarters in Lagos or elsewhere; US parishes are, in effect, the mission field of African mother churches, with pastors deployed and accountable across the ocean.

What a first-time visitor would find

Long, loud and joyful: hours of singing and dancing, prayer aloud and together, night vigils; Aladura congregations worship in white garments, often barefoot in the sanctuary; a single service may move between English, Yoruba and other languages.

What it has always cared about

Prayer as labor — all-night vigils and extended prayer meetings are ordinary discipline, not special events; evangelism as the diaspora's obligation; deliverance and healing; sacrificial giving; and raising children in the faith far from home.

Its gift to the wider church

Reverse mission — the living demonstration that Christianity's center of gravity has moved south, brought back to the country that once sent the missionaries out; and prayer-vigil disciplines that American congregations of many families are beginning to borrow.

Commonly confused with

With African-American denominations — entirely different histories: the AME was founded in Philadelphia, not Lagos; with generic Pentecostal churches, from which governance and calendar distinguish them; and the Celestial Church of Christ with the Churches of Christ, a pure string collision.

Range of views inside it

From the RCCG's ordered parish model to independent Aladura congregations; language, dress and liturgy vary with the mother church; second-generation congregations are anglicizing at their own pace.

A note from the mapmakers: Our data cannot reliably distinguish an African-initiated parish from an African-American congregation or another immigrant-led church by name alone. Nothing here may be asserted of a specific parish — least of all its language or practice. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "African-initiated parishes typically…"

Sources: African Immigrant Religions in America (Jacob K. Olupona and Regina Gemignani (eds.), NYU Press) · Word Made Global: Stories of African Christianity in New York City (Mark R. Gornik, Eerdmans) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)

Where African-initiated churches churches are on the map

7 African-initiated churches congregations appear on The Church Map, across 5 states.

Bodies and networks in this family

Moments that formed this family

  • 1990 — The new immigrant church renews the whole

    The fastest-growing streams of American Christianity in the twenty-first century are again immigrant-planted: the Redeemed Christian Church of God and other African-initiated bodies planting hundreds of US parishes, Latino Pentecostal and Catholic congregations revitalizing city neighborhoods, and Korean, Chinese, Filipino and Brazilian churches filling buildings older congregations had emptied. Meanwhile multiethnic congregations — rare in 1990 — have become one of the strongest currents in American church life.

    The American church is being renewed the way it always has been — by arrival. Its congregations look more like the nations gathered in Revelation than at any point in the country's history.

Read The American Church Story · Find these churches on the map