Cherubim and Seraphim Movement Church

Heritage

The Cherubim and Seraphim movement began in Lagos in 1925 around Moses Orimolade Tunolase, an itinerant preacher renowned for prayer, and Christianah Abiodun Akinsowon, a young woman whose visionary experience during the Corpus Christi festival drew the founding circle together. It became the first great church family of the Aladura revival — praying people in white garments, testing dreams and visions, seeking healing from God rather than charms — and over the century divided into numerous C&S branches and councils, which share heritage more than headquarters. Diaspora congregations gather across American cities.

Theological family

Aladura Christianity: trinitarian, Bible-centered by its own confession, marked by ceaseless prayer, prophecy and visions weighed within the congregation, divine healing, angelology reflected in its very name, and white garments worn for worship. Other traditions assess Aladura practice variously; this record reports the movement's self-understanding.

Who decides what

Varied by branch: the movement is a family of councils and independent bands, each with its own hierarchy of spiritual ranks — apostles, prophets, elders — a structure that multiplied as the movement divided.

What a first-time visitor would find

White garments and bare feet, singing driven by drums and handclaps, long intercessions, prophetic messages delivered and tested, psalms prayed as living texts, and services that do not watch the clock.

What it has always cared about

Prayer as the church's name and nature; the ministry of women honored from its founding vision onward; dreams and visions taken seriously as address from God; the psalter prayed with African fervor.

Its gift to the wider church

As the Aladura pioneer, Cherubim and Seraphim opened the path African-initiated Christianity has walked ever since — faith received from missionaries, then owned, re-voiced and re-clothed in African form, a century before that story became the norm of world Christianity.

Commonly confused with

With the Celestial Church of Christ — also white-garment, founded a generation later with a distinct origin and order; and among its own many branches, which outsiders routinely mistake for one organization.

Range of views inside it

Wide: branches differ in hierarchy, liturgy and council membership; the white-garment prayer tradition is the common thread.

Where Cherubim and Seraphim Movement Church churches are on the map

1 Cherubim and Seraphim Movement Church congregations appear on The Church Map, across 1 states.

• Maryland — 1