African Independent Churches (AICs), Indigenous and Spiritual churches belong to the African Spiritual Churches Association (ASCA) and are made up of Zionist, Ethiopian and Apostolic churches. In this chapter I will elaborate on the theological training of our ministers, our theology and the kind of minister we need for the fastest growing church in South Africa.

African Independent Churches (AICs)

For many years we were called AIC for the very simple reason that we broke away from missionary churches in order to be independent and African. This was because, in the last century, African Christians began to feel more and more uncomfortable, discriminated against and oppressed in missionary churches. We felt that Western culture, Western customs, Western dress and Western interpretations of the Bible were imposed upon us while everything African was treated as inferior, as pagan or even as coming from the devil. In European churches, whites were treated as superior and inevitably put in charge in order to supervise blacks.

The African struggle for independence and freedom began in the churches and started in the Transkei with the Reverend Nehemiah Tile, the first African to be ordained a Methodist minister. When Tile broke away from the Methodist church in 1884, an increasing number of African Christian communities established their own African-style Christian churches (Nolan 1993:3–4). At that stage, the movement was known as the ‘Ethiopian movement’ because of the biblical prophecy that one day Ethiopia, or Black Africa, would turn to the God of the Bible: ‘Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hand to God’ (Pss 68:31). The principal argument was that, if the Christian faith could be formulated legitimately in terms of Western culture, then it could just as legitimately be formulated, lived and experienced in terms of African culture. It was not necessary to reject the African sense of community, African family ties, African respect for one's elders and one's ancestors, African ways of celebrating (singing and dancing) and the African belief in the spirits.

A new wave of independence broke out in Wakkerstroom, on the border between the then Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) and the then Transvaal (the area made up by Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, and North West), at the beginning of the 20th century. At the time, Pentecostalism, and especially the ministry of healing, was being introduced into South Africa from the United States (Nolan 1993:3–4).