Zionist churches proliferated in South Africa’s segregation era amid a global revival of the doctrine of divine healing. Among the nearly eight hundred new denominations that emerged were some of the largest Zionist churches, including Ignatius Lekganyane’s Zion Christian Church (ZCC) and Isaiah Shembe’s Nazaretha Church. All of these new denominations took root in the absence of government recognition and during a period when church-state relations were in flux. Many Zionists found ways to work around and in spite of segregation-era laws, but these efforts occasionally ended in disaster—as at Bulhoek in 1921. For scholars, Zionist churches have long posed problems of categorization. Scholars once imagined Zionists as embodying a distinctively African expression of faith, but important new scholarship has challenged this understanding. The time is ripe, however, to reassess what made Zionists different. This entry looks to Zionists’ doctrine and methods of evangelism to understand them as segregation-era rebels.
