scholarly journals A Remarkable Woman in African Independent Churches: Examining Christina Nku’s Leadership in St John’s Apostolic Faith Mission

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mookgo Solomon Kgatle

The name African Independent Churches (AICs) refers to churches that have been independently started in Africa by Africans and not by missionaries from another continent.There has been extensive research on (AICs) from different subjects in the past. There is, however, a research gap on the subject of leadership in the AICs, especially with reference to women leaders. To address this gap, this article discusses leadership in the AICs with special reference to the leadership of Christina Nku in St John’s Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM). A historical examination of Christina Nku’s leadership is studied by looking at her roles as a family woman, prophet, church founder, faith healer and educator in St John’s AFM. The aim of this article is twofold. First it is to reflect on gender in the leadership of the AICs. Second it is to apply the framework of leadership in the AICs to Christina Nku’s leadership in St John’s AFM. Consequently, the article is an interface between gender and leadership in an African context. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that Christina Nku was a remarkable woman in the leadership of the AICs.

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Okwudiri Obineche

Jansenism is a seventh-century religious movement within the Roman Catholic Church, named after a Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen, whose work Augustinus (1640) reviewed the major thoughts of Augustine’s theology. Jansenist teachings were associated with harsh moral rigorism against the Jesuits’ Molinist thoughts. It was first condemned by Pope Innocent X in 1653, and finally in 1713 with many French migrants finding refuge in Holland from persecution. However, having retained traces of its teachings in the same Catholic Church that condemned them, Jansenist thoughts have found flourishing ground in the modern churches of Africa, especially among the African indigenous Pentecostal denominations in Nigeria. This indigenous Pentecostal tradition comprises the African Independent Churches, the Aladura movement, and the African Pentecostal movement, whose belief and practices are in line with the five pillars of Jansenism. This work, therefore, proposes that the reality of history lies with the future; whose interpretation of the past is proved by modern reality, and not by the ancient traditions


1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
J.J. Kritzinger

In the South African population censuses of the past the thousands of African Independent Churches were all classified and tabled together in one category. Since 1980 only one, the Zion Christian Church, has been identified separately. Previous statistics did not make it possible to know which of these churches were the larger ones, where they were based and which groups were growing as these statistics were very general. This article gives the reasoning behind the proposal made to the Central Statistical Services to enumerate some of these churches separately, and to classify the more or less 4 500 churches into a number of categories on the basis of their stated names.


2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas S. Thinane

Missio hominum as a theological framework within the discipline of missiology in understanding missio Dei still lacks proper exploration. Few attempts have been made by theologians in the past but in different disciplines other than missiology. The exception is the previous studies by Nico Smith who investigated and conceptualised the subject at great length. This article builds on Smith’s perspectives on missio hominum with the aim of providing an in-depth understanding of the subject in an African context. This shall be achieved by juxtaposing missio hominum with an African concept of Ubuntu through a literary analysis. Ubuntu is imperative in understanding the significance of human beings within the Christian mission in fulfilling the purpose of missio Dei.Contribution: This article makes two important contributions in the field of missiology – first, by illustrating through missio hominum that human beings are God’s partners in accomplishing his mission on earth, and second, by illustrating through Ubuntu that human beings should partner with one another for the same purpose.


1975 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold W. Turner

To think of the planting of Christianity in Africa and the work of missions and churches is to think of schools, of these agencies ‘throwing across tropical Africa their gigantic fishing net of primary and secondary schools’. And to think of the African peoples themselves over the past century is to recall the swelling demand for education above almost everything else. Back in 1902 this was well expressed in the exhortation of King Lewanika to his Lozi council: ‘Marotse, leave your shades, abandon our paganism. Send your children to school so that we also can become a nation.’ The school has undoubtedly been the most universally appreciated Christian contribution to black Africa over the past century and more.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Kohnert

Much has been written on the relationship of China and Africa in the past decade. However, the subject of Chinese migrant entrepreneurs in Africa and their articulation with African counterparts was little explored up to the early 2010s. Apparently, this research gap has been closed, as shown by four publications in recent years: three edited volumes and one monograph, focusing on this subject. In view of early prejudices on the passive or even disapproving reception of Chinese migrants by Africans, the state of the art underlines the importance and scope of African agency vis à vis Chinese migrant entrepreneurs in Africa. This has been underlined unison in the four books under review.


2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes J. Knoetze

�This article presents a brief overview of the historical development of the missional church from the understanding of the missio Dei. From this perspective, it attends to the African context. With regard to African children, the African independent churches are looked at from a missional church perspective. The nature of the missional church is described as being a Biblical, Trinitarian, discerning, evangelistic, hermeneutic and agogic community. The implication of being missional in accordance with the mentioned characteristics is then linked to the five solas of the Reformed tradition. It is concluded that the African independent churches and the mainline missionary churches need each other in order to be truly missional in Africa and to reach the children of Africa.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Children and Youth Ministry is challenged by the context of Africa, when some relevant characteristics of the African independent or initiated churches (AICs) are described and related to the Reformed tradition. The (missional) ecclesiology of the AICs and the Reformed tradition is challenged by children�s ministry


Africa ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Engelke

Pentecostal studies has been one of the most vibrant areas of research in Africa for over twenty years, but is it time we started to look past Pentecostalism? Using some of the most important work in this tradition as a point of departure, this article offers both a critique of and supplement to the Pentecostal literature. It focuses in particular on how we should understand the relationship between Pentecostalism and African Independency by pushing the debates on how to frame their oft-shared desire to ‘break with the past’. Every rupture is also a realignment and how each is conceptualized and understood is a matter not only of discourse but decisions and dilemmas faced in everyday life.


1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (4I) ◽  
pp. 321-331
Author(s):  
Sarfraz Khan Qureshi

It is an honour for me as President of the Pakistan Society of Development Economists to welcome you to the 13th Annual General Meeting and Conference of the Society. I consider it a great privilege to do so as this Meeting coincides with the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the state of Pakistan, a state which emerged on the map of the postwar world as a result of the Muslim freedom movement in the Indian Subcontinent. Fifty years to the date, we have been jubilant about it, and both as citizens of Pakistan and professionals in the social sciences we have also been thoughtful about it. We are trying to see what development has meant in Pakistan in the past half century. As there are so many dimensions that the subject has now come to have since its rather simplistic beginnings, we thought the Golden Jubilee of Pakistan to be an appropriate occasion for such stock-taking.


Author(s):  
Daiva Milinkevičiūtė

The Age of Enlightenment is defined as the period when the universal ideas of progress, deism, humanism, naturalism and others were materialized and became a golden age for freemasons. It is wrong to assume that old and conservative Christian ideas were rejected. Conversely, freemasons put them into new general shapes and expressed them with the help of symbols in their daily routine. Symbols of freemasons had close ties with the past and gave them, on the one hand, a visible instrument, such as rituals and ideas to sense the transcendental, and on the other, intense gnostic aspirations. Freemasons put in a great amount of effort to improve themselves and to create their identity with the help of myths and symbols. It traces its origins to the biblical builders of King Solomon’s Temple, the posterity of the Templar Knights, and associations of the medieval craft guilds, which were also symbolical and became their link not only to each other but also to the secular world. In this work we analysed codified masonic symbols used in their rituals. The subject of our research is the universal Masonic idea and its aspects through the symbols in the daily life of the freemasons in Vilnius. Thanks to freemasons’ signets, we could find continuity, reception, and transformation of universal masonic ideas in the Lithuanian freemasonry and national characteristics of lodges. Taking everything into account, our article shows how the universal idea of freemasonry spread among Lithuanian freemasonry, and which forms and meanings it incorporated in its symbols. The objective of this research is to find a universal Masonic idea throughout their visual and oral symbols and see its impact on the daily life of the masons in Vilnius. Keywords: Freemasonry, Bible, lodge, symbols, rituals, freemasons’ signets.


No other talent process has been the subject of such great debate and emotion as performance management (PM). For decades, different strategies have been tried to improve PM processes, yielding an endless cycle of reform to capture the next “flavor-of-the-day” PM trend. The past 5 years, however, have brought novel thinking that is different from past trends. Companies are reducing their formal processes, driving performance-based cultures, and embedding effective PM behavior into daily work rather than relying on annual reviews to drive these. Through case studies provided from leading organizations, this book illustrates the range of PM processes that companies are using today. These show a shift away from adopting someone else’s best practice; instead, companies are designing bespoke PM processes that fit their specific strategy, climate, and needs. Leading PM thought leaders offer their views about the state of PM today, what we have learned and where we need to focus future efforts, including provocative new research that shows what matters most in driving high performance. This book is a call to action for talent management professionals to go beyond traditional best practice and provide thought leadership in designing PM processes and systems that will enhance both individual and organizational performance.


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