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African Christians recognized early on that if they were to build the church with their own leaders, they would have to assert their distinctiveness from the mission-built denominational structures.

Many stopped short of full separation—the Ethiopianist church movement grew out of Africans willing to work within missionary structures, but critiquing those structures. Some Ethiopianists did think you should divest yourself of English names, start your own schools and your own churches, and reject all funding from white missionary groups. But others, like James Johnson (p. 14) saw something in Western civilization that Africans should capture and use in prosecuting their spiritual and political goals. Their goal was not to separate for the sake of separating, but to build an African church lifting up its hands to God.

What was it about the missionary way of doing Christianity that was so distressing to their African converts?

African Christians experienced at every turn the scientific racism that the mission churches had absorbed—this was simply the dominant theme in Western thought about other cultures.

This ideology presumed the inferiority of African intelligence, African cultural forms, the African way of life. And it translated into a strict distinction between African culture and Christian culture: African culture was ruled by demons in the form of native spirits. Christian culture, on the other hand, was Western culture, full stop.

When the Presbyterians translated the Bible into Efik in Southeastern Nigeria, for example, they did not want to use the local words for spirit to indicate the Holy Spirit. They were afraid the people might think this was the same as one of their tribal spirits. So they simply left the Third Person of the Trinity untranslated.

Missionaries rejected absolutely all the African ways of talking about and handling the spirit world. They did not study the indigenous worldview, but rather used dismissive terms like "fetish," "heathen," and "pagan." This has only begun to change recently, as missionary scholars like Andrew Walls, who are faithful Christians but believe you should know indigenous cultures from the inside, have used instead terms like "primary worldview" and "traditional religion."

Because African converts were not allowed to enter fully into a Christianity they could recognize as their own, they began to work towards indigenous churches.

When Africans did begin to make Christian faith their own, how was that indigenous African Christianity different from Western forms?

First, we have to acknowledge the success of the missions effort: the Africans did indeed absorb the missionaries' teachings! They picked up their biblicism—their high view of Scripture. They picked up their emphasis on conversion. They pursued social activism on the missionaries' evangelical model. And they followed them in strongly emphasizing the person of Christ and eschatology. They even heeded the proscriptions against "fetishes."

But they also drew out of Scripture different emphases than had their teachers.

The missionaries read the Bible through the lenses of the Protestant emphasis on Word over Spirit and the Enlightenment desacralization of the universe.

The Africans, on the other hand, read the Bible through their own traditionally "charismatic" worldview: they knew there were spirits in the sky, the water, the land, and the ancestral worlds. Only, now, they proclaimed the power of Jesus over these other powers.

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