ABSTRACT
It can be safely hazarded that until the publication of H.W. Turner’s comprehensive and microscopic eight-year study of the ‘Church of the Lord’1-one of the myriads of Aladura organizations in West AfricaAfrican Churches were hardly examined by Church historians with scientific eyes. By and large these Churches, which began to appear on the continent in the nineteenth century, have been presented as unorthodox aberrations and bastards, beyond the pale of redemption and absolutely unqualified to be considered legitimate branches of the Church Universal. Their history, it has been contended, has been one of unmitigated sinfulness. Their origins were sinful: the founders were either rabid power-hungry rebels against ‘constituted authority’, or hyper-erotic individuals who wished to debase Christianity by flooding the Church with polygamists, or pagan-at-heart rebels who aimed at heathenizing Christianity. Their subsequent development was sinful: they departed from the forms and formularies of the Western Churches from which they had broken away, evolving their own theologies, systems of worship, hymnals, liturgies, doctrines, styles of witnessing and so on.
