The nature and character of the African Independent Churches (AICS) in the twenty first century: The theological and social agenda

Abstract

The middle of the 1960s to the end of the 1990s saw great interest in the lives of the African Independent Churches (AICs) as a world phenomenon. However, the advent of HIV and AIDs shifted academic research and interest from the AICs to the HIV and AIDS pandemic, especially in African scholarship. As a result, the study of the AICs remained the interest of a few African scholars. This article attempts to find the place of the AICs in the 21st century and the new areas of interest in the study of the AICs. The article gives an overall view of the African situation of the AICs and then focuses on southern Africa with examples from Botswana. The article critically examines the theological and social agendas of the AICs in Africa and particularly southern Africa. The theore-tical framework of the article is that of selected classical sociologists who maintained that religion binds people to¬gether. The functionalist theories of Redcliffe-Brown and Malinowsky are applied.