Berkley Center

Background: This discussion with John Padwick was part of preparatory work for a June 24, 2008 consultation at the ISS in The Hague on "Global Development and Faith-Inspired Organizations and Development in Latin America." In this conversation, Mr. Padwick explains the history and evolution of the African Independent Churches, particularly in Kenya, and its aim of strengthening the culture of reciprocity across the continent. Mr. Padwick describes the churches' involvement in community development initiatives, particularly savings and credit associations and HIV/AIDS education.

What path has brought you to your current position? How does it involve international development work and issues?

I am currently involved with the Organization of African Instituted Churches (OAIC), and have worked largely from that base since 1978, living in Nairobi, Kenya.

I first came to Nairobi as an Anglican missionary, with the Church Missionary Society (CMS). CMS is one of the older missionary organizations, founded in 1799, and has a long history in Africa. It was the first church body established in Kenya, around 1840, and worked there for many years, though its presence is not very visible today. I initially worked for some six years as a teacher, then a headmaster.

After I had been in Kenya for six years, David Barrett, who was working from Kenya at that time, and who initiated and edits the World Christian Encyclopedia, suggested my name to Archbishop Markos, then in Nairobi as the Coptic (Orthodox) bishop. CMS seconded me to work with him.

At the time, I personally knew little about the African Independent Churches (AICs), and CMS also had little knowledge about them, seeing them as rather bizarre Christian organizations or sects. CMS and I were both interested at least from an academic perspective. In 1978 Bishop Markos was instrumental in facilitating a first international conference of AICs, coming from seven countries, in Cairo. As a result the OAIC was set up, to represent the voices of independent churches, and also to start some schemes for theological education.

The OAIC until fairly recently has had a low profile, in Africa, and perhaps particularly in Kenya, where they deliberately wanted to stay away from Kenyan politics. The local Kenyan branch of OAIC—OAIC Kenya Chapter—has however grown in both size and visibility in Kenya, particularly over the past five years, and at the international level OAIC International is now becoming recognized as a significant actor.

Can you give a bit more background on the AICs?

AICs form in essence a movement representing an African Christian response to the missionary movement in Africa. The earliest manifestations were the foundation of churches around the 1880s or 1890s, but the most important growth came from the 1920s on. The AICs emerged most clearly where the missionary presence was strongest, and where scripture was translated into African mother tongues earliest.

The AIC growth was partly political, and partly religious. What happened was that local leaders took part of what was brought by the missionaries, but also rejected some of the values that came with the missionaries, especially social values. The phenomenon began in several places across the continent, including Kenya and southern Africa. There, the missionary role was seen to be one of creating an emerging middle class, in part through the training of an elite of Christian leaders. They (the elites) were able to work easily with the colonial government, and benefited from colonial government funding. It led to the creation of a new middle class, and that was understood to break the traditional communality of many communities, especially in villages.

This pattern was not as clear in West Africa, where there was a different path. But the common understanding was that the traditional economy of reciprocity, where people felt strongly responsible one for another, was coming under serious threat. This understanding was a central factor that led to the foundation of AICs. They represented an attempt to recreate the relationships of reciprocity that seemed most in danger, using concepts, values, and imagery taken from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.

How did this emerge in Kenya?

In Kenya, the new AICs first emerged in western and central Kenya, from the mid 1920s. They were especially strong in Nyanza.

And your own work?

CMS, playing what amounted to a limited role, seconded me to work with Archbishop Markos. It was he who was involved in setting up the OAIC as an organization.

So my involvement with the AICs grew from the leadership role that the Orthodox Church and especially Archbishop Markos played in establishing the first overarching organization that linked these churches.

Over the previous 30 to 40 years, the Coptic Church had received various requests from AICs for affiliation. Many were seeking validation as Christian churches, because they had been largely rejected by the traditional Protestant mission churches. That was why Markos was sent from Cairo to Nairobi. The understanding was that they (the Orthodox Church) were thus fulfilling the mission from St. Mark, in the very founding of the Coptic Church. More practically, there was a sense that the Orthodox part of Christianity had lost out in the evangelization of Africa, and some leaders saw an opportunity in the opening to the AICs.

The Coptic role in the development of the AIC movement remained significant, especially through the presence of Bishop Markos, until 1990, when he was forced to resign. This represented an assertion by the AICs, that we now want to own the organization. Markos was, nonetheless, clearly the spiritual father of the new African organization, which was based in Kenya.

How was David Barrett involved?

David Barrett was in Nairobi in the early 1990s, and in fact the remarkable World Christian Encyclopedia was initially produced in Nairobi. He had met Archbishop Markos, and from their discussions thought that a CMS missionary would be useful. That is how I got involved.

And how did the AIC evolve?

The headquarters of the new organization was in Nairobi, and from 1978-90 Bishop Markos led the organization. My own role was always rather mixed, as I was balancing a theological interest and above all a keen interest in the work of grass roots development. I was interested in what faith brings to what the churches do at the grass roots level for the community.

My current role turns largely around communications, but I am also keenly interested in research, reflection, and the theological articulation of what is happening on the ground. I am interested in how communities tell their own stories, and how they develop the strands that link them.

A feature of these churches is that very few of their theologies are written down. To facilitate their engagement in what is happening on a policy front, they want their theologies to emerge. The process in turn helps them to own their own theology, and the freedom to change it where necessary.

What do you see as the AIC grass roots process?

AICs are essentially involved in building community. As an organization, over the past 16 to 17 years, OAIC has been involved in participatory development at the grassroots. This took on an HIV/AIDS component in the 1990s, and that is now run together with other community development activities as a “livelihoods and HIV” program. I left OAIC in 1985 to study, then came back to western Kenya, working with independent churches as a development coordinator at the grass roots level. I came back to the OAIC in 1993. At the grass roots, the development work comes in part from engagement with the AIC world view and values—what we call the founding vision of the churches—and seeing how that relates to contemporary society.

What kinds of interventions are happening?

We facilitate fairly typical development initiatives; they include particularly savings and credit associations to support microenterprises. As they develop, the associations begin to take stronger interest in community activities. They help orphans, vulnerable children, they buy their school uniforms, they engage with local authorities over the rights of orphans to inherit land and to attend school. Widows are also in the same vulnerable situation, and also play a significant role in our programmes.

With HIV/AIDS initiatives, through our participatory approaches—participatory learning in action (PLA) and participatory rural appraisal (PRA)—we have sought to facilitate processes that allow the grass roots and communities to identify their own priorities, and analyze their own problems and develop initiatives to cope with their problems. The process aims to engage with the belief systems of communities as they are. We don't attempt to correct or bring in any official kind of faith, but we try to draw on what they actually believe.

An example: we had been teaching scientifically how the HIV virus spreads. When we went back months later to groups and asked what people actually believed about HIV/AIDS, we realized that their response was spiritual; that the disease was caused by evil spirits or a curse of the ancestors, or because people had broken taboos. We thus realized that in order to engage people's motivation, a motivation derived from faith, we had to listen much more carefully to what people believed, and to create situations where their beliefs could be acknowledged and where their own leaders could begin to engage with them on aspects of their faith.

Faith can be positive, and it can also be negative. Many of the pastors we have trained can go back to congregations and enable congregations to confront issues of stigmatization and marginalization, for example banning spontaneous choruses that condemned people suffering from AIDS as sinners and worthy of God's punishment. Once they had understood the scientific side of the process, and once they understood a little about poverty and the imbalance of power relations, and how the powerful can take advantage of the weak in a sexual context; once they began to grasp a much more holistic picture of how the virus is spread, then they could begin to deal with the stigma and marginalization brought about by certain negative aspects of their faith. In this way, it was possible for people with AIDS to be given decision making roles and welcomed back into the church.

Microenterprise involves making a living in a changing dynamic or economy. Could you characterize the approaches to wealth among AIC churches? Are they diverse, and how do they relate to prosperity gospel types of approaches?

These churches tend to have somewhat mixed approaches to wealth. If we go back to African traditional values, we can see how wealth was regarded in the African tradition: wealth was positive as God is supposed to bring prosperity. Poverty is more troubling, because it suggests the question, what have the poor done wrong? Are they cursed by ancestors? You will hear such views in the AICs, with spiritual causes or explanations for poverty and wealth. Poverty could result from evil spirits or witchcraft, or the curse of the ancestors.

This also goes back to the concerns about the emerging middle class and elites that we spoke about earlier, a concern that wealth was created through oppression, through unfair trading, and through an unjust process. Wealth can thus be seen as unjust in some way, and that strand tends to justify poverty, in a sense that these people, the poor within communities, have been wronged.

There is also the element of reciprocity. In traditional value systems, a lot of assistance was to be given to the poor to help them help themselves out of poverty. The poor man might be assisted with a plot of land or a cow and would be expected to take advantage of what he had been given.

There is also a negative side of reciprocity, that leads people to expect to get assistance from their neighbors and development organizations, and this can create problems. It can lead to dependency on others. The impact of this upon the communities is that it can act as a constraint against the emergence of entrepreneurial skills, and it is justified by the ‘you only get rich by exploiting others,' and ‘poverty avoids the sin of exploiting others'.

Against that background, savings and credit associations work because they are rooted in principles of reciprocity, with benefits channeled into individual entrepreneurial enterprises. You contribute to the group funds, and the group lends to you, but at the same time provides moral support, and makes sure that your business succeeds. In a traditional setting it works quite well; people are willing to charge themselves high rates of interest, because they see that high rates of interest go back into the communal pot. When you get to a certain level, however, there can be problems. For example, when someone wants to go beyond the village level to buy a shop in a local market or a vehicle, the village scheme may not be able to offer a large enough loan. Members who want to make further progress are obliged to go outside the cooperative to microcredit institutions and banks. The rates of interest there are probably similar to the village savings and credit scheme, but are often regarded by many members as too high because they are not grounded in reciprocity, and the profit is seen as going outside the group to someone else. People are concerned that the gambles are too great when you enter into these formal relationships outside of reciprocity, and that non-payment of loans can result in the seizure of all that you possess. It can be difficult for AIC members to leap into the free market.

How much is known about the success of these small local credit schemes? How do they work out when people migrate or are in transit?

The methodology of these schemes is quite well known and studied. To give one instance, the Trickle Up Program (TUP), had a scheme which provided $50 to individual participants to work on a business plan and after three months they were evaluated and given a further $50 as startup capital. We worked with the program in western Kenya. However, initially it did not work very well when operated on an individual basis. People needed the backup and reciprocity of the group, and we ended up giving money to the group to lend back to individuals. That was much more successful.

My perception is that savings and credit schemes can rise and fall, but overall, even if they last only 3 to 4 years, they achieve something worthwhile. The incidence of people running away with money, at least in the villages, is not high. We have village schemes that have been going for 15 years, now expanding into other development activities.

Do you see the AIC phenomenon as largely rural, or is it transposing and changing in the urban setting?

The ideology, values, and symbolism of the AICs are all rooted in rural society, which poses a challenge when members of AICs move into the cities. Most AIC migrants are fairly poor, and lack much formal education. Typically they move to informal settlements around the cities when they first migrate, from where the formal sector draws cheap labor. AICs tend to be strong in these settlements. The churches in Kibera (a large informal settlement in Nairobi) are nearly all AICs or indigenous Pentecostal (though the lines between the two groups are often blurred). Some indigenous Pentecostals are members of the AIC organization. They are not mission planted, and they call themselves AICs.

The independent and Pentecostal churches are both groups that fit naturally into more informal settings, as they have the flexibility that is needed in such settings. The traditional Protestant churches, for example, tend to like to own the land where they build structures, while for the AICs or Pentecostals this is less important. This poses the question on whether AICs, and their theologies and teachings, promote effective engagement with the free market and the urban setting. It is an area of concern, and in the historic AICs, the feeling is usually that people's real home is back in the village. They seldom buy property in the city.

There are three broad categories of AICs, and their response to modernity and the free market is somewhat different. The first category is that of the so-called ‘nationalist' churches and politically motivated churches, which struggled to overturn colonialism through education and sometimes by force. The values of these churches are more instrumental, and they believe in building the kingdom of heaven on earth. They have less qualms about engaging with the urban setting, and they have the education to be successful. The second category of AICs is that of the Spiritual churches (which include the Zionist Churches in Southern Africa, Roho (Spirit) Churches in West Kenya, Aladuta churches in West Africa and others). These churches are what most people think about when they think of African independent churches. Their members often wear white robes, believe in gifts and power of the Spirit, and laws of purity and impurity. This group of AIC churches generally speaking do not engage very effectively with these market and urban environments. The third category is the indigenous Pentecostal churches, with a more modern orientation. Their strength is that they support individuals who go out and become entrepreneurs, in ways the more traditional independent churches do not. It is in this latter group of churches that the prosperity gospel is the strongest.

There is also movement across boundaries. Some of the most successful churches working in development and HIV/AIDS, advocacy on orphans and widows, are from Uganda. They are rural Pentecostal churches, and retain some of the communal values of the rural churches and at the same time look ahead. They are halfway between the spiritual and the indigenous pentecostal churches.

One issue that we want to address at the consultation is the questions and tensions around values that divide some faith communities, and faith and secular development institutions. Some of the areas of friction are around gender, roles of women, HIV/AIDS strategy, the roles of the state, and corruption and governance. There is often a gap between the ideal and the actual, and between what should and what can be. What is your experience and wisdom here?

Just picking up on one or two of these topics, and what you call the discrepancy between the ideal and the actual, this is one of the areas that in working in HIV/AIDS you constantly come across gaps between what people expect of themselves and each other and what actually goes on. We facilitate discussions around this topic.

To take one example, on condom use between HIV discordant couples. If we had gone straight to the churches to discuss upfront and directly the topic of condom use, we would have been rejected. However, simply by bringing the churches into the discourse around HIV/AIDS and how it is linked to behavior, we have often reached a position where churches are ready to recommend that we at least talk about condoms and make them available. We work in the area of discrepancy between the ideal and the actual in a sensitive way.

Gender relations are an important topic to pursue. AICs are by their nature and for historical reasons strongly patriarchal. There is, however, also the countervailing factor that the theology of many AICs understands that the Holy Spirit can work through whatever gender, and some large churches have been founded by women prophets. Over time the values of the dominant society reimpose themselves, so the role of women in AICs tends to become subordinated again to men. But at least in theory, there is an openness to women. Situations arise where women do stand up in congregations and rebuke pastors—even archbishops! We work at it in our programs, and insist or try to insist that women are brought into decision-making structures. But we seek to build on seeds that are already present in the founding vision of the AICs.

We have not been engaged enough on corruption. The reason for this is perhaps that most of the independent churches, and OAIC itself, have been somewhat vulnerable institutions. The churches that were most effective in fighting corruption in Kenya in the 1990s, during the struggle for the second democratization, those who were most successful, had strong moral and financial support from abroad. In terms of protesting against corruption, AICs have not been particularly strong. We are promoting AIC engagement in constitutional reform at the national level, so that structures that promote accountability are in place. The personalism of most AICs and their inability or unwillingness to adapt to formal bureaucracies is a disadvantage in this area. Formal structures that promote accountability often run counter to their values.

Looking at the role of the state, we may also want to consider the roles of legal systems, the formal systems of jurisprudence, brought mostly from Europe and imposed on people who had little understanding of it, in a language inaccessible to most people. This perception of the law continues to the present day. During the colonial period there was often extreme legal prejudice against AICs. They were often banned, and many continue to consider themselves marginalized by legal structures today. The formal systems of the law have been used against them, and this inability of more marginalized communities to access formal systems of law in a way that is either cheap or comprehensible to them is one of the things that led to violence in Kenya in January and February. The militias have their own legal system, and also have judicial functions, they try to keep peace and where they have significant influence try to solve disputes—despite themselves being illegal, and often using violence.

What do we know about the growth in numbers on the continent?

Barrett calculates that across the continent there were some 55 million AIC members in 2000. If we update a bit, maybe there are 60 million, and of course you have tens of thousands of denominations. My assessment of the growth is that the historical Protestant churches and historic AICs are growing only through births; they are not converting many people. The growth rates are highest with the indigenous Pentecostals, and the older AICs are losing members to the indigenous Pentecostals. We should be able to draw on some of the strengths of the indigenous Pentecostals.

You started out as a teacher. How do you see the role of education, and modernity, values, and tension?

Some of the AICs, particularly those from central Kenya and the nationalist AICs have always played a central role in education. Church leaders often emerged from the independent schools they established. The school structures came first, and in fact, in the 1930s and onward, until 1952 in Kenya, you had the African Independent Pentecostal Church in central Kenya running a large number of schools with the values of African nationalism. They were a thorn in the colonial flesh. All these schools were either burnt or handed over to Catholics or Protestants when the emergency began in 1952. Many of the Roho churches also tried to establish their own schools, and were prevented to doing so by the colonists. As a result, you had a situation where many of the church leaders lacked adequate formal education, and no matter how they had wanted to run schools in the early days, as time went on, they tended to devalue the importance of education simply because they didn't have it. You had a theology building up that the Holy Spirit alone is enough and we didn't need education. That is declining now, as everybody knows the value of education. Moreover, the growing number of small nursery and primary schools being set up in an informal way by AICs in informal urban settlements over the past ten to fifteen years shows their understanding of the value of education. The DR Congo, where there is a strong presence of AICs, is also the home of the Kimbanguist church, the largest AIC on the continent. The Kimbanguists run many schools and hospitals, and have their own university in Kinshasa.