African Initiated Churches and Ecological Sustainability: An Empirical Exploration

1 Introduction^[1]

The consequences of climate change increasingly jeopardize the integrity of environmental systems and human lives across the globe. The African continent is among the world regions that experience the most devastating impact of climate change and environmental degradation, in the form of floods, droughts, reduced harvests, or climate-sensitive diseases.^[2] These effects are predicted to worsen in the coming decades if CO₂ mitigation measures remain low.^[3] Due to its “low adaptive capacity,” Africa is seen as “highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change” by the United Nations Environment Programme.^[4]

Meanwhile, successful climate change adaptation is not only dependent on advances in technologies and natural sciences and adequate national and global policy frameworks but also conditional on the transformation of mindsets and values.^[5] The climate crisis, as Sponsel phrased it, has to be understood essentially as “a spiritual and moral crisis.”^[6] In this situation, religious communities hold great potential for the promotion of effective climate change adaptation. As we have pointed out elsewhere:

Religious communities are crucial stakeholders for achieving these paradigm shifts, particularly in those areas of the world where religion is highly relevant in individual and public life. … Most importantly, religion shapes social imaginaries and people’s values. In this context, religious communities have the ability to act as agents of social, cultural, economic, political and ecological change and to function as sources of knowledge.^[7]

Therefore, the specific attitudes fostered, and actions implemented in areas of environmental sustainability, such as climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as environmental protection, are highly important – especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, where religion features as an important factor in most people’s lives.

However, the role of religion with respect to ecology has been contested. Perhaps, the most prominent critical perspective – specifically on the role of Christianity – was already brought forward in 1967 by Lynn White in his essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.”^[8] White argued that “Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia’s religions (except, perhaps, Zoroastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.”^[9] Since then, the debate has moved on considerably and an inter- and transdisciplinary field of research on religion and ecology has emerged.^[10] Moreover, questions of ecological sustainability have recently also gained more prominence in the context of the religion and development debate.^[11]

Ecological engagement in religious traditions around the globe has led Gottlieb to postulate that “world religion has entered into an ‘ecological phase’ in which environmental concern takes its place alongside a more traditional religious focus on sexual morality, ritual, helping the poor and preaching the word of God.”^[12] Indeed, there are ecological initiatives in many of the world’s religious traditions^[13] – for example, the Laudato Si’ movement in the Catholic Church, the Kairos for Creation in the Ecumenical Movement, the Islamic Al-Mizan movement, and the Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change.^[14] However, despite these prominent initiatives and the burgeoning literature on religion and ecology, recent reviews have brought to the fore more ambiguous results. The hypothesis that religions are becoming “green,” i.e. that environmental concerns are becoming a major focus of their theologies and actions (Taylor’s “greening-of-religion hypothesis”),^[15] has been questioned, as recent empirical studies have painted a more ambivalent picture.^[16]

While it might not be justified to speak of substantial “greening of religion” in the sense that ecology is becoming part of religions’ core doings and ideologies, there seems to be an “ecological turn” across many religious communities, i.e. “increased ecological awareness without this becoming a central element in theological tenets and religious activities” [and which] “varies across religions and world regions.”^[17] According to Taylor, van Wieren, and Zaleha, “more, rigorous, mixed-methods research” is necessary “to determine whether and under what circumstances and through what sorts of communicative strategies religious perceptions and beliefs … can most effectively promote ecologically and socially adaptive biocultural systems.”^[18] One emerging indication in the literature, however, is that there seems to be particular potential of traditional religious communities for environmental conservation. As Taylor, van Wieren, and Zaleha find in their review, “indigenous traditions often foster pro-environmental perceptions. This finding suggests that indigenous traditions may be more likely to be pro-environmental than other religious systems and that some nature-based cosmologies and value systems function similarly.”^[19] This potential of traditional religious communities is also supported by the chapter on Africa in the 2022 IPCC report on climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emphasizes the pro-environmental nature of indigenous and local knowledge, which their authors connect with “African traditional beliefs” that “place great value on the natural environment.”^[20] The IPCC report even finds that: “such [local and indigenous] practices record higher evidence of climate risk reduction compared to practices influenced by other knowledge types.”^[21]

This article approaches the topic of a “greening of religion” or an “ecological turn,” as defined above, in religious communities with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, a region in which 89% of the population state that “religion is very important in their lives.”^[22] Within this context, the article focuses on African Initiated Christianity, a growing and influential religious movement. We follow Öhlmann, Frost, and Gräb’s wide definition of African Initiated Christianity, who consider

African Initiated Churches as all those Christian religious communities that have their origins in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa (Anderson 2000, 2001). We draw on the original typology by Turner (1967, 17) to refer to churches that are ‘founded in Africa, by Africans, and primarily for Africans’ without ‘missionary Godfathers’ as Pobee and Ositelu (1998, 55) pointedly added. Their key feature is that they were founded by Africans and did not directly emerge from the European and North American mission initiatives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This closely relates to the definition used by the Organization of African Instituted Churches (OAIC), which ‘understands an AIC to be a church that acknowledges Jesus Christ as Lord, and which has separated by seceding from a mission church or an existing African independent church, or has been founded as an independent entity under African initiative and leadership’ (Gichimu 2016, 810). To emphasise this overarching common characteristic of being initiated in Africa by Africans, we deliberately use the term African Initiated Churches instead of other commonly used interpretations of the ‘I’ in AIC such as Independent, Indigenous, and International (see Venter 2004a for an overview).^[23]

Öhlmann, Frost, and Gräb identify three main waves in the emergence of African Christianity: (1) Independent/Nationalist Churches that seceded from mission churches and can hence be seen as an ecclesiastic independence movement, (2) Independent/Spiritual Churches constituting an indigenous form of Christianity marked by the incorporation of elements of African traditional belief systems and of the early Pentecostal movement, and (3) African Pentecostal/Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches with close relations to the global Pentecostal movement and an emphasis of the power of the Holy Spirit and a gospel of prosperity.^[24] While it is acknowledged that African Initiated Christianity constitutes a highly heterogeneous religious movement, three overarching characteristics applying to a majority of African Initiated Churches are identified by the authors: “first, a history of institutional and financial independence from the historic European and North American Christian confessions, … second, contextuality, a common origin and rootedness in colonial and postcolonial Africa … [and] third, a spiritual worldview.”^[25] We acknowledge that such an overarching definition inevitably comes with a loss of precision in each individual case belonging to this category. Following Öhlmann, Gräb, and Frost, we recognize the diversity of African Initiated Christianity as a religious movement but base our empirical exploration on the assumption that there are sufficient common characteristics across the different churches and contexts within Sub-Saharan Africa to merit this overarching perspective, particularly in relation to issues of ecological sustainability and sustainable development.

Within the African religious landscape, African Initiated Churches have a high demographic significance, representing roughly a third of African Christianity.^[26] They originate from and are embedded in local contexts and can therefore be considered grassroots actors in their respective communities.^[27] The Organization of African Instituted Churches (OAIC), an umbrella organization of African Initiated Churches – which, significantly, includes churches of all the three aforementioned waves –, describes this contextuality as follows:

[African Initiated Churches] are homegrown African churches, founded originally during the colonial period, that have developed indigenous forms of worship, theology and social organization, all deeply inspired by a vision that is both Christian and African. As followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to respond with conviction to the challenges, such as entrenched poverty, ill health and the breakdown of African cultural and social systems, that require groups to organize themselves in order to confront these obstacles.^[28]

This self-description shows how deeply interwoven Christian belief and contextual social action are in African Initiated Churches. This is reflected in their manifold social activities. Church-based childcare institutions, schools or hospitals, educational scholarships, or agricultural trainings attest to the churches’ role as contextually embedded development actors reacting to the social needs in their communities inspired by their beliefs.^[29] African Initiated Churches have therefore increasingly been recognized by international development agencies and by academics as actors of social development. Considering the ecological situation in sub-Saharan Africa, it seems that they are in a similar way ideally situated to be actors for ecological sustainability as well. Moreover, they share a spiritual worldview with African traditional religious beliefs and practices, and particularly the strand of independent/spiritual churches (second wave African Initiated Churches) often incorporates elements thereof in their belief systems^[30] – which the literature has argued to foster care for the environment as we have seen above.^[31] The question arises as to whether such pro-environmental attitudes are also emerging in the context of African Initiated Christianity.

So far, however, only little empirical research has been done on African Initiated Churches as actors for ecological sustainability. This article therefore seeks to investigate how African Initiated Christianity reacts to climate change and environmental degradation. It elucidates environmental knowledge, theologies, and actions emerging in the churches and the motivations in which these are grounded. It emerges that African Initiated Churches show increasing concern about the environment in their local communities. Their environmental theological reactions range from unique eco-theologies to arguments on creation conservation as found in the ecumenical movement. At the same time, their environmental action focuses on the local level and the immediate context, including wider perspectives on global climate change and calls for political action against it only in some instances.

2 The Role of Ecology in African Christianity

Several scholars contributed to the emergence of eco-theologies in African Christianity, which illustrates a growing engagement with ecological sustainability. Examples thereof are the comprehensive works by Conradie and Kavusa.^[32] Interestingly, a number of scholars draw on African traditional religious thought for their development of African eco-theologies. Sakupapa argues that

the African notion of vital force opens up avenues for reflection on the cosmic breath of the Spirit given its emphasis on life and relationality. … In fact, in African cosmology, the sacredness of nature is derived from nature’s relationship with the creator whose vital force has animated nature. Humans are therefore in an ontological relationship with nature given their common descent from the creator. … As such, one of the ways in which to respond to the ecological crisis in the African context lies in the recovery of the African notion of vital force with its underlying idea of God’s pervading presence in the whole of creation. The notion of vital force can therefore be exploited for the development of an ecological ethos based on reverence for the whole of life.^[33]

Maluleke in his liberation theological approach in the South African context connects the theological engagement with environmental justice to issues of social justice. Drawing on both Christian theology and African tradition, he highlights the vision of a society in which

the African men and women … together with white men and women, were with the land, to which they belonged, together with the forests, the lakes, the rivers and fellow animals. And the Bible was with all of them, to guide them and help them to walk with God.^[34]

Mpofu argues that the ecological crisis presents a ‘disharmony between nature and humanity’, which theology needs to address. In his view, ‘the concept of unity between “self and the entire Kosmos” in African worldview presents a potentially constructive African theology of ecology’.^[35]

A particular dynamic seems to unfold in recent approaches to African eco-theology with respect to the reception and inclusion of elements of African traditional religious beliefs and practices.^[36] It appears that there is a wide-spreading consensus among scholars of African traditional religious beliefs and practices that these world views foster care for the environment and ecological preservation in manifold ways, thereby echoing Taylor, van Wieren, and Zaleha’s and the IPCC’s results that traditional religions foster pro-environmental attitudes. In this vein, Amanze opines that the “relationship between nature and human beings in most African societies is one characterized by being ‘in communion’ with nature and not dominating nature.”^[37] Amanze sees the reason for this in the interconnectedness of the material and spiritual worlds, which entails a very close relationship between humans and the natural environment, based on African traditional religious worldviews: “Many of the traditional unwritten laws that are used to protect the environment are based on traditional religious beliefs …. African peoples’ spiritualities can help communities to conserve natural resources.”^[38] He concludes that

the African people in their traditional settings endeavour to conserve and preserve natural resources … [which] is achieved through African traditional religions which contain beliefs and practices in the form of taboos and prohibitions that ensure the environment is not degraded despite the introduction of modern capitalist economies.^[39]

In a similar vein, Olúpǫ̀nà highlights:

The environment and nature are infused in every aspect of African traditional religions and culture. This is largely because cosmology and beliefs are intricately intertwined with the natural phenomena and environment. All aspects of weather, thunder, lightning, rain, night, day, moon, sun, and so on may become amenable to control through the cosmology of the African people.^[40]

Anim, on the other hand, sees this traditional worldview as a thing of the past, disrupted by Christian notions of human dominance over creation:

In the past traditional religious beliefs and cultural practices had values and principles that ensured the preservation of the environment and natural resources. The value and respect given to nature found expression in the myths and metaphors that described the earth in human terms such as ‘mother’, and other natural elements such as the vegetation and rivers also assumed a divine nature which called for reverence and preservation. The people in the past, by indigenous wisdom, understood that humanity was dependent upon the ecology for its own survival and that treating the environment with respect and dignity was a form of worship to God who in his wisdom created them. Thus African traditional people saw themselves as stewards of God’s creation and by respecting the handiworks of God one showed respect to God.^[41]

Taringa emphasizes the relevance of the African concept of Ubuntu with respect to the environment, which

presupposes a worldview where there is a seamless interconnection between the divine, human and natural worlds. Ubuntu stresses what has been described as an anthropo-cosmic worldview. At the heart of Ubuntu is an animistic relational epistemology. Divine-human relations are not considered more important than the relationship between humans and the natural. Ubuntu is, therefore, dark green; meaning Ubuntu considers nature to be sacred, imbued with intrinsic value, and worth of reverent care. Ubuntu expresses and promotes an ethic of kinship between human beings and other forms of life; plant and biological. Ubuntu turns attention to we-ness. Ubuntu, therefore, appreciates that humans share the local environment with other beings and emphasizes we-ness, echoed at the heart of Ubuntu’s, ‘I am because we are; because we are therefore I am’. Both the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ should be interpreted to also refer to nature.^[42]

African Initiated Churches are rooted in the same spiritual cosmology as African traditional religious beliefs and practices.^[43] From this, we hypothesize that they might in a similar way position themselves positively towards the environment and we aim to find out whether they ground any eco-theological approaches equally in concepts such as ubuntu and the notion of the vital force as we have seen above for African traditional religious beliefs and practices and African mainline churches’ eco-theologies.

Moreover, they are important grassroots social development actors.^[44] Against this background, it is surprising that little attention has been paid to their role with respect to ecology. Not much literature exists on African Initiated Christianity and ecological sustainability. The most prominent scholar in this field is Daneel. He has written extensively on environmental activism in the context of African Initiated Churches in Zimbabwe, and activism in which he himself was involved as well. Daneel highlights the connection of the care for the environment and the struggle for liberation, in the form of a new struggle for the “liberation of creation”:

Under the auspices of the Zimbabwean Institute of Religious Research and Ecological Conservation, two religiously distinct movements—the Association of Zimbabwean Traditionalist Ecologists and the Association of African Earthkeeping Churches—joined forces to wage a new chimurenga, a struggle for the liberation of creation, particularly the rehabilitation of the degraded environment of Zimbabwe’s overcrowded communal lands, under the banner ‘war of the trees.’^[45]

Others are more doubtful of African Initiated Churches’ positive engagement with the environment. Especially those African Initiated Churches that have included a “prosperity gospel” approach into their practices are criticized for this in light of environmental protection. Golo writes that the churches do not fulfil their potential for environmental care, firstly because of their theological emphasis on saving souls in the afterlife and thereby neglecting this physical world and secondly by an emphasis on prosperity gospel that saves people from physical suffering and poverty but that results in materialist lifestyles.^[46] Maseno and Mamati attest to a similar criticism of the prosperity gospel in their empirical study of an African Initiated Church in Kenya.^[47] However, there are approaches to remedy these challenges by creating new African Pentecostal eco-theologies.^[48]

Öhlmann, Frost, and Gräb, in their study of African Initiated Churches in South Africa, do not find ecological concerns to be among the top priorities in the churches surveyed in 2016, even though they “operate within contextual belief systems of spiritual world views.”^[49] However, the authors identified the substantial potential of African Initiated Churches to implement ecological sustainability: “Due to their ability to culturally embed and promote new values, mind sets and concepts of life, they have the potential to create a consciousness for the limitations of natural resources as part of their comprehensive vision of transformation.”^[50]

It might be that this potential is starting to be utilized now, a few years later, as shown by the example of the Church of Pentecost in Ghana. While Anim argues “that many African Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians have bought into the dominion theology of the Prosperity Gospel, which presents the most anthropocentric approach to religion and faith and thereby have changed their attitudes to what was considered a ‘sacred’ environment and sustainable development,” he describes a recent shift exemplified by action taken by the Church of Pentecost in Ghana, which “has launched an extensive campaign in the country to address the problem of sanitation and environmental care.”^[51]

3 Methodology and Data

In a mixed-methods approach, this article draws on empirical material from two research projects conducted by the Research Programme on Religious Communities and Sustainable Development (RCSD) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin between 2017 and 2022. The article makes use of (1) qualitative interviews and focus group discussions with leaders of African Initiated Churches, (2) lectures held by church leaders at conferences held in the context of the research projects,^[52] and (3) data from the Religious Leaders’ Perspectives on Corona Survey. While the data from the first and second strands of material are qualitative, the survey data (third strand) are quantitative. The interview data and the survey data were collected separately and do not come from exactly the same countries or churches (although there is substantial overlap). While data collection of the qualitative and quantitative data were separate processes, both emerged from the Research Programme RCSD and are undergirded by the same notion of African Initiated Christianity.^[53] The data are complementary in that they provide different angles on African Initiated Christianity and ecological sustainability. The different strands of material are employed here to facilitate an empirical exploration that is as comprehensive as possible. Of course, the use of three different datasets raised the question of the data’s commensurability, which we acknowledge. While the datasets are not commensurable in a strict sense, they provide a way of methods triangulation and thereby elucidate the role of ecological sustainability from different angles. In the following, each of the three different strands of empirical material are presented.

4 Findings – Environmental Concepts and Actions of African Initiated Churches

In accordance with the research objectives motivating this article, we structure the findings into three sections: (a) environmental interest and knowledge, (b) environmental concepts, and (c) environmental actions.

5 Discussion

With the exception of Daneel’s case of the African Earthkeeping Churches in Zimbabwe,^[82] there has until very recently been little research that would evidence engagement with issues of ecological sustainability in African Initiated Churches. While most of the research on African Initiated Churches shows them to be actors of social development as well as economic and political empowerment, issues of ecological sustainability seemed not to constitute a major concern for them and to be secondary to social, economic, and spiritual issues.^[83] Based on interview data collected in 2016, Öhlmann, Frost, and Gräb^[84] find that ecological sustainability is not a priority for African Initiated Churches in South Africa and is secondary to social and economic issues. As the authors elaborate:

When investigating development priorities of African Initiated Churches, it emerged that issues related to ecological sustainability play a marginal role. … Moreover, when asked about their opinion on what constituted the major problems in people’s lives, a long list of issues emerged, from unemployment and teenage pregnancies to the need for theological education …. However, not a single item was mentioned relating to ecological sustainability or broader environmental issues.^[85]

Our results on the other hand, which are based on more recent data, point in a somewhat different direction. Our study contributes to the thus far small, but corpus of recent research indicating a shift in this regard.^[86] Our results indicate that there seems to be a significant ecological turn in African Initiated Christianity similar to the ecological turn in many mainline churches.^[87] This is not to say that environmental issues suddenly take a position in African Initiated Churches as a singular priority issue dominating social and economic concerns. Rather, the intention is to highlight that there is a turn from previously close to no engagement with ecological sustainability to some form of engagement and the recognition of the issue as being important. In this vein, several African Initiated Church leaders in our sample emphasize the importance of environmental sustainability for their communities. In church leader interviews and focus groups, several respondents mentioned environmental issues without this constituting a specific question. In the Religious Leaders’ Perspectives on Corona Survey, close to half of the respondents from African Initiated Christianity considered environmental degradation a more important problem than COVID-19 – even at the height of the pandemic. Environmental protection was ranked among the highest priorities for the time after the pandemic.

However, rather than being the result of theological deliberation, we interpret this ecological turn to be a consequence of the increasing existential pressure that African Initiated Churches are under because of the effects of climate change, which in the very recent have been particularly aggravating globally and in Sub-Saharan Africa in particular. Increasing ecological challenges, such as the loss of biodiversity, environmental degradation, and the increasingly perceivable effects of climate change, seem to place environmental concerns as a relevant issue in African Initiated Christianity. The recent interest by African Initiated Churches in environmental problems seems to be particularly driven by observed changes in the natural environment and their negative consequences for the livelihoods in their own communities. And while African Initiated Christianity might have had a special connection to nature even before the current increasing environmental destruction due to its rootedness in African spiritual worldviews, the current interest in the acute consequences of climate change and environmental destruction has a very different focus. It is the intersectionality of economic, social, and environmental issues for the members of African Initiated Churches that is driving the environmental actions in the churches.

Consistent with the environmental interest that focusses on their neighbourhoods and congregations, the environmental actions of the churches focus on the alleviation of immediately perceived and visible environmental problems. In contrast, global environmental factors, global climate justice, and political environmental engagement do not seem to play a prominent role. This emphasis on local-level environmental challenges is coherent with the description of AICs as locally and contextually embedded churches in the literature. In a pragmatic approach, their leaders connect environmental and economic problems with each other, especially where people depend on (subsistence) farming for their livelihoods. This resulted in an emphasis on agricultural problems and practices in the environmental accounts in our data. Additionally, it held true even in other settings, where subsistence farming was not a dominant form of income, that where African Initiated Church leaders described environmental concerns, they typically mentioned the consequences for their communities and emphasized the resulting poverty. Consequently, their biggest environmental concerns were changing weather patterns, soil degradation, water shortages, and waste pollution.

These findings mean that African Initiated Churches might not have been concerned with aiming to protect nature for its own sake, as similarly, Taringa has pointed out for African traditional religious beliefs and practices. Taringa criticises that practitioners of African traditional religious beliefs and practices might only protect the environment because they are afraid of the consequences of a broken taboo or an angered spirit and not because they see any value in nature itself.^[88] This criticism, it seems, could also be directed at African Initiated Churches. Indeed, African Initiated Churches in our sample had a great interest in the environment and negative environmental impacts where these had immediate negative consequences for their communities – while a deeper motivation, relating to an intrinsic value of environmental protection, is only visible in a few instances (for instance, in the lectures by Legkanyane and Matshobane).

The crucial question, however, is how the motivation to engage with the environment actually affects the environmental activities in African Initiated Christianity. In our view, it is secondary whether or not the African Initiated Churches have an interest in protecting the environment for its own sake or whether environmental engagement is propelled by the interest to preserve people’s livelihoods. The important result is that the churches do indeed engage in environmental protection activities.

Unlike mainline churches that often develop elaborate eco-theologies, AICs exhibit a more implicit theological engagement with ecology. Eco-theological reasonings in African Initiated Churches, such as the ones presented by Lekganyane and Matshobane, remain exceptions. Interestingly, these theological reasonings did not seem to lead to environmental actions as directly as the environmental constraints in the communities did. While a study on the Nigerian context suggests that for instance eschatological theological schemata influence climate change perceptions,^[89] such effect of theological reasonings on environmental actions seems to be relevant in only a small minority of the African Initiated Churches included in our study. Interestingly, theological reasoning appeared to follow rather than precede environmental action. Rather than deriving ecological commitment from doctrine, many African Initiated Churches engaged with environmental issues first and then integrated theological interpretations retrospectively.

The current literature on ecological theologies in African Christianity shows an increasing reception of the ecology–spirituality connection inherent in African traditional religious beliefs and practices and culture.^[90] Even though African Initiated Churches are embedded in African spiritual worldviews, there seems to be little explicit reference to traditional spirituality and culture in their engagement with environmental issues. There is currently no broad reception of the ecological implications of the nexus of spirit, humans, and nature highlighted inter alia in the works of Olúpǫ̀nà, Amanze, and Taringa.^[91] Why did the majority of African Initiated Churches in our sample not incorporate environmentally friendly elements of African traditional religious worldviews into their theologies? We assume that this is the case firstly because theological engagement in African Initiated Churches with the environment seems to be relatively scarce overall. Instead, practical engagement with the negative consequences of climate change and environmental destruction has so far been in the foreground. Secondly, many African Initiated Churches position themselves apart from explicit African traditional religious beliefs and practices for their own believers^[92] and accept explicitly only cultural similarities with traditions that are inter alia preserved in African traditional religious beliefs and practices. The relationship between African Initiated Churches and African traditional religious practices and beliefs is complex and dynamic. The fact that there does not seem to be much incorporation of environmental elements from African traditional religious worldviews in the environmental approaches of African Initiated Churches might be part of the demarcation of a boundary between Christianity and African traditional religious practices and beliefs on the part of the churches. Thirdly, it is important to note that in the academic discourse on how and whether to incorporate African traditional religious beliefs and practices in African Initiated Churches’ theologies, reference is made by scholars to a supposedly authentic past, in which nature was preserved by the rules of African traditional religious beliefs and practices that everyone followed seemingly easily until Christianity came into the picture.^[93] However, critical perspectives on these arguments have been voiced. For instance, Milton questions the idealization of indigenous ecological knowledge as a “myth of primitive ecological wisdom” and dissects the political interests behind the idea that indigenous and traditional communities are traditionally environmentally friendly: “Environmentalists cling on the image of non-industrial peoples as paragons of ecological virtue because it forms part of their most cherished arguments, particularly for the environmentalist critique of industrialism.”^[94] Similarly, there might be aspects of other agendas behind the discourse on the historical environmental-friendliness of African traditional religious beliefs and practices. Jahnel interprets this as a conscious reappropriation of an imagined pre-colonial history by scholars from African contexts for descriptions of their own traditions. The current discourse on African traditional religious beliefs and practices and the environment is in her view thus connected with a post-colonial reinterpretation of the romanticizing narrative on the supposedly authentic ecological role of African traditional religious beliefs and practices.^[95] Taking this one step further, this might potentially lead to an overemphasizing of the positive relationship between African traditional religious beliefs and with the environment. Hence, the finding that African Initiated Churches do not explicitly refer to African traditional religious beliefs and practices in their ecological reasoning and actions might on the one hand be due to a perceived need to demarcate the boundary between Christianity and African traditional religious beliefs and practices. On the other hand, the relevance of environmental protection and ecological awareness in African traditional religious beliefs and practices might not be as pronounced as some of the recent literature assumes it to be.^[96]

However, in the wake of the general trend of practice-based, reactive ecological commitment in African Initiated Churches, there are some instances of more comprehensive theological engagement within African Initiated Churches. One significant example is the emerging eco-theology of the Zion Christian Church,^[97] which indeed draws on African traditional religious beliefs and connects biblical imperatives for the care for creation with African principles such as Ubuntu. It will be interesting to see how eco-theological engagement further unfolds both in the Zion Christian Church as well as in African Initiated Churches in general, particularly in its reception and interpretation of ecological values coming from African traditional religious beliefs and practices and culture. Where elaborate eco-theological reasonings, like the one by Lekganyane, were presented, African Initiated Church leaders made use of extensive natural scientific knowledge about climate change. This intricate link between scientific knowledge about climate change and eco-theologies should be investigated further in future empirical research.

Notwithstanding the differences between African Initiated Churches of the first, second, and third founding waves regarding their history, worship styles, or global networks, they did not differ in their outlooks on the environment along these lines of the founding waves. At first glance, this might seem surprising given some of the theological differences between the churches of the different founding waves, for instance the anthropocentric emphasis on financial prosperity in some charismatic churches of the third wave. In our view though, this finding underlines the significance of the embeddedness in a spiritual worldview which all the African Initiated Churches share despite the differences in how they are officially relating to African traditional religious beliefs and practices. Anderson emphasized that African Initiated Churches of the third founding wave are accepting the reality of a “spirit-filled world” as it is shaped by African traditional religious beliefs and practices exactly by rejecting these spirits.^[98] Although these churches might appear to be less inclined towards African traditional religious beliefs and practices than the independent churches of the second founding wave, the embeddedness in their cultural and religious contexts should not be underestimated. Our data show that the African Initiated Churches of the different founding waves did not differ in the extent to which they related (or rather, did not relate) to the environmental attitudes of African traditional religious beliefs and practices. Additionally, they did not differ along these lines in the extent to which they engaged with the environment in practice. Our interpretation is that this is due to the high importance that all African Initiated Churches give to their own communities. If a community is severely affected by climate change, the churches will react to this negative impact because of their shared interest in social service activities. Environmental theology and action in African Initiated Churches, hence, seems to be driven primarily by the impact of climate change and environmental degradation in their communities and not primarily by their relationship to African traditional religious beliefs and practices.

Finally, the approach of the current study has its limitations. We use three different types of data from research projects not primarily focused on ecological sustainability. While on the one hand, this provides the advantage of a methods triangulation and different perspectives on the role of ecological sustainability in African Initiated Christianity, the data are not commensurable in a strict sense, a limitation that needs to be acknowledged when assessing the generalizability of the results. The same is the case for the selection of the sample of churches, which is not a random sample, but rather a convenience sample in all three datasets used in this article. Some countries or regions might be overrepresented, while others might be underrepresented. As the title of our article suggests, the aim is to provide an empirical exploration into the role of ecological sustainability in African Initiated Christianity beyond studies focusing on specific countries, sub-categories of African Initiated Christianity, or individual churches. The results hence provide important first insights into this topic on a wider scale. Rather than being conclusive, they aim to spark further and even more comprehensive research on the topic.

6 Conclusion

While until recently in most cases environmental concerns have not played a central role in African Initiated Christianity, our analysis indicates that there seems to be an ecological turn. Issues of ecological sustainability seem to be increasingly recognized by leaders of African Initiated Churches: environmental issues emerged as topics in the interview and focus group discussions and our survey data shows African Initiated Church leaders consider environmental issues to be of high importance during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

African Initiated Churches engage in many different practical and local activities to adapt to climate change, stretching from training in sustainable agriculture to tree-planting and waste collection. These activities are an expression of what is needed in practice in local communities to adapt to climate change and the consequences of environmental destruction. Moreover, we currently seem to see the early stage of African Initiated Churches’ eco-theological engagement. African Initiated Christianity is thus currently taking an ecological turn in their interest in, actions on, and partly also in their theology on ecology, but not because of their close relations with African traditional religious beliefs and practices as our hypothesis had been, but because of the immediate needs arising from climate change consequences. In summary, we find that some African Initiated Churches are local actors for environmental sustainability, which recently started to engage with environmental concerns, and which recognize environmental sustainability as a very important field. The community-embedded African Initiated Churches have a great potential to become involved in environmental protection even more in the future, as they have effective local networks and a great interest in the topic.

While this article provides important first insights into the role of ecological sustainability in African Initiated Christianity, its scope is necessarily shaped by the nature of the data it draws upon. Drawing on interview material not specifically targeted to questions of ecology, it brings to the fore that environmental issues constitute an important topic for African Initiated Churches leaders, who mentioned this theme on their own initiative. However, more subtle references to and implications for the nexus of theology, traditional spirituality, and ecology might stay below the surface. Uncovering them necessitates further research specifically geared to exploring this nexus in greater depth. This is an important avenue for further research.