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Christianity largest groups in Africa. Pew projected that 53% of Africa's population would be Christian in 2020. Estimates of Christians on the continent range up to eight hundred million. Catholicism Roman Catholic
- It Began in North Africa
- Dramatic Conversion of Emperor Constantine
- The Shaping of Roman Christianity in Africa
- Christian Kings in Ethiopia
- A Thousand Years of Growth
- Missions, Politics & Slavery
- The Abolition of Slavery
- Freetown, Liberia, and Evangelising West Africa
- Evangelical Missions
- Colonialism and African Initiated Churches
Christianity was well established in North Africa in the first few centuries after Christ. From a solid foundation in North Africa, Christianity moved deeper into the heart of the continent. The challenge by Islam and African traditional religionsdeepened the faith of believers. The fifteenth century was a turning point when Catholicism from Portug...
Constantine, emperor of Rome in the fourth century, had a dramatic conversion to Christianity, and that had a direct impact on the early Coptic (Egyptian) church, especially in urban Africa. At the council of Nicaea in 325, Constantine attempted to have church leaders agree on how to understand the deity of Christ. But his efforts were only partly ...
Egyptian Christianity grew and spread. The Bible was translated into several variations of the Coptic language, and monasticism, which originated in Egypt, spread to the Latin-speaking church of western North Africa. Monasticism is a religious way of life in which priests renounce living in the world and instead live in monasteries—and sometimes by...
While Christianity in North Africa and Egypt flourished and North African Christians strongly influenced the church in Rome, Christianity was also growing in the powerful kingdoms of Nubia (ancient Sudan) and Ethiopia. Nubia is one of two countries that claim to be the world’s oldest Christian nation (the other is Armenia). In both Nubia and Ethiop...
Over the next thousand years, Christianity in Ethiopiagrew stronger while in Nubia it declined. Between 1200–1500, the Zagwe dynasty in Ethiopia, a family of Christian kings, revived Christian art, literature, and church expansion. Lalibela, the greatest emperor of the Zagwe dynasty, built eleven famous stone churches carved out of solid rock to cr...
From 1420 until 1800, Portuguese politics and Christian missionaries from Portugal and Spain dominated much of coastal Africa. A controversial decree by the pope, called the Padroado, granted to the king of Portugal all rights to economic, military, and evangelistic activities in the areas he controlled. Slave traders and missionaries wrestled with...
In the late eighteenth century, evangelical and other British leaders formed a movement that sought to abolish slavery. Great nineteenth-century British leaders such as William Wilberforce (member of the British parliament and champion of anti-slavery legislation), Thomas Clarkson (leader of the anti-slavery society in England), and Granville Sharp...
Sierra Leone, a West African colony for freed slaves, was founded in 1787. From Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, the evangelisation of West Africa began through liberated slaves such as Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first Anglican bishop in Africa. Liberia, founded for free-born American blacks in 1822, played a similar role.
The evangelical revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States and England produced the modern missionary movement. Denominational missions and faith missions such as the Africa Inland Mission, Sudan Interior Mission, Sudan United Mission, and the South Africa General Mission (later the Africa Evangelical Fellowship) influ...
The shape of missions changed in 1884–1885 with the Berlin Conference in Germany. At this meeting, European powers partitioned Africa for colonization and trade. France was given certain countries, and King Leopold II of Belgium was given the Congo, for instance. Europeans justified their imperialism as being a part of a civilizing mission to an Af...
- Africa Study Bible
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In the 21st century, they constitute the bulk of the booming Christian community on the continent. As of 2023, there are an estimated 718 million Christians from all denominations in Africa, and the majority of Africans are Christian.
Christianity in Africa can of course pride itself with a long history going back to references in the Bible itself and expressions that originate in the time of the early church. In particular, the Ethiopian church has been iconic in the self-understanding of a number of later African Christian movements. Many of the Christian denominations ...
Overview. Christianity in Africa. Quick Reference. Apart from Egypt and the Mediterranean coast (Roman ‘Africa’, on which see the next entry), Christianity had by the 4th cent. penetrated to Nubia (where it died out in the 16th cent.) and Ethiopia, but it did not spread further south until the era of Portuguese expansion in the late 15th cent.
LAST MODIFIED: 28 April 2016. DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846733-0105. Introduction. Christianity in Africa goes back to the earliest days of the church, when it spread along the Mediterranean and Red Sea coastlands of north and northeast Africa and their hinterlands.
