HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY IN NIGERIA

HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY IN NIGERIA Christianity Christianity is one of the two main religions in Nigeria,Christians make up 48.2% of the population.[5] Nigeria has one of the largest Christian population in Africa with over 70 million persons in Nigeria belonging to the church. The ecclesiastical provinces of the Church of Nigeria are: Lagos, Ibadan, Ondo, Benue, The Niger, Niger Delta, Owerri, Abuja, Kaduna and Jos.[6] Its primate is most rev, Nicholas Okoh.[6] The Church of Nigeria has about 15 million members. [7] The Nigerian Baptist Convention has about three million baptized members.[8] The Archdioceses of the Roman Catholic Church are: Abuja, Benin City, Calabar, Ibadan, Jos, Kaduna, Lagos, Onitsha and Owerri. [9] It has about 39 million members in Nigeria. [10] Cardinal Francis Arinze is a Roman Catholic Cardinal from Nigeria.[11] There are about 380,000 New Apostolic Christians in entire Nigeria. The majority of Christians are found in the south East and South-South and Middle-belt region. An increasing number of mission stations and mission bookstores, along with churches serving southern enclaves and northern Christians in the northern cities and larger towns, are found in the Muslim north. Christianity in Yoruba area traditionally has been Protestant and Anglican, whereas Igboland has always been the area of greatest activity by the Roman Catholic Church. Other denominations abounded as well. Presbyterians arrived in the late seventeenth century in the Ibibio, Annang and Efik land and the Niger Delta area and had missions in the middle belt as well. The works of the Presbyterian Church in Calabar from Scotland by missionaries like Rev Hope M. Waddell, who arrived in Calabar 10 April 1846, in the nineteenth century and that of Mary Slessor of Calabar being examples. Small missionary movements were allowed to start up, generally in the 1920s, after the middle belt was considered pacified. Each denomination set up rural networks by providing schooling and health facilities. Most such facilities remained in 1990, although in many cases schools had been taken over by the local state government in order to standardize curricula and indigenize the teaching staff. Pentecostals arrived mostly as indigenous workers in the postindependence period and in 1990 Pentecostalism was spreading rapidly throughout the middle belt, having some success in Roman Catholic and Protestant towns of the south as well. There were also breakaway, or Africanized churches that blended traditional Christian symbols with indigenous symbols. Among these was the Aladura movement that was spreading rapidly throughout Yorubaland and into the non-Muslim middle belt areas. Missionary work and Christianity Apart from Benin and Warri, which had come in contact with Christianity through the Portuguese as early as the fifteenth century, most missionaries arrived by sea in the nineteenth century. As with other areas in Africa, Roman Catholics and Anglicans each tended to establish areas of hegemony in southern Nigeria. After World War I, smaller denominations such as the Church of the Brethren (as Ekklesiyar Yan'uwa a Nigeria), Seventh-day Adventists and others worked in interstitial areas, trying not to compete. Although less well-known, African-American churches entered the missionary field in the nineteenth century and created contacts with Nigeria that lasted well into the colonial period. Offshoots of European denominations African churches were founded by small groups breaking off from the European denominations, especially in Yorubaland, where such independence movements started as early as the late nineteenth century. They were for the most part ritually and doctrinally identical to the pavent church, although more African music, and later dance, entered and mixed with the imported church services. A number also used biblical references to support polygyny. With political independence came African priests in both Roman Catholic and Protestant denominations, although ritual and forms of worship were strictly those of the home country of the original missionaries. By the 1980s, however, African music and even dancing were being introduced quietly into church services, albeit altered to fit into rituals of European origin. Southern Christians living in the north, especially in larger cities, had congregations and churches founded as early as the 1920s. Even medium-sized towns (20,000 persons or more) with an established southern enclave had local churches, especially in the middle belt, where both major religions had a strong foothold. The exodus of Igbo from the north in the late 1960s left Roman Catholic churches poorly attended, but by the 1980s adherents were back in even greater numbers, and a number of new churches had been built.