Abstract

For some years now the proliferation of new religious movements in Africa and the search by individuals for new meanings in belief have held the interest of scholars of religion. But their interpretations of the significance of these ‘religious flowerings’ raise a number of questions, in particular questions about the meaning and applicability of the word ‘new’ in religion. Instead of taking it literally, we should understand this religious ‘innovation’ on two planes of transaction with the sacred, the horizontal and the vertical. First, on the horizontal plane this religious innovation may be discerned in the ongoing adjustments made by traditional African religions as they encounter, whether peaceably or violently, religions originating in the West or Asia; these encounters have given rise to neo-traditional and prophetic movements and to independent Churches. We shall touch later on the two-way borrowings and adaptations that have taken place in some prophetic religions as regards their organization, rites, liturgy and charismatic communication of religious truth. On the other hand, religious renewal is discernible in the adjustments and innovative processes of elaboration adopted by such ‘travelling religions’ as Pentecostalism and Charismatic Renewal in relation to the basic process of making sense of the life of the individual and the community of the faithful.