Ijebu leader in the Nigerian Aladura movement.

After dismissal as a Church Missionary Society schoolmaster, Aina participated in the developments of the Faith Tabernacle movement and in 1924 founded a small congregation in Ibadan. He was caught up in the Aladura revival of Joseph Babalola in 1930, along with J. O. Oshitelu, whose Church of the Lord he joined in 1931. He seceded in 1935 with a group which called itself the Aladura Church, which had a subsequent history of divisions and name changes, such as Aladura Apostolic Church (1942) and Living Faith Apostolic Church (1952), all in Ibadan. In 1949 he published a pamphlet in Yoruba, The Silver Jubilee of the Establishment of the Aladura Church in Ibadan, but his hopes of using it to set up a union of Aladura churches were unrealized. Some fourteen other printed publications included hymnbooks, church constitutions, a catechism, a service book and ordinal, and treatises on the Second Coming, polygamy, and Islam. His Present Day Prophets and The Principles Upon Which They Work (c. 1932) defended the Aladura movement and included an ingenious theology of its sacramental use of water. He was biblical and theological, sophisticated and original as an independent African Church leader.

Harold W. Turner

Bibliography

Harold W. Turner, The African Independent Church, vol. 1 (1967) and introduction to 1964 reprint of Aina’s Present Day Prophets.

This article is reproduced, with permission, from Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, copyright © 1998, by Gerald H. Anderson, W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan. All rights reserved.

External link

Encyclopaedia Britannica (complete article): Aladura