Ambaricho and Shonkolla. From Local Independent Church to the Evangelical Mainstream in Ethiopia. The Origins of the Mekane Yesus Church in Kambata Hadiya

Sammanfattning: This thesis is a contribution to the scholarly debate on how African Independent Churches (AICs) relate to outside partners. It is a case study from the perspective of the periphery of Ethiopia, which explains the origins of the Mekane Yesus Church in Kambata HadiyaThe diachronic structure of the study with a focus from 1944 to 1975 highlights how a group of Christians reacted to cultural pressure and formed a local independent church, the Kambata Evangelical Church 2 (KEC-2). The KEC-2 established relations with external partners, like a neighbouring mainstream conference of churches, a neighbouring mainstream church, an international organisation, and a mainstream overseas church and its mission. These relations influenced the KEC-2 to develop into a synod of the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus (EECMY). The diachronic approach is augmented by synchronic structural analyses, illustrating how aspects in the independent KEC-2, like polity, worship, doctrine and ethos were changing.The study contends that "Ethiopian Evangelical Solidarity" was a crucial factor in the development of the independent KEC-2 into a synod of the EECMY. As this factor helped the Ethiopians to transcend barriers of ethnicity, social status and denominationalism, it is not unreasonable to assume that the study has relevance for a wider African context.This thesis builds on material taken mainly from unpublished printed sources in various languages from archives in Ethiopia, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA. These are supplemented by interviews made by the author.