ABSTRACT

The purpose of this essay is to introduce the history of the evangelical movement in Ethiopia by taking into account its local roots and underscoring the pivotal role the native agencies played in its expansion. “The Evangelization of Ethiopia by Ethiopians,” was the unwritten mantra of Ethiopian Pentecostals who in the 1960s sought to launch a nation-wide mission campaign with messianic zeal.1 The young Ethiopians were not alone in this kind of endeavors. There were others before them who advanced that line of thinking and made significant efforts to reach out to other Ethiopians in their own times. For that reason one could argue that the evangelical movement in Ethiopia has a long history. The Ethiopian Pentecostals arose essentially from an indigenous base with an urban milieu. Their persecution experiences and radical resistance to communism lend them a distinct identity in the landscape of the evangelical faith groups in Ethiopia. In the following essay, I will look into contexts of the rise of the Pentecostal movement in Ethiopia in the 1960s and examine the role played by the Ethiopian Pentecostals in spreading the evangelical faith in Ethiopia. The general thesis I seek to submit in this essay is that though Protestant

missionaries have introduced evangelical Christianity to Ethiopia from the West, its growth and expansion stems mainly from the contributions of native agencies. This becomes more apparent given the legal and cultural restrictions under which the Western Protestant missionaries operated and granted that the remarkable expansion of the movement occurred in the 1960s and during the times of the Ethiopian Revolution (1974-91) in the absence of the external agencies.