No abstract

St John's Apostolic Faith Mission, founded by Christinah Nku (also known as Mme Christinah) and all its splinter groups can be theorized as presenting a crisis model for managing change. These churches provide their members with a well worked out path of inclusion through baptism and related rituals, as well as, alleviation of crisis through an assortment of healing, cleansing and deliverance rituals. There is also a strong element of maintaining a person's healing through an assortment of rituals of celebration and ideological reinforcement. They do this through a process of resource mobilization from both Christianity and African Religion to set up a religion that adequately responds to both the existential and spiritual needs of their members.

Indeed, it can be argued that the modern missionary movement from the West, along with other developments within Western Europe, played a significant role in bringing about the crumbling of Western Christendom, though this outcome may not have been intended' (Bediako 2000:316).

This article outlines resources possessed by the African indigenous churches (AICs) that help them engage with the democratic dispensation and could be used to foster social cohesion in South Africa. It starts off with the premise that social cohesion is that which holds the nation together. The South African rainbow-nation narrative tended to focus on tolerance and there cognition of diversity as strength. Tolerance does not address the fundamental issues that would facilitate cohesion. The idea of cultural justice as advocated by Chirevo Kwenda is seen as the most useful tool to move forward. Cultural justice ensures that all citizens are able to draw on their cultural resources without any fear of being discriminated against. The AICs have an assortment of resources at their disposal that are drawn from African religion,Christianity and Western culture. These resources enable AIC members to appreciate being African and Christian, as well as being South African.

The advent of the 1996 constitution and the promotion of freedom of religion gave space to previously discriminated religious traditions to flourish. There have been a number of revivals of aspects of African Traditional Religion. The Bill of Rights guarantees Religious Freedom but tends to limit it to Freedom of belief. People have every right to believe and practice as long as their practice is in line with the law. This paper is a reflection on the difficulties posed by the notion of Religious Freedom as contained in the 1996 South African constitution for practitioners of African Indigenous Religions and other minority religions. In a case that captured the imagination of the legal fraternity, Gareth Prince, a practicing Rastafarian, was prevented from joining the Bar of the Western Cape because of a prior conviction of being caught in possession of dagga, an illegal substance. He argued that he used cannabis as part of his religious observance. Justice Ngcobo, in his judgement dismissing the case, made it very clear that ‘the right to freedom of religion is not absolute’. In other words, religious practices need to fall within the provisions of the law of the land. At the core of our argument is that the intellectual and cultural resources that were mobilised in writing the South African constitution failed to reflect on the religious practices of indigenous people and other minority religions.