Ethiopia Foreign Missions
Priest conducting a service at a church in Debre Markos
Courtesy United Nations (Y. Levy)
In a 1944 decree, Haile Selassie forbade missionaries from
attempting to convert Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, and
they had little success in proselytizing among Muslims. Most
missionaries focused their activities on adherents of local
religions--but still with only little success. In the 1960s,
there were about 900 foreign missionaries in Ethiopia, but
many were laypersons. This fact was consistent with the
emphasis of many such missions on the education and
vocational training of the people they sought to serve. One
obstacle to the missions' success in the rural areas may
have been the imperial government's insistence that Amharic
be used as the medium of religious instruction except in the
earliest stages of missionary activity. There was also some
evidence that Ethiopian Orthodox priests residing outside
the Amhara and Tigray heartland, as well as local
administrators, were hostile to the missionaries.
In the late 1960s, there were 350,000 to 400,000
Protestants and Catholics in Ethiopia, roughly 1.5 percent
of the population. About 36 percent of these were Catholics,
divided among those adhering to the Ethiopian rite (about 60
percent) and those following the Latin rite. The three
bishops were Ethiopians. Protestants were divided among a
number of denominations. The largest, nearly equaling in
number the size of the Catholic congregation, consisted of
adherents to the Fellowship of Evangelical Believers, the
Ethiopian branch of the Sudan Interior Mission. The next
largest group, about half as large, was the Ethiopian
Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus, an entity that was fostered
jointly by Scandinavian, German, and American Lutheran
groups. This group claimed 400,000 members in the late 1970s
and had an Ethiopian head. Several other groups, including
the Bethel Evangelical Church (sponsored by the American
United Presbyterian Church) and the Seventh-Day Adventists,
had between 5,000 and 15,000 members each.
Many missionaries and other observers claimed that the
revolutionary regime opposed missions and harassed the
clergy and communicants. Although the government denied
these accusations, its approach to those accused of not
accepting its authority suggests that the mission churches
and the regime had not reached a modus vivendi.
Data as of 1991
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