NIGERIA

Rev. Kefas Kane Mavula was elected bishop of the United Methodist Church in Nigeria 3 March 2007. Mavula’s appointment comes at an exciting time for Nigerian United Methodists, who have been experiencing rapid growth over the past decade. According to Mark Tooley, Institute for Religion and Democracy United Methodist action direction, the United Methodist Church in Nigeria has gone from ten thousand members to over 400,000 members in the past fifteen years. “Africans now constitute about twenty-five percent of the United Methodist Church,” he said. “With this membership shift to theologically conservative churches in the Global South, United Methodism is slowly moving away from twentieth century liberal Protestantism, which wreaked havoc on America’s mainline denominations.” In addition to rapid church growth in Nigeria, United Methodism elsewhere in Africa is growing quickly. There are over one million United Methodists in the Congo and over 600,000 United Methodists in the Ivory Coast alone. (Institute for Religion and Democracy)