Lumpa Church

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Lumpa Church. The most widely known independent church in Zambia. It was founded by a Bemba, Alice Mulenga Mubusha (1924–78), a catechumen in the Church of Scotland mission, who experienced a mystic death and resurrection in 1953, and was commissioned to deliver Africans from witchcraft and sickness. A mass response led to the foundation of her Lumpa (‘best of all’) Church about 1954, which gathered some 60,000 members by 1960 under herself as Alice Lenshina (i.e. ‘Regina’ or Queen), with a new Sione (‘Zion’) as headquarters and a strict ethic forbidding magic, divorce, polygamy, inheritance of widows, and beer-drinking.