Mai Chazas Church

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Mai Chaza's Church. Church founded, among the Shona-speaking Manyinka in Zimbabwe, by Mai (Shona, ‘mother’) Chaza (d. 1960), after a mystical experience of death and resurrection while in a coma early in the 1950s. Initially remaining within Methodism, development as a separate body began in 1955, based on her new village, Guta Ra Jehovah (‘city of Jehovah’), as the first of a series of holy cities which served as famous faith-healing centres, especially for barren women. Her works and teachings, as related to those of Jesus, have been collected in a Guta Ra Jehovah Bible. The movement's adherents have declined to no more than 3,000.