Ethiopia: An African nation became Christian centuries before most European peoples. Here, the claim that ‘Christianity is a Western religion’ makes no sense. Keys to the culture: ሰላም · ተዋሕዶ · ጾም · ቡና. Geography and history, the church, films and books, and prayer for this land.
An African nation became Christian centuries before most European peoples. Here, the claim that ‘Christianity is a Western religion’ makes no sense.
Ethiopia covers about 1.1 million square kilometres and has roughly 130 million people, making it Africa’s second most populous country. When Eritrea became independent in 1993, Ethiopia lost its coastline and became the world’s most populous landlocked country.
The first key to understanding the country is the highlands, which immediately correct one common impression. The Ethiopian Highlands average more than 2,000 metres above sea level, and Addis Ababa stands at over 2,300 metres, making it one of the world’s highest capital cities. It is therefore not hot: daytime temperatures in Addis are usually in the low twenties Celsius, and nights require a jacket. The assumption that Africa means scorching heat already fails in Ethiopia’s capital. The highlands also help explain why the country remained independent for so long: they form a natural fortress.
The highlands are both the birthplace of coffee—wild Arabica still grows in their forests—and the source of the Blue Nile. Water flowing from Lake Tana provides much of the Nile’s volume, creating long-running tensions with downstream Egypt over dams. In the northeast, meanwhile, the Danakil Depression is one of the hottest places on Earth. One country contains both the cool of the highlands and the extreme heat of the lowlands.
One more fact: the famous australopithecine fossil ‘Lucy’ was found here, which is why Ethiopia is often called the cradle of humankind.
Around the beginning of the Common Era, the Kingdom of Aksum arose in these highlands. It was a power that traded with Rome, Persia, and India, minted its own coins, and at times ruled across the Red Sea. In the fourth century, King Ezana converted to Christianity and made it the state religion. This happened at roughly the same time as the Christianisation of the Roman Empire and centuries before Ireland, England, and most European peoples became Christian.
Ethiopia has its own epic account of the dynasty’s origin, the Kebra Nagast. The Queen of Sheba and King Solomon have a son, Menelik I, who brings the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia; later emperors are Solomon’s descendants. This is legend rather than established history, but it became a central text of national identity. The imperial constitution itself claimed descent from the Solomonic dynasty.
After the rise of Islam redirected Red Sea trade, Aksum declined. Church and crown withdrew into the inland highlands, entering almost a thousand years of relative isolation. The Zagwe dynasty carved the churches of Lalibela; a supposed ‘restoration of the Solomonic dynasty’ followed in the thirteenth century. During the long sixteenth-century war with the Adal Sultanate, Portuguese soldiers intervened with firearms—the consequences of this intervention appear in the church history below.
At the Battle of Adwa in 1896, Menelik II defeated an invading Italian army. Ethiopia thereby became the one African country to repel European colonisation successfully and preserve its independence, a story that can be compared with Thailand’s. The victory made Ethiopia a symbol for Africans and the African diaspora alike, inspiring both Pan-Africanism and the Rastafari movement.
Haile Selassie I ruled from 1930. Italy invaded again in 1935 and occupied the country for five years; the emperor’s speech to the League of Nations travelled around the world. Ethiopian sovereignty was restored in 1941. A military coup overthrew the monarchy in 1974, and the Derg regime brought the Red Terror and then the famine that shocked the world in 1984–1985. The regime fell in 1991, Eritrea became independent in 1993, and Abiy Ahmed became prime minister in 2018 and received the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. Armed conflict in the northern Tigray region from 2020 to 2022 caused a severe humanitarian disaster.
This land’s experience cannot be contained in one sentence: an ancient nation that was never colonised and has seventeen centuries of church history now faces both the pressures of modernisation and deep internal fractures.
Scripture records this: in Acts 8, an Ethiopian eunuch reads Isaiah in his chariot. Philip explains the passage, and the man is baptised in water beside the road, then ‘went on his way rejoicing.’ The Ethiopian church understands this scene as its beginning. Scholars add a qualification: ‘Ethiopia’ in ancient sources often referred to Kush or Nubia on the upper Nile, not necessarily to the borders of the modern state. Both statements belong here—and in any case, this self-understanding is itself very ancient.
The documented turning point came in the fourth century. A young Syrian named Frumentius was stranded at the Aksumite court and later persuaded King Ezana to believe. He travelled to Alexandria, where Athanasius ordained him as Ethiopia’s first bishop. Locally he is called Abba Selama, ‘Father of Peace.’ The church therefore shares its roots with Egypt’s Coptic Church. Hold the date in mind: England did not yet have a church, and Patrick of Ireland had not been born.
After the Council of Chalcedon in 451, Ethiopia followed the Coptic Church in declining Chalcedon’s formulation and took its own path. The word in its formal name is Tewahedo, ‘being made one’, discussed among the cultural keys. For the next fifteen centuries it existed largely cut off from European Christianity. The ‘Nine Saints’ from Syria established a monastic tradition in the fifth and sixth centuries, and Scripture was translated into Geʽez, which remains the liturgical language. One further fact deserves mention: the Ethiopian Orthodox Old Testament contains more books than the Protestant canon, including Enoch and Jubilees. This does not alter the Protestant position on the canon, but it helps us see that the history of ‘the canon’ is more complex than we may assume.
A dramatic change came in the seventeenth century. Under Jesuit influence, Emperor Susenyos converted to Catholicism and tried to impose it, provoking civil war. His son Fasilides expelled the Jesuits, restored Orthodoxy, and closed the country to outsiders. The pattern closely resembles the events in Thailand in 1688: when an outside religion became entangled with political power, the reaction brought generations of isolation.
Protestant missionaries, including the Swedish Evangelical Mission, began arriving in the late nineteenth century. In the later twentieth century, Protestant churches, locally called P’ent’ay, grew rapidly in the south. The Lutheran Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus is now among the largest Lutheran bodies in the world, far larger than the European churches that first sent missionaries to it. Under the Derg from 1974 to 1991, church property was seized and many believers imprisoned, yet Protestant churches grew still faster after persecution. The Orthodox Church had its own martyrs in the same dark era. During the Italian occupation, Archbishop Abune Petros was shot for refusing to bless the occupation; his statue still stands in central Addis Ababa.
Today roughly four in ten Ethiopians are Orthodox, about one third are Muslim, and around one fifth are Protestant. In a majority-Christian nation where Muslims make up about one third of the population, the two communities have lived beside one another for more than a thousand years. That fact itself deserves to be known.
The claim that ‘Christianity is a Western religion’ makes no sense here. No one brought the church to this land; it has always been here, older than many of the European churches that later carried the gospel elsewhere. Churches around the world should remember that we did not receive a Western possession from the West. We were welcomed into a family that included Africans and Asians from its beginning.