CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
The aim of this study is to examine the role of the Assemblies of God Church in the Efik customs and traditional rites and also to explore the world view of the Efik people in maintaining their customs. Among the Efik people there are various norms, beliefs, values, symbolic rites, rituals as well as principles and practices guiding the smooth operation and functioning of the society. In view of this therefore there is need to understand the culture and religion of the Efik people and those of the Assemblies of God Church. This would help identify how the people have been impacted all these years.
The Assemblies of God Church has its root in the Pentecostal Azusa Street Revival of the early 20th century. Established Churches generally did not welcome the Pentecostal aspect of the revival and participants in new movement soon found themselves forced outside existing religious bodies. These people sought their own places of worship and founded hundreds of districtly Pentecostal congregations. The doctrinal position of the Assemblies of God Church is framed in a classical, Pentecostal and evangelical context. The Assemblies of God as Trinitarian holds the Bible as divinely inspired, infallible, authoritative rule of faith and conduct.
The Assemblies of God members are avowedly fundamentalist in their theological views emphasizing the unity and Trinity of God, the Incarnation and authentic death of Christ, humanity’s fallen nature, the need for repentance and sanctification by faith and the inspiration and sufficiency of the scripture. They stress the work of the Holy Spirit in the process of conversion and the out pouring of the Spirit’s cleaning from inner sin. The primary indication of the baptism in the Holy Spirit is speaking in tongues as the “Spirit gives utterance”. The Assemblies of God believes in the modern day use of other spiritual abilities and in supernatural or divine healing. The doctrine of faith, which describes the basic beliefs, unites the many branches of the movement, as each national Assemblies of God denomination forms its own doctrinal declaration.