Each of its three founding pastors had been educated at the Livingstonia, Malawi mission and ordained as ministers of the Scottish missionary-led Presbyterian church based there.
[1] Donald Fraser, one of the leading Scottish missionaries, considered that the theological education of African candidates for ordination was insufficient without an "established christian character", which could only be proven through a lengthy probation.
He was deposed from the ministry in 1932 for involvement with preventive witchcraft, after which he founded the African Reformed Presbyterian Church in the Livingstonia area.
Charles Chidongo Chinula, another former Livingstonia student who had been ordained in 1925 but deposed from the ministry for adultery in 1930 and suspended from church membership.
[6] Another view is that the high standard of teaching at Livingstonia predisposed its graduates to independence of thought and action, to reject some of the more rigid Free Church of Scotland doctrines and to question its attitudes to polygamy, traditional dancing and the boundary between traditional medicine and practices amounting to witchcraft and what Mwase referred to as the "denaturalization and denationalization of the native Church" by non-native missionaries.
[9] After a long probation as a licensed preacher, Mwase became one of the first three African ministers to be ordained in Nyasaland by a Presbyterian church in 1914.
His relationship with the church was difficult: this was partly because of his strongly independent personality but also because he disagreed with the rigid application of its doctrines to newly-converted Africans.
The first major clash occurred in 1915 when he baptized catechumens without the prior consent of his superiors, which was regarded as serious insubordination, leading to Mwase being suspended from the ministry for a month.
[10][11] A more serious quarrel arose in 1932 when Mwase was again suspended after complaints about his disciplining of a church Elder led to a dispute between hom and a Scottish minister.
Although the account of McCracken, the main source for Mwase’s activities, ends in 1940 and the exact date of his death is unknown, he provided evidence to the Abrahams Commission when it visited Nyasaland in 1946 and it is recorded that he died in the mid-1940s.
After a significant delay, he was ordained into the United Free Church of Scotland in 1918 and assigned to work in the Livingstonia congregations under the direction of Dr Robert Laws.
[16][17] Although Mkandawire had 14 years of unblemished service, in 1932 he was, accused of taking phemba medicine as a safeguard against being poisoned, or possibly against witchcraft.
The issue was not clear-cut as, although the church condemned the use of charms against witchcraft and dancing and drumming to cure spirit possession, it regarded the taking of traditional medicines as protection against disease or against snake-bite as foolish but not an offence against its moral code.
He opened a village school in the Chilumba area with himself and his son as teachers and, in 1936 this was awarded a small government grant which was renewed in subsequent years.
Charles Chidongo Chinula (1885-1971) was a teacher, an ordained minister of the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian for which he composed a number of hymns, the founder of an independent African church and a committed nationalist politician, initially seeking an African voice in Nyasaland politics and later opposing federation with Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia.
[23] While in Loudon Mission, Chinula opposed the efforts of the missionaries to suppress such elements of Ngoni culture as traditional dances but also acted as an evangelist and from 1918 expressed his wish to train for the ministry.