Between Pulpit and Hearth: A Genealogical Reading of Reformed Liturgy and Gendered Identities in African Ritual Life

Abstract

This study analyses the Reformed liturgy as a site of ritual contestation that both shapes and facilitates the reconstruction and transformation of gender roles and identities in African contexts. Rooted in genealogical and decolonial scholarship, it examines how a ministry, long-reformed yet fundamentally integral to African-congregational communities, continues to express masculine forms of agency already present in reformed worship that influence perceptions of power, belonging, and identity. The emphasis is on Reformed communities in Southern Africa, where the arrangements of liturgical practices, preaching, eldership, sacramental administration, and life-cycle rites persist in grappling with a colonial past from an African epistemological perspective. This study examines the intersections of baptism, marriage, funerals, and ordination with customary rites such as lobola (bridewealth), initiation, and ancestor veneration, drawing on liturgical theology, ritual studies, and African gender scholarship to reveal both reproductive and resistant dynamics while simultaneously reshaping a new order within these practices. This article examines the ways in which worship facilitates continuity, rupture, and transformation within African gender identities, while seeking to situate Reformed liturgy within an African context of ritual ecologies rather than to contrast them. This approach may enhance decolonial discourse by illuminating contemporary discussions on liturgical studies and gender.

1. Introduction

In the last ten years, African theological literature has intensified its examination of the influence of worship on worshippers, specifically regarding the formation of gendered subjects through liturgical mediation. Contemporary scholars at the intersection of post-colonialism, ritual studies, and African religious experience contend that the liturgies that predominantly African Christian denominations received from European influences are not impartial vessels of Christian doctrine; instead, they are historically contextualised constructs infused with anthropologies, ontologies, and gendered practices (Barnard 2019). This is particularly relevant to the previously mentioned Reformed liturgical traditions, which are Protestant worship practices that originated from the magisterial reformations of sixteenth-century Geneva and Heidelberg in Northwestern Europe, but were subsequently indigenised, contested, and reconfigured in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The author examines the article in Reformed liturgy as a contested ritual arena, highlighting the construction, reproduction, and occasional transformation of gendered identities. It genealogically traces, following Foucault ([1975] 1977) and his decolonial interpreters (Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2020), the fortuitous inheritance of the current gender order in Reformed congregational life through colonial stratifications and pre-colonial civilisational history. The alternative genealogical approach integrates a decolonial hermeneutic that acknowledges the fundamental insights of African feminist scholarship articulated by Oyěwùmí (1997, 2016). This perspective has been further developed through the contributions of a new generation of scholars since 2017, who assert that gender, as a binary and hierarchically structured category, is a construct of colonial power imposed upon societies with historical civilisations characterised by diverse social-symbolic orders, distinct from those centred around dual-sex classifications and complex ontological assertions regarding human interactions in spatial, temporal, and relational contexts (Dlamini 2022; Mama 2023).

This researcher presents a threefold argument. The Southern African Reformed liturgy, derived from European Calvinist traditions, initially manifested distinct forms of gendered theology wherein sacramental authority, preaching, and eldership were exclusively male domains; women’s ritual contributions were restricted to a domestic-affective sphere, which this researcher refers to, in reference to this article’s title, as “the space between pulpit and hearth.” Secondly, this gendered liturgical economy not only displaced but also engaged in an often violent and occasionally constructive dialogue with the pre-existing social structures of ritual belonging in South Africa before the advent of reformed Christianity; it generated hybrid configurations wherein “Reformed Christian” and “African” emerged as mutually contesting categories (Van der Watt 2022; Resane 2020). Third, Khosa-Nkatini (2019) emphasises the continuity of African ritual practices, including lobola, initiation, ancestral veneration, and mourning, indicating that Reformed liturgy has not fully assimilated the gendered ritual ecology in which it exists, and suggests potential resources for decolonial liturgical reform within African Christian traditions.

The analysis is grounded in the existing literature concerning the Vhavenda, Batswana, Basotho, AmaXhosa, and Afrikaner contexts within the Southern African provinces, where representatives of Reformed traditions, now represented by the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa (URCSA), such as the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) and its mission churches, the Afrikaans-language Reformed Church in Africa (RCA), the English-language Reformed Churches in South Africa (RCSA), and Berlin Mission descendants among the Vhavenda, have established themselves. The article does not undertake fresh ethnographic fieldwork; instead, it utilises an extensive body of material written between 2017 and 2026 by African theologians, ritual scholars, and gender researchers, in conjunction with foundational theoretical resources that are crucial for analysis.

The article proceeds as detailed below. The next section outlines the theoretical framework, incorporating decolonial gender theory, Foucauldian genealogy, and African ritual studies. The third section outlines the methodology of the literature-based study. The fourth section outlines the historical genealogy of the introduction of Reformed liturgy to Southern Africa and its early reception by Africans. The fifth segment examines gendered ritual authority within the Reformed worship environment, concentrating on the pulpit, eldership, sacraments, and the simultaneous roles women have occupied alongside formal positions. The sixth part analyses the interaction and tension between Reformed liturgy and African traditional customs in marriage, initiation, ancestral veneration, funerals, and birth-naming and baptism ceremonies. The seventh segment synthesises the findings into a decolonial liturgical genealogy, while the concluding section offers conclusions.

2. Theoretical Framework

This essay connects three theoretical discussions that have mostly occurred independently, but that enhance one another when examined alongside decolonial gender theory, Foucauldian genealogy, and African epistemologically informed liturgical-ritual studies.

2.1. Decolonial Gender Theory

Decolonial gender theory, as articulated by Oyěwùmí (1997, p. 6) and further advanced by Manning (2021, p. 1204; Udenigwe et al. 2026, p. 2), posits that the gender system inherited from European modernity a dualistic, stratified, biologically determined categorisation of individuals into “men” and “women,” along with corresponding roles in public and domestic spheres, rationality versus affectivity, and productivity versus reproduction was not an inherent human condition but rather a distinctly modern-colonial construct propagated through imperial frameworks. Oyěwùmí (1997) provocatively posited that pre-colonial Yoruba structured social ties primarily through seniority and kinship rather than gender, asserting that colonial powers enabled the imposition of “woman” as a significant category for social relations. Similar social structures, influenced more by seniority, lineage, and kinship than by a binary gender framework, have been documented in several African contexts, including certain Southern African civilisations like the Vhavenda, where ritual status frequently depends on generational and clan affiliation. This essay approaches such similarities with caution; the significance of gender, seniority, and kinship differed markedly among civilisations, and Oyěwùmí’s Yoruba case should be interpreted as illuminating rather than universally applicable to all communities.

Subsequently, Oyěwùmí (2016) expanded her research to encompass motherhood, demonstrating how a culturally specific Western kinship framework has been erroneously seen as universal across scholarly, ecclesiastical, and developmental discourses.

African feminist scholars (Mama 2023; Okech 2020) have addressed these calls, advocating for a more nuanced perspective in which African societies comprehend sexed difference through unique symbolic logics, specifically ritual and cosmological grammars that differ from those defining European modernity. The concept of the coloniality of gender (Icaza 2018; Cariño and González 2022) elaborates on this discovery by emphasising that the colonial encounter not only initiated racial hierarchies but also established a gendered cosmology, wherein the cisgender Eurocentric model of sex/gender was imposed as universal and naturalised, thereby displacing indigenous configurations.

Numerous studies in African theological scholarship (Chitando et al. 2023), along with the broader Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, have underscored the complicity of Christian missions, including Reformed missions, in the colonial-gender project, which African Christian women opposed and re-envisioned through their involvement. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018, 2021, 2022) articulated the “coloniality of power, being, and knowledge” as a comprehensive analytical framework: gender constitutes one dimension of a coloniality that infiltrates subject formation, epistemology, and institutional existence; decolonisation must address all three aspects. Chitando’s new work (Chitando 2012) on religion and masculinities offers a crucial correction, asserting that a comprehensive decolonial gender critique must analyse the formation of African masculinities within the colonial-Christian framework.

Consequently, the decolonial-gender framework generates three preliminary theses for this article: (i) unexamined or erroneous perceptions of universal and clear gender categories underlie Reformed liturgical practices; (ii) this imposition has historically been problematic and remains contentious; and (iii) the reclamation of African ritual epistemologies is integral to the decolonisation of theology and essential to any liturgical reform initiative.

2.2. Genealogy

The genealogical approach, first articulated by Nietzsche and elaborated by Foucault ([1975] 1977), attempts to uncouple present configurations from their naturalisation by showing how those arrangements came into being contingently over time. Simply put, as Foucault refers to it, a history of the present is an examination of how we learned to recognise the obvious as we do. The liturgical field is especially suited to a genealogical approach because the nature of liturgy itself is that it seems immutable, scriptural, even eternal when in fact it holds within its rich layers all manner of sediment from histories both more recent and more ancient.

In a long section on coloniality, this researcher examines the genealogical project pursued by decolonial scholars such as Mignolo and Walsh (2018) and Maldonado-Torres and Cavooris (2017), which identifies modern subjectivities originating in the challenges of European expansion in the long sixteenth century and their ramifications in contemporary arrangements. On conditions of coloniality, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2021, 2022) has advanced a genealogical-decolonial method that traces the palimpsest constitution and contestation of African subjectivities. Vellem (2017, p. 1).

It calls for us to “un-think the West,” a genealogical imperative in its own right: to make visible what has become sedimented as natural in African Reformed life, and to present it as a rear-guard stance of identity politics by showing it to be historically contingent, for it is possible. This study concerns itself here with three layers of a liturgical genealogy shaping Reformed worship in Southern Africa: (a) the context of the European Reformation in which they were formed; (b) their missionary-colonial transmission to Southern Africa; and finally, (c) their contemporary ongoing African appropriation, contestation, and transformation.

2.3. Liturgical Theology and African Ritual Studies

The third stream is liturgical theology and ritual studies, particularly as discerned in the work of Southern African scholars. These included Tovey (2019), who developed an approach to the study of ritual sensitive to inculturation and to specific practices related to African Christian worship. Their research draws on classical ritual theory while paying attention to the particularities of the African ritual ecologies, including the place of African Independent Churches in dialogue with mainline Protestantism. African Independent (or African Initiated) Churches are particularly enlightening in this regard. Their liturgical improvisation, integration of healing, prophecy, dreams, and ancestral expressions, together with a somewhat greater receptiveness to women’s ritual and prophetic leadership, have consistently challenged conventional Reformed and Protestant denominations to reevaluate the cultural parameters of permissible worship. When examined concurrently, the two streams demonstrate that the inculturation issues confronting Reformed liturgy are neither recent nor discretionary but have been historically explored throughout African Christianity.

Within Reformed circles, Smit (2017), Vosloo (2015, 2017), and van Wyngaard (2020) have also discussed how the traditions’ own resources could be drawn upon for prophetic critique, covenant, and koinonia as avenues for mobilisation against colonial-modern formations within their own traditions. Kgatla (2021) is an example of this, as historical retrieval provides internal Reformed grounds for a proper critique of patriarchy and racism alike in the name of commitments to unity, reconciliation, and justice founded in the beliefs entailed by the Belhar Confession.

Work by (Scott 2020; Björkander 2024; Hill 2026) argues in greater depth that African ritual studies cannot study worship in isolation, asserting that liturgy is part of a larger landscape of rituals shaping African Christians’ lives, an ecology that includes lobola, initiation, naming, veneration of ancestors (as these cultures understand them), healing, and mourning. That understanding informs the article’s framing between pulpit and hearth: the gendered subject of Reformed liturgy participates in other customary ordinances, and the two ritual orders interact in ways that are too complex to be adequately described as “syncretism” or “dual religious belonging.”

2.4. Synthesis: A Decolonial-Genealogical-Liturgical Frame

This confluence of streams has not been argued in one theologian but instead brings out the latent genetic traditions (and contingent genealogical layers) of early Reformed liturgy as a historical formation, a dialogue between meaning and effect with customary ritual stemming from decolonial gender theory (a kind of perversion par excellence in radical equivalency theorisation). It takes us to the framework: not the monolithic colonial residue of Reformed liturgy but this researcher’s contention that, because of its nature, there are also latent decolonial possibilities within this tradition yet awaiting genealogical excavation and intentional ritual re-fashioning.

3. Methodology

This study is a narrative, conceptual, literature-based investigation utilising a genealogical-decolonial hermeneutic methodology. It does not conduct new ethnographic fieldwork; it reads against a background of large, recent studies on Reformed liturgy and African ritual life, as well as on gender in Southern Africa, alongside some key, broadly theoretical works.

The analysis is structured by three methodological commitments. First, it reads the literature genealogically: rather than treating present categories and practices as self-evident, it maps them through traceable historical layers. The analysis scrutinises that which may at first appear given or natural, following (Foucault [1975] 1977; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2020), and second, it is not a neutral or an outside reading of the materials, but rather one that reads from within in awareness of the coloniality endemic to both liturgical formation and gender construction (cf. Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Vellem 2017). Finally, the analysis is interdisciplinary (liturgical theology; ritual studies; African religion; gender; decoloniality), as no single perspective suffices to capture the intricacy of African Reformed gendered ritual life.

For the common literature review, the significant delimitations were specific to the years 2017–2026, ownership access (peer-reviewed journal articles, scholarly monographs, and edited collections in English), Southern African and diasporic African scholars writing on African materials, together with work by non-Southern authors writing on Afro-centric material. That means foundational older works (Foucault [1975] 1977; Oyěwùmí 1997) are kept if they retain analytic purchase. The searches in the four primary databases (Scopus, Web of Science, AJOL, ATLA Religion Database) and others (EBSCO Religion and Philosophy Collection), were conducted using keyword combinations such as “Reformed liturgy,” “African ritual,” “gender and worship,” decolonial liturgy,” “ancestral veneration,” women’s ordination; “Reformed sacraments,” “lobola and the church,” “African women’s theology,” “initiation rites,” “covenant and culture,” “Belhar Confession and gender,” and “women’s ecclesial leadership”; the names of particular Southern African Reformed denominations.

The inclusion criteria were as follows: (i) peer-reviewed journal articles, scholarly monographs, edited collections, or doctoral dissertations published in English; (ii) publication between 2017 and 2026, excluding foundational theoretical works (specifically Foucault [1975] 1977; Oyěwùmí 1997) retained for their enduring analytical relevance; (iii) substantial engagement with at least one of the primary themes of the study: Reformed liturgical practice, African ritual life, gender and religion. The exclusion criteria included: non-academic devotional or denominational pamphlets, sources lacking verifiable peer review, and publications focused solely on non-African Reformed contexts unless referenced for their theoretical framework. It is recognised, however, that devotional and denominational sources, including pamphlets, liturgical handbooks, orders of service, and congregational materials, possess significant evidential value for lived experiences. The absence of reformed practice, intended to maintain methodological consistency with peer-reviewed scholarship, is noted as a restriction that future ethnographically focused research could effectively explore.

The period from 2017 to 2026 was selected since it encompasses the post-#RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall decolonial scholarly movement in South African theology, during which African feminist and decolonial theological contributions have significantly increased.

The preliminary database searches yielded around 340 potential sources across the five databases. Following deduplication and title/abstract screening in accordance with the inclusion criteria, 142 sources were selected for full-text review. A subsequent round of relevance assessment, concentrating on whether each source could meaningfully contribute to at least one of the article’s three argumentative threads (the gendered economy of the Reformed liturgical office; the interaction between Reformed worship and African customary rites; and the resources within the Reformed tradition for decolonial reformation), narrowed the final corpus to approximately seventy works cited in this article. Backward and forward citation analysis of seminal publications (Plaatjies-Van Huffel 2017; Oyěwùmí 1997; Vellem 2017) was employed to identify supplementary sources not retrieved through keyword searches.

Thematic coding of the retained corpus was conducted in two phases. The initial analysis revealed recurring categories derived from the literature: gendered ecclesiastical roles (pulpit, eldership, diaconate, sacramental administration); parallel female spaces (Manyano, Vroue Federasie, prayer leagues); life-cycle rituals (lobola/magadi, initiation, ancestral veneration, funerary practices, birth and naming); and decolonial theological resources (Belhar, Calvin’s pneumatology, African feminist theology). The second review evaluated these categories through a genealogical-decolonial lens, enquiring how each source portrays current configurations as historically dependent rather than inherent. The research consistently acknowledges the premise proposed by Mignolo and Walsh (2018) that decolonial reading is neither neutral nor external but rather emerges from an awareness of the ongoing influence of coloniality in both liturgical formation and gender production.

Three constraints warrant attention. Initially, as a literature-based study, the analysis cannot capture the nuanced lived experiences of congregations as ethnography does and depends on the practical research of others. Secondly, the emphasis on Southern Africa prioritises certain ritual ecologies, whereas situations in the West and East African Reformed Churches are referenced as pertinent but remain secondary in focus. The genealogical method is selective, focusing on specific strands rather than creating an overarching historical narrative. These limitations serve as methodological prompts and indicators for additional empirical, comparative, and historical investigation.

4. Historical Genealogy: Reformed Liturgy’s Arrival and African Reception

4.1. The Reformation Inheritance: Geneva, Heidelberg, and Dordt

As such, the Reformed liturgical tradition that came to Southern Africa was not a nondescript Protestant inheritance but rather a historical formation. Calvin’s Geneva provided a disciplined, didactic, and word-centred form of worship that focused the liturgical action on the preached Word, regulated by the ordained ministry about sacraments, as well as congregational governance through a fourfold office: pastor/doctor; elder; deacon (Smit 2017, 2004). All these offices were restricted to men, a restriction Calvin justified both by biblical argument and, following Genesis, by natural order, but which decolonial-feminist analysis has shown reflects the gendered cosmology of early-modern European Christendom (Vosloo 2017; van Wyngaard 2020).

Christian Reformed Church (1988a, 1988b, 1988c), the Three Forms of Unity, shaped the doctrinal stance that Dutch Reformed missionaries would bring to the southern tip of Africa. The catechetical tradition practised a specific pedagogy: of formation in the Christian faith through repetition and recitation, and oriented towards fathers teaching their families (Vosloo 2017). The husband-father was likened to the priestly head of the domestic commonwealth, which the “home” represented, and the wife was likened to its co-labourer, supporting his work, especially in nurturing children and maintaining a good moral atmosphere in the home. Smit (2017), in a sympathetic-critical reading of Calvin, shows how this domestic theology did not invent patriarchy, but it did sacralise a particular form of it.

4.2. Transplantation: The Cape and Beyond, 1652–1900

With the establishment of a settlement under the Dutch East India Company at Cape Town in 1652, Reformed worship was introduced and later institutionalised through various church structures, including the Cape Synod and the primitive Dutch Reformed congregations. Reformed liturgy spread to the north and east from the Cape by way of sub-industrial and industrial location-by-location missions: into the interior with Voortrekker congregations as early as the 1830s, among Tswana through both London Missionary Society and subsequent DRC mission development, amongst Basotho through pastoral care that came via Cunninghams followed by more century-long interventions by Paris Evangelical Missionary Society functions, among Vhavenda starting in 1872 via Berlin Mission and within AmaXhosa voting along a broader spectrum of Scottish congregation works pledging their involvement alongside present URCSA developmental structures (Denis 1997; Hofmeyr and Cross 1986; Duncan 2005).

Historical accounts of these missions have been significantly rewritten over the past 10 years. The earlier mission-friendly narratives of how the Reformed tradition Christianised African societies have now been replaced by genealogical and decolonial interpretations that attend to the violence, epistemic, ritual, and political means by which Reformed liturgy was injected into African communities. The missions of reformation did not arrive at ritual fields without markers; they came among societies with vast ritual ecologies, initiation cycles, ancestor worship, healing rites, and marriage exchanges regimented through their own gendered grammars. The encounter with the missions aspired, frequently explicitly, to displace such orders by vilifying them as “pagan” while replacing them with Reformed Word, sacrament and discipline (Lephakga 2017).

The displacement was never absolute; however, mainline mission churches, African Christians from the first moments of contact, participated in Reformed liturgy out of their own ritual ecologies, creating worship which was never simply European nor simply African but emergent hybridities (Lephoto 2024). Proponents of an African biblical hermeneutics, such as Mtshiselwa (2014), have long challenged missionary readings by showing how embedded within scripture itself are resources for liberatory reconfiguration in dialogue with South African experience.

4.3. Twentieth-Century Consolidations and Fractures

The history of Reformed denominations continuing to coalesce along racial lines in Southern Africa during the twentieth century is now a well-documented and decisively critiqued story. The racism that the Dutch Reformed Church scandalised itself with (in the mid-20th century), and then sought to right in its merger of white (NGK), “coloured” (NGSK), African (DRCA), and Indian churches into the URCSA formation from 1994 (Plaatjies-Van Huffel 2021), took place under apartheid theology, before it was ecclesially renounced in the Belhar Confession of 1986 (Landman 2021). The gendered dimensions of these racial divisions were equally evident: Black Reformed women endured the dual challenges of apartheid violence and ecclesiastical neglect, engaging in ministry and motherhood while the dominant ecclesiastical structure excluded formal authority for women (both white and black) and sanctioned women’s ordination only belatedly and inconsistently across generations within the Reformed community (Naidoo 2013).

The story of women’s ordination cannot be fully told through denominational progress, but it still has a chartable genealogy along with the lines. Whereas the DRC was still literally opening ordination to women in 1990, URCSA inherited that opening and has gradually moved, albeit unevenly, women into pastoral leadership; the RCSA (“Doppers”) and some conservative streams have remained more restrictive (Plaatjies-Van Huffel 2017). However, the formal opening of the office has not meant a structural transformation, as evidenced by Naidoo (2013). Although women are being ordained, they have too little access to senior positions; theological education remains dominated by masculinist assumptions about the nature of ministry and church; ritual labour in congregational life, caring, cleaning, choir, pastoral visitation, and intercessory prayer is routinely ignored or undervalued and without pay (Naidoo 2013; Plaatjies-Van Huffel 2017).

In the post-apartheid period, a vigorous decolonial critique of Reformed liturgy and theology has also emerged (Nyamnjoh 2019), to some extent animated by the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements. The need for an unthinking West approach (Vellem 2017), reflections on “21st century African theology” articulate a horizon in which Reformed liturgy, called to be re-imagined for Africa, must draw on African epistemic resources rather than merely re-presenting European forms. This genealogy now leads us out into the contemporary ritual context, where the gendered politics of liturgy are currently being played out.

5. Gendered Ritual Authority in Reformed Worship

5.1. The Pulpit: Preaching as Gendered Performance

This article focuses on the pulpit as both an architectural and theological centre of Reformed worship, which in Southern African Reformed tradition has over the centuries been almost exclusively a male space (Plaatjies-Van Huffel 2017). Preaching is more than the mere communication of doctrine; it is a ritual performance by which authority is enacted, hearers are constituted as an audience, and voices, bodies, and speech enter through a single act. Naidoo (2013), based on a voluminous empirical study in South African theological education, indicates how homiletics as pedagogy has been pitched to male voices and bodies and rhetorical traditions, forcing women preachers to perform constant micro-shifts in their register, dress, and gesture quite simply to have their words heard with authority.

The gradual (but uneven) opening of pulpits to women across the entire Reformed family in DRC, URCSA, RCA, RCSA, and the Berlin Mission successor congregations among Vhavenda (Plaatjies-Van Huffel 2017) is not alone sufficient to decolonise a gendered economy of the pulpit. Women preachers continue to experience their sermons being framed in gendered tropes: theirs is the “emotional,” the “pastoral,” or “motherly” preaching, while male preaching remains the unmarked, seemingly neutral norm, with its style seen as the default, ungendered vessel of theological profundity or prophetic authority, rather than being recognised as a gendered performance (see Chitando 2012). What is reproduced as long as the liturgical-rhetorical economy remains intact, which can be done with the mere addition of women, the pulpit is not a gendered character (Plaatjies-Van Huffel 2017).

5.2. Eldership and Diaconate: The Architecture of Authority

Outside the pulpit, Reformed authority is dispersed into the offices of elder and deacon, with the consistory or kerkraad serving as the primary governing body for a congregation. The insistence of the Reformed that ministry be a plurality of offices, thereby sharing authority in a body rather than concentrating it into a sole ministerial barrelhead, is one distinctive contribution, and such has paradoxically strengthened yet also limited patriarchal ecclesial power flows (Smit 2017). Men-only Eldership synthesises male power through the family economy of a congregation; women’s Ordination adds on rituals, liturgy, and governance options that redistribute ritual and governance work.

By tracing the place of women in URCSA, Plaatjies-Van Huffel (2017) documents an almost agonising progression from complete marginalisation through discreet “helper” roles, to ecclesial offices of full eldership and ministry. However, as Hadebe (2017) points out, the diaconate has been feminised long before the eldership: gendered entrance into caring and visiting work in feeding the church’s diocesan labour was more easily available to women than to men, who themselves retained work in teaching and ruling. This gendered division of ecclesial labour coincides with and sustains the broader domestic-public schism, which decolonial gender theory really understands as a colonial-modern imposition (Hadebe 2017).

5.3. Sacraments: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper

Because Reformed sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, are administered by ordained ministry, they are therefore mediated by the gendered economy of office. For African Reformed contexts, baptism has become a site for decolonial-liturgical reflection. The structure of the baptismal liturgy, oriented around themes of covenant actualised within a temporarily regenerate community and the promise made by guardians for their child to formally respond (Smit 2017), entailed a household theology that maintained an image of the father as priestly head and the mother as supportive co-labourer. Because Reformed baptism in Scotland responded to the described pragmatics of birth and naming rights, which were gendered differently in African societies, it often focused on the mother and grandmothers, or on the maternal lineage (Magezi 2018).

Her work on Reformed congregational life has been similarly coloured by a vision of the Lord’s Supper as the central, communicative act in those churches. Ordained men have guarded, administered, and policed the sacramental table; women prepared, polished, and arranged the elements in ways that made the rite materially possible while remaining at its symbolic margins (Hadebe 2017). Drawing on ritual-studies analysis of South African congregational life, Leach (2024) demonstrates how the eucharistic economy is diffused across many hands and many spaces, yet the official liturgical script continues to erase this in practice, ascribing the rite solely to an ordained celebrant.

5.4. Women’s Spaces: From Manyano to Vroue Federasie

In contrast to the formal economy of office, Southern African Reformed life has long subsisted alongside parallel women’s spaces (prayer leagues, women’s federations, choir guilds, and confraternities of widows and grandmothers) whose ritual and spiritual labour has been considerable and essential to the church’s existence, despite these locations being de jure (formally and officially) suppressed inside ecclesiastical hierarchies (Plaatjies-Van Huffel 2017; Hadebe 2017).

Within Afrikaner Reformed circles, the Vroue Federasie (Women’s Federation) organised women’s ecclesial and social work, with a supportive yet seldom critical stance toward formal offices within the patriarchal structure. Black Reformed traditions, distinctively shaped by innovative prayer leagues modelled successively and differently on the Methodist manyano, inherited Pentecostal precedents, and indigenous women’s gatherings (Yafeh-Deigh 2020), produced extraordinary unofficial quasi-institutional spaces of spiritual authority, the prophetic preaching, healing, and dream interpretation all delineated from office structure.

These parallel realms make simplistic narratives of women’s exclusion far more complex. As Babatunde (2021) has argued, African Christian women have always exercised considerable ritual authority “between pulpit and hearth” neither because they were canonically allowed to do so, but rather because the lived ritual ecology of African congregations was invariably broader than any official liturgical script. This means that part of the decolonial-genealogical task is not finding a woman’s authority where there was none, rather making visible an authority, there all along, with which to question what might be different in formal liturgical practice were it officially recognised and repositioned (Plaatjies-Van Huffel 2017).

5.5. The “Pulpit and Hearth” Economy

So, the composite picture is of a Reformed liturgical economy divided between the pulpit, male, public, oral-literal, theological-theoretical, and authoritative and the hearth, female, domestic-material-embodied-affective-supportive. They are, rather, inextricable, with the authority of the pulpit materially funded by the labour of the hearth while all along symbolically subordinating that labour.

Decolonial gender theory (Oyěwùmí 2016) provides the analytic for naming this configuration as colonial-modern and African feminist theology (Phiri 2024), the resources for re-imagining it. The following section addresses the messiness of African ritual ecologies in which Reformed worship is ongoing, engaging with Reformed liturgy in ways that are generative and contested.

6. Dialogue and Tension with African Customary Rites

In Southern Africa, Reformed liturgy has never functioned in ritual isolation. African Reformed Christians live in ritual ecologies that encompass lobola/magadi (bridewealth), rites of initiation for both genders, ancestral veneration, elaborate naming and birth rituals, and funerary practices. The genealogical and decolonial task is to read Reformed liturgy not in opposition to, but within this wider ecology, paying attention to the gendered dynamics produced at the points of overlap and contestation (see Magezi 2018).

6.1. Marriage: Between Magadi and the Wedding Service

For many African Reformed Christians, the Reformed wedding liturgy, with its vows, ring exchange, and pastoral pronouncement, is but one moment amid a longer marriage process.

Negotiations by clan elders between families for lobola or magadi, usually paid in livestock or an equivalent amount of money, are ceremonially elaborate and occur before and after the church wedding (Chiweshe 2016). Lobola, also known as lobolo, mahadi in Sesotho, or magadi, and referred to as bride wealth or bride price in English, is a traditional practice in Southern Africa in which a prospective groom and his family present a gift, traditionally livestock and increasingly monetary, to the bride’s family. This practice is prevalent among the Nguni and Sotho peoples, as well as many groups across South Africa, Zimbabwe, Eswatini, and Lesotho, particularly among the Venda community in Limpopo.

Lobola essentially does not represent a “purchase” of the bride, despite the misleading English term “bride price. Specifically, it is a process of forging a connection between two families. It expresses gratitude to the bride’s parents for her upbringing, demonstrates the groom’s capacity to provide for a family, and legally consolidates the two families. This viewpoint regards marriage as a coalition of families and lineages, rather than merely a union of two individuals.

These two ritual orders hold different gendered scripts. In contrast, the church wedding presents the bride as a covenantal partner who pledges in her own voice, whereas the magadi describes an event in which she is conceived of as a daughter transferred between lineages, and male elders speak on behalf of each family. The manifestation of bridewealth significantly differs across various groups. Within the Nguni ethnic groups (amaZulu, amaXhosa, amaSwati, and amaNdebele), it is referred to as lobola or ilobolo and was traditionally calculated in cattle; among the Sotho-Tswana groups, it is known as mahadi, magadi, or bogadi; and among the Vhavenda, it is typically negotiated and disbursed in instalments over several years. The quantity of cattle involved, the extent and manner of negotiation, the function of designated intermediaries, and the prevalent replacement of currency for livestock vary significantly among communities and between rural and urban environments, rendering a singular description inadequate to encompass the institution comprehensively. Acknowledging this inherent diversity protects against the colonial inclination to regard “African custom” as a monolithic entity.

In Reformed liturgical theology, lobola is effectively interpreted in conjunction with the tradition’s covenantal framework. Reformed worship perceives marriage not merely as a private agreement between two parties but as a covenant established before God and observed by a broader community, an emphasis that aligns closely with the lobola process, wherein two lineages are united and held mutually accountable. Interpreted in this context, bridewealth should not be viewed as a competitor to the wedding liturgy but rather as a concurrent covenantal act; the decolonial-liturgical endeavour aims to engage the church’s theology of covenant in a deliberate dialogue with the bridewealth process, avoiding both uncritical endorsement and outright condemnation (cf. Chiweshe 2016; Magezi 2018).

Scholarly work on lobola has recently been ambivalent. Studying Zimbabwean cases, Chiweshe (2016) documents the inhumane commercialisation of lobola along with the commodification of women’s bodies within late-capitalist conditions. Black South African women adopt a bifurcated position, with some maintaining that lobola maintains their culture and social structure, which entitles men to dominate over women (Nduna 2021). Magezi (2018) interprets the altered family shapes as cultural literalizing factors that form an “in-between” ritual context that does not work with either customary or church liturgy at full speed, and in which gendered functions are actively reworked.

For Reformed liturgy, the question becomes how the church can position itself as critical and transformative within this system without either re-circulating colonial-missionary criticism of traditional rites or, conversely, wilfully uncritical baptism. The decolonial-liturgical task here is one of is discernment, as suggested by Henkeman et al. (2021): identifying elements that work for or against the agency of women in both ritual orders and reform liturgical practice.

6.2. Initiation: Vhusha, Domba, Murundu, and Reformed Suspicion

The female initiation cycle of Vhusha and Domba, and the male rite of Murundu, have historically structured the life transition from childhood to social adulthood among the Vhavenda. Similarly, the Berlin Mission, amongst other Reformed missions working with the Tswana (bogwera and bojale), Basotho (lebollo), AmaXhosa (ulwaluko) and Bapedi, viewed these rites warily, deeply suspicious of what was often seen as a pagan influence, so much so that converts were frequently required to abandon them in order to achieve full ecclesial participation (Lephakga 2017). The upshot, in many congregations, was a lengthy stretch of formal prohibition followed by informal dual practice: families continued to send children for initiation while confessing Reformed Christian faith in church.

Over the last ten years, initiation rites in African studies have undergone significant reappraisal, and their gendered import has become a more prominent area of scholarly inquiry. Drawing inspiration from (Monyela 2017) on Basotho male initiation, Johnson (2018) on female initiation among the Yawo of Malawi, and Prempeh (2023) writing on Southern African Pentecostal and mainline contexts respectively, argue that the initiation rites serve essential pedagogical, communal, and identity-forming purposes which Reformed mission Christianity has not adequately replicated due to its displacement. Similarly, while recent scholarship has soberly acknowledged the negative and ambiguous aspects of these rituals, medical risks related to male circumcision rites, gendered scripts in female initiation that may reinforce subordination, and a secrecy that protects abusers (Mokhutso 2023; Chitando 2012), the legacy of affirmation continues to persist as well.

Critical engagement, not uncritical celebration, is what a decolonial-liturgical approach to initiation demands: processes that research the precedents for thought found in rites themselves before approaching them as “culture” destined for evangelisation. The Reformed task, then, is to see the formative work rites do in producing adult subjects with certain obligations, identifications, and embodied dispositions, and to ask how Christian formation might engage this work in critical dialogue rather than seek to offer a replacement from without.

6.3. Ancestral Veneration: A Persistent Theological Frontier

Ancestral reverence and its theological implications have remained the most controversial of all African ritual frontiers for Reformed Christianity. Karani (2023) contends that the extensive colonial-mission dismissal of African ancestor practices as idolatry, juxtaposed with the veneration of saints, was based on a misconception that narrowly defined ancestral practices as worship. African theologians, beginning with Adeoye (2025), contend that ancestral veneration is more comprehensible within the cosmotopos, or kinship-cosmological framework, than within the Anglo-Western concept of religion as worship; it bears some resemblance to the traditions of the communion of saints in Catholic Christianity.

Ancestral practice is profoundly gendered. In both Vhavenda and many Southern African societies, the reverence is mediated by specific gendered roles. The senior man articulates the ritual address, but it is the senior women, especially makhulu (grandmothers), and vhomakhadzi (paternal aunts) who have ritual knowledge, memory of rites, and institutional memory for family lines (see Chitando 2012). That refusal to remember the ancestors in Reformed liturgy does not eliminate this ritual economy; it merely relocates it to a semi peripheral world, usually domestic, and frequently known as the domain where women elders hold sway. This authority is already informally practised; senior women makhulu, vhomakhadzi, and dikgosadi consistently uphold the daily life of the congregation, preserve its ritual memory, and lead household and cemetery ceremonies. Formal theological acknowledgement would so identify and validate an existing ministry rather than establish a new one.

A decolonial Reformed engagement with ancestral practice will not have to affirm every ritual action but must refuse a binary that has historically framed the inquiry. As Hunt (2020) shows, Reformed Christology and pneumatology are fruitful resources for wrestling with the communion of the living and the dead, which makes it honourable to think about—rather than pathologise or ignore altogether the role senior women play in stewarding kinship memory. The genealogical insight is that the colonial Reformed condemnation of ancestral practice was, from a theological point of view, not necessary; it was contingent in history, and other configurations are possible.

6.4. Funerals: Ritual Density and Gendered Labour

Funeral appears to be the densest space for ritual co-presence in contemporary Southern African Reformed life. A funeral generally consists of church services (sometimes several, including a night-vigil service and graveside committal), customary ritual elements (ritual washing, the address to the dead, appropriate-scale slaughtering venue, unveiling of the tomb some months later) backed by specific gendered labour (women cooking, weeping, and maintaining housekeeping; men speaking, managing transport and finances, and carrying the casket) (Mtshiselwa 2014; Magezi 2018).

The feminine-masculine division of funerary labour replicates, in exaggerated form, the wider “pulpit and hearth” economy: women perform most physical and emotional ritual work; men furnish public speaking and presiding. However, as ritual-studies scholarship has shown, the ritual table for a Southern African Reformed funeral is not always at the pulpit but in the home where women elders lead rituals of acceptance, consolation, and care that encompass the public liturgy. The decolonial-liturgical question is whether this distributed centre of ritual can be acknowledged, honouring the graveyard and community as the funeral site rather than continuing to script the liturgy as a pulpit event with domestic complement in formal reaction.

6.5. Birth, Naming, and Baptism

Birth and naming close the ritual cycle. Among many Southern African birth traditions, the prescribed practices include a short period of mother-child separation, combined with special treatment and care of the placenta and umbilical cord; the naming of newborns is usually by senior relatives, and the gradual reintroduction or reintegration of mother and child into communal life (Bush 2019). It now falls into the same cycle of thinking reflected in the Reformed baptismal liturgy, which testifies to its own theology of covenant, regeneration, and inclusion. Baptism becomes a moment in an entire welcoming ritual economy where the two are thoughtfully integrated; when kept apart, it sits as one ritual moment here and there, with its own logic separate from others and its own gendered architecture.

Magezi (2018), examining changes in family structures in the context of urbanisation, asserts that the cycle of birth, naming, and baptism is being reinvoked as families contend with migration, household shrinkage, and shifting generational power. Younger women are increasingly asserting greater ownership of who they name, where, and when; church baptisms are being framed in terms of choice and consent, not through parochial family means. Such shifts present the renewed possibilities for critical and decolonial-liturgical engagements that hold both African ritual heritage and contemporary aspirations of African Reformed women in mutual regard (Hadebe 2017).

7. Toward a Decolonial Liturgical Genealogy

The genealogical reading provided here outlines three intersecting conclusions for continued decolonial-liturgical work in African Reformed configurations.

So, first, this study shows that gender in Reformed liturgy is not a given substance but rather an accomplished event. The pulpit-and-hearth economy that organises so much of Southern African Reformed congregational life is the sediment from many different strata: early-modern European household theology carried from the Reformation; colonial-mission impositions of European gender configurations on African societies; apartheid racialisations of Reformed denominational life; slow, incomplete twentieth-century openings to women in office; and a renegotiation under post-apartheid, decolonial, and African feminist pressures still ongoing. This layered contingency is, in and of itself, decolonial work: it does away with the excuse of “that’s just how Reformed worship goes”, creating space for other possibilities (Vellem 2017).

Second, Reformed liturgy participates in rather than transcends the ritual ecology of Africa. Not least, the temptation, both in old mission-based apologetics and, strangely, in some new inculturation theologies, to insist on Reformed worship at the centre and to customarily silence or selectively incorporate rites. The reverse decolonial reading asks: in what way does Reformed liturgy participate in wider African ritual life, with its own integrities and gendered architectures, if it involves a re-positioning, its own functional liturgical implications? For instance, it suggests that the Reformed wedding liturgy needs to be conceived and designed as one event within an extended marriage process, with intentional ritual dialogue between magadi and wedding, rather than awkwardly co-existing (Chiweshe 2016; Magezi 2018). This translates into the need for funerary liturgy to reflect this already distributed ritual centre and acknowledge, rather than script out, the work of women elders (Gittos and Hamilton 2017). And this indicates that baptism, naming, and birth rites can be framed as critical-perioral discourses instead of being compartmentalised.

Third, the resources for a decolonial liturgical reformation are there in the Reformed tradition itself but need African and decolonial labour to activate them. Smit (2017) illustrates how much Calvin’s own theology of the Spirit, of Christian life, and of the catholicity of the church outstrips and at points contradicts the patriarchal forms which that theology has by necessity been institutionalised into. Vosloo (2017) discerns, even within the Reformed tradition, a prophetic-critical strand that, from the Belhar Confession and beyond, mobilised to provide internal grounds for challenging not only racism but also the gendered hierarchies that have beset this tradition. Black Reformed identity has been re-narrated by Vellem (2017) and Boesak (2019) as inherently liberating, pushing back against the colonial reduction in Reformed life to white-Afrikaner respectability. Through the long yet often unrecognised history of women’s participation in Reformed life, Plaatjies-Van Huffel (2017) has also rendered visible women’s authority. African feminist theology (Chitando 2012) has furnished both the analytical resources to recognise the operation of patriarchal patterns and the constructive orientation to envision alternatives.

Bringing these together, a decolonial Reformed liturgical practice would have at least the following features. It would regard the here-and-now gendered economy of office and ritual labour as a changing object of perennial reform rather than a frozen inheritance. It would resist the false dichotomy of either European-Reformed or African-customary, instead engaging at those points of dialogue and tension where new configurations are born. Rather than cultural background, it would recognise the ritual authority of senior African women as makhulu, vhomakhadzi, dikgosadi, theologically significant and legitimate. It would reimagine the sacraments as distributed iterations in which the labour of preparation, hospitality, and embodiment is liturgically named rather than erased. It would pull in initiation, lobola, ancestor veneration, and funerary practice as items for theological exploration deserving careful Reformed consideration but without uncritical blessing or reflexive condemnation. And it would do all of this from the African Reformed congregation as a site of ongoing genealogical work (and disentangling), rather than externally sourced authority.

Rather than abandon its own deepest commitments, this would extend the Reformed tradition’s legacy: ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei. In African Reformed contexts, this means being available for reform and always reformed, so that inherited configurations of liturgical life (including their gendered configurations) are continually subjected to critical, scriptural, and contextual reform. (Smit 2017; Vosloo 2017; Vellem 2017).

8. Conclusions

This study contends that Reformed liturgy in Southern Africa should be interpreted not as a fixed legacy but as a complex, contested, and adaptable ritual construction in which gendered identities are perpetually created, established, and redefined. Analysing the tradition genealogically and via a decolonial perspective has revealed three interconnected insights. The “pulpit-and-hearth” economy, which structures much of congregational life, is a historical residue of early-modern European household theology, colonial-mission impositions, apartheid-era racial divisions, and the partial advancements for women in office during the twentieth century, rather than a timeless theological certainty. Secondly, Reformed worship in Southern Africa is not isolated from the wider African ritual ecology, which includes lobola, initiation, ancestral devotion, burial practices, and naming ceremonies; it engages with this ecology, and its gendered structure can only be understood in relation to it. The resources for a decolonial liturgical reformation are inherent within the Reformed tradition, found in Calvin’s pneumatology, the prophetic critique of the Belhar Confession, the extensive history of African women’s unofficial ritual authority, and African feminist theological scholarship.

Three consequences arise for academic inquiry and liturgical practice. This study encourages additional empirical research, ethnographic, historical, and comparative, on the specific congregational locations where Reformed and traditional ritual practices intersect. The Vhavenda, Batswana, Basotho, AmaXhosa, and Afrikaner settings mentioned warrant thorough individual examination, as do the concurrent histories of women’s ritual authority within the Reformed denominational family. The analysis indicates that, within liturgical theology, the Reformed slogan ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei should be interpreted in the African context as a mandate to reform both the gendered aspects of liturgical life and the doctrinal elements, representing an extension rather than a repudiation of the tradition’s fundamental principles. The article suggests specific modifications for congregational practice: positioning the Reformed wedding liturgy as a singular event within a broader marriage continuum that encompasses magadi; permitting funerary liturgy to recognise the existing ritual centres in domestic spaces and cemeteries; acknowledging senior women makhulu, vhomakhadzi, dikgosadi as theologically relevant ritual participants rather than merely cultural figures; and reconceptualising the sacraments as distributed perform.

This article’s contribution is to situate Reformed liturgy firmly within African ritual ecologies instead of opposing them, and to see its gendered structure as historically contingent rather than theologically imperative. This interpretation neither subjugates African ceremonial life to Reformed objectives nor conflates the Reformed tradition with a generalised Africanism. It instead creates a domain of continuous genealogical endeavour wherein African Reformed congregations serve as the principal locus of decolonial liturgical reform, drawing from their own ritual ecologies and theological assets, to develop worship configurations that render the labour and authority of African women, historically situated between pulpit and hearth, liturgically prominent and theologically acknowledged.