David Barrett's 1968 survey of African religious movements estimated that congregations founded and led by Africans, rather than descended from external missionary bodies, already numbered in the thousands across the continent by the mid twentieth century, and situated the Zion Christian Church within that broader category rather than treating it as an isolated case. The church's growth from twenty congregations in 1924 to a membership exceeding a million within a century is, on Barrett's framing, one successful outcome among a much larger field of similar African founded movements, most of which stayed far smaller.
Leadership has remained hereditary within the Lekganyane family since Engenas Lekganyane's death, a pattern common to large African Initiated Churches, and succession has at points been contested, most visibly in a mid twentieth century split that produced a rival branch carrying the same name, a schism that illustrates how personal, rather than institutional, the church's authority structure still is.
The Zion Christian Church is best read on its own terms as a distinctly Southern African Christian tradition, neither a survival of precolonial religion nor a simple transplant of missionary Christianity, but a new synthesis that emerged from the encounter between the two under colonial era conditions, a description that applies equally to the Kimbanguist Church and the Aladura churches described elsewhere in this atlas.