Afrikaanse Protestantse Kerk

Afrikaanse Protestantse Kerk (APK)
Official Logo of the Afrikaanse Protestantse Kerk
Classification	Protestant
Theology	Reformed, Conservative, Separatist
Polity	Presbyterian
Region	South Africa and Namibia
Origin	1987 Pretoria, South Africa
Separated from	Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk
Congregations	220 (2010)
Members	35,000 (2012)
Ministers	93 plus 63

The Afrikaanse Protestantse Kerk (English: Afrikaans Protestant Church), commonly abbreviated APK or AP Kerk is a South African conservative Reformed Church federation with about 35,000 adherents. The federation was formed by 240 congregations, including some in Namibia, and has ecumenical ties with the Afrikaans Protestant Church in England and Wales.

Its official motto is lig in duisternis (meaning light in the darkness) from 1 John 2:9-11 "If we say that we are in the light, yet hate others, we are in the darkness to this very hour. If we love others, we live in the light, and so there is nothing in us that will cause someone else to sin. But if we hate others, we are in the darkness; we walk in it and do not know where we are going, because the darkness has made us blind." And also from John 12:35-36: "So Jesus said to them, “The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.”

In 1982 the World Alliance of Reformed Churches's General Council declared Apartheid to be a sin and its theological justification a heresy, in the process expelling from its membership the Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK), the major branch of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) in South Africa and the traditional mother church of South Africa's Afrikaner population. The shock of this isolation from other branches of the Reformed Churches worldwide led to the adoption in 1986 of Belhar Confession by some branches of the DRC; the NGK, while stopping short of adopting the Belhar Confession, retracted its 1976 defence of apartheid as a biblical imperative, instead releasing a "more nuanced" document called Church and Society that provided "qualified support for separate development."

However, the document "reflected the new majority consensus within the NGK which rejected the older, Kuyperian theology" and thus outraged the more conservative clergy within the NGK: as a "direct result" the Afrikaanse Protestantse Kerk was founded in Pretoria on Saturday, 27 July 1987 by 3000 dissidents, together with conservative elements from other branches of the DRC in South Africa.