Today, in Christian churches among the Shona-speaking people of Zimbabwe, Mwari is used as equivalent to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Supreme Being, God the Creator. Roman Catholics have used Mwari for God for over forty years, but mainline Protestants employed the term regularly long before this (Creary 2011: 207–208). Mwari, who might be called an indigenous god, thus has been taken over into Christian circles and has been elevated to the position of the highest source of all faith. This applies also to the African Initiated Churches, who frequently refer to Mwari Wokudenga (the God of Heaven) or Mwari Baba (God the Father) (see Daneel 1987: 189, 219). For the new Pentecostal or Charismatic churches, which stress transnational ties and reverse mission, this local application for the universal deity becomes more problematic (see Maxwell 2006; Ojo 2007). Certainly in the mainline churches today, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, Mwari is the accepted word for God.

Adopting Mwari as the name for the Christian Supreme Being in Zimbabwe has not always been straightforward. Jesuit missionaries, for example, in the1890s banned the use of Mwari as a name for God and instead insisted on employing the term Yave (YHWH) or Jehovah. In 1890, the Jesuit Francis Richartz argued that using Mwari as the Christian equivalent for God would confuse the “natives” since they only honour ancestral spirits and do not worship God (Creary 2011: 208).