Simon Kimbangu and the Kimbanguist Church

Simon Kimbangu belonged to the Baptist church at Wathen, a station of the English Baptist mission in the Lower Congo (Lerrigo, The Prophet Movement in Congo, pp. 270–272); a Kimbanguist account of 2004 calls him a former catechist of that mission (Nduku-Fessau Badze, Le Kimbanguisme a quatre-vingt-trois ans, section 1.1). The story of his call, as the American mission secretary P. H. J. Lerrigo heard it in 1921 from a man who had it from Kimbangu, is that a stranger came to him in dreams, gave him a Bible and told him to preach and to heal, and that he refused more than once (Lerrigo, The Prophet Movement in Congo, pp. 270–272). At last he was told that his soul would be required of him if he did not go to a sick child in a nearby village; he went, prayed, laid his hands on the child and shook violently, and the child recovered (Lerrigo, The Prophet Movement in Congo, pp. 270–272).

Kimbangu settled in his own village of Nkamba, and people came from every direction with their sick, by trail and by rail, so that the medical work of the missions came to a standstill (Lerrigo, The Prophet Movement in Congo, pp. 272–273). Lerrigo, who travelled through the district that August, records cases in which no cure followed and regarded the movement as a delusion (Lerrigo, The Prophet Movement in Congo, pp. 272–273) (Lerrigo, The Prophet Movement in Congo, pp. 276–277). The Kimbanguist account says that Kimbangu preached repentance, the commandments of God and the equality of all peoples, opposed fetishes, sorcery and polygamy, and was the envoy of Jesus Christ and not his equal (Nduku-Fessau Badze, Le Kimbanguisme a quatre-vingt-trois ans, section 1.1).

Lerrigo reports talk that God was about to drive the whites out of the Congo, says that some of the movement’s prophets were said to have told people not to work for them or pay taxes, and writes that the teaching that the Lord would return at once, so that planting was useless, led the government to act (Lerrigo, The Prophet Movement in Congo, p. 275). In the Kimbanguist account Kimbangu told his judge that he had raised no revolt and had only preached the gospel (Nduku-Fessau Badze, Le Kimbanguisme a quatre-vingt-trois ans, section 1.1). According to Jules Chomé, a Belgian lawyer who wrote a book on the trial in 1959, a court-martial at Thysville consisting of a single officer tried him without a defender (Chomé, Kimbangu (Biographie Belge d’Outre-Mer VI), cols. 576–579). It found that by spreading false reports of healings and resurrections and presenting himself as one sent by God he had alarmed the native population and gravely disturbed public order, and it sentenced him to death, though the prosecutor had asked for penal servitude for life (Chomé, Kimbangu (Biographie Belge d’Outre-Mer VI), cols. 576–579). Lerrigo thought the sentences out of proportion to the facts brought out at the trial, and reports that missionaries petitioned King Albert, who reprieved Kimbangu (Lerrigo, The Prophet Movement in Congo, pp. 276–277). He was held in the prison at Elisabethville until his death thirty years later (Chomé, Kimbangu (Biographie Belge d’Outre-Mer VI), cols. 576–579).

Followers of his were scattered to places of banishment across the colony (Nduku-Fessau Badze, Le Kimbanguisme a quatre-vingt-trois ans, sections 1.2–1.3). At the end of 1959 the colonial administration allowed the movement to exist as a church, and in the 1960s it was led by Kimbangu’s son Joseph Diangienda (Chomé, Kimbangu (Biographie Belge d’Outre-Mer VI), cols. 576–579) (Nduku-Fessau Badze, Le Kimbanguisme a quatre-vingt-trois ans, sections 1.2–1.3). The church became a member of the World Council of Churches; in June 2021 the council’s central committee ended that membership “for theological reasons”, which its published summary does not specify (World Council of Churches, Central Committee overview (June 2021) New members and specialized ministries).