Simon Kimbangu
A Baptist of the Lower Congo who began to preach and to pray over the sick at Nkamba in 1921, was condemned by a Belgian court-martial and spent the rest of his life in prison. The Kimbanguist Church honours him as the special envoy of Jesus Christ.
Kimbangu was a member of the Baptist church at Wathen in the Lower Congo, and by his own account, as it reached the missionary P. H. J. Lerrigo in 1921, he began to heal and preach after repeated visions that he had at first resisted (Lerrigo, The Prophet Movement in Congo, pp. 270–272). A court-martial condemned him to death that year, and King Albert reprieved him (Lerrigo, The Prophet Movement in Congo, pp. 276–277). Jules Chomé’s entry in the Belgian academy’s biographical dictionary gives his birth as 24 September 1889, with a question mark, and his death in the prison at Elisabethville as 10 October 1951 (Chomé, Kimbangu (Biographie Belge d’Outre-Mer VI), cols. 576–579); the day of his death is given differently in the Kimbanguist account cited below (see Simon Kimbangu and the Kimbanguist Church).
A Kimbanguist account published in 2004 calls him ntumwa, the envoy of Jesus Christ, and says that he did not claim to be Christ’s equal: asked by his judge whether he was the saviour, he is said to have answered that Jesus Christ is the saviour and that he had been sent to proclaim salvation to his own people (Nduku-Fessau Badze, Le Kimbanguisme a quatre-vingt-trois ans, section 1.1).
In the timeline
- 1921, firm dateSimon Kimbangu and the Kimbanguist Church
In 1921 Simon Kimbangu, a Baptist of the Lower Congo, begins to preach and to pray over the sick at Nkamba, and crowds come to him. A Belgian military court sentences him to death; reprieved, he dies in prison thirty years later, and a church grows from his followers.