A Church Built in His Absence

Kimbanguism was constructed almost entirely while its founder was in prison. The administration deported his followers in large numbers to distant districts, which scattered the teaching across the colony instead of ending it, and for thirty years the movement existed as an illegal network of house meetings under continuous surveillance. Kimbangu himself, held incommunicado, played no organising role.

Leadership fell in practice to his wife Marie Muilu and later to his sons, and the youngest, Joseph Diangienda, formally organised the church after Belgian recognition in 1959, a year before independence. It grew very quickly. It joined the World Council of Churches in 1969, the first African initiated church admitted, and it now has several million members across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, the Republic of the Congo and the diaspora. Its theology has been the subject of considerable discussion, in particular the place accorded to Kimbangu himself, on which the church's own formulations and those of its critics have not always matched, and there have been internal divisions over the question. It is a large living church and the atlas describes it rather than adjudicating its doctrine.