The Prophetic Office of Simon Kimbangu

Simon Kimbangu was a Baptist mission catechist at Nkamba in the Lower Congo when, in April 1921, he began laying hands on the sick. Accounts of healings spread within weeks, plantations and mission stations emptied as people walked to Nkamba, and the Belgian administration read the movement as sedition rather than revival. He was arrested in September of the same year, tried by a military court, sentenced to death, and reprieved by the king to life imprisonment. He was moved to Elisabethville, now Lubumbashi, at the far end of the colony from his home, and he died there in 1951 after thirty years in prison, having never led a congregation again. His public ministry had lasted about six months.

Everything the church teaches about him was therefore developed by others, in his name, across three decades during which he was in no position to endorse or correct it, first in clandestine village networks under colonial suppression, then in the organized church his sons founded in 1956 and which was admitted to the World Council of Churches in 1969, the first African Initiated Church to be received. That sequence is the reason the question of his status is difficult. A founder who is absent for thirty years and then dead cannot arbitrate between the readings of him that grow up in his absence.

Marie-Louise Martin, a theologian who taught in the Kimbanguist church's own theological school and wrote the first substantial study of it, argued that the church's teaching keeps Kimbangu firmly within a Christian frame. On her account he is a prophet in the biblical sense, a witness sent to Africa, and the church's confession is trinitarian and Christ-centred; the readings that make him a messiah are an outsider's error, inherited from a colonial habit of treating any African prophet movement as a political messianism in religious dress.

Bengt Sundkler, writing earlier and comparatively about southern African prophet churches, had described their founders as occupying a mediating position between God and the community which is not easy to distinguish from a messianic one in practice, whatever the formal confession says, because it is the prophet's person that the community treats as the channel. The two readings use much of the same evidence, the hymns, the pilgrimage to Nkamba which the church calls the New Jerusalem, the honours paid to Kimbangu's family, and reach different conclusions about what they mean. Neither has been refuted. The dispute is also not merely historical: what the church officially teaches about Kimbangu in the present century is itself a matter the atlas cannot settle from the sources it holds, and it is recorded as an open question rather than answered.