Simon Kimbangu

Who is Simon Kimbangu?

Simon Kimbangu was a Congolese religious leader whose brief prophetic ministry in 1921 gave rise to one of Africa's largest independent Christian churches. Born in Nkamba in the Bas-Congo region of the Belgian Congo, he trained as a catechist with the British Baptist Missionary Society before experiencing what he described as a divine call to heal and preach. In April 1921 he began a public ministry marked by reported healings that drew enormous crowds, disrupted colonial plantation labor, and alarmed Belgian authorities, who saw the movement as a threat to colonial order. After only about six months, Kimbangu was arrested, tried by a military tribunal, and sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted by King Albert I to life imprisonment. He spent the following thirty years in prison in Lubumbashi (then Elisabethville), far from his home region, and died there in 1951. The church that grew from his ministry, the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth by the Prophet Simon Kimbangu, was formally recognized after independence and became the first African-initiated church admitted to the World Council of Churches in 1969.

Sources: Dictionary of African Christian Biography, "Kimbangu, Simon" (dacb.org) · Britannica, "Simon Kimbangu" · World Council of Churches, member church records