Abstract
Much of the research on African Initiated Churches (AICs) was conducted and produced over a period of several decades from the 1960s through the 1990s by outside observers from Europe and North America. That alone makes this publication, Kimbanguism: An African Understanding of the Bible by Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot, a particularly significant study. Gampiot is an insider—a Congolese sociologist and the son of a Kimbanguist pastor. With lifelong exposure to the church’s realities and well-earned, sure-footed confidence, the author traces the deep historico-religious and cultural roots of Kimbanguism from precolonial times to the contemporary circumstances that have made the movement the largest AIC in the world today.
While the subtitle of the volume highlights the role of the Bible in the Kimbanguist movement, Gampiot makes it clear that there are, in fact, three theological sources that shape the church’s doctrines: the Bible, inspired hymns, and the prophetic utterances of the church’s spiritual leaders, that is, the three sons of the movement’s founder, Simon Kimbangu, and most notably of his youngest son, Diangienda Kuntima. This claim will be enough to raise the eyebrows of some readers, and concerns only mount as Gampiot further states that, “although Kimbanguists hold the Bible to be sacred, it may be criticized; inspired hymns . . . may be doubted or even rejected; but Papa [Diangienda] is deemed infallible by everyone in the Kimbanguist Church” (89).
Much of this study, then, explores the fascinating dialectic between these three sources, making abundant reference to hymn texts, biblical themes, personal interviews, prophetic pronouncements, official church statements, and testimonies from the faithful. The resulting synthesis of these various streams shaping the church’s doctrinal understandings and practices is what Gampiot believes to be a creative postcolonial appropriation of the Bible designed to meet the needs of identity reconstruction within the African context (260–64). To be fair, he does accurately report that many Christians, including the World Council of Churches and both Roman Catholic and Protestant bodies within the Congo, have chosen to disagree, stating that Kimbanguists have stepped over the line and moved beyond what is acceptable within central Christian understandings (135–54).
Gampiot does do a bit of comparative work in relation to other AICs, most notably Isaiah Shembe’s Church of the Nazarites in South Africa and the Harrist movement in Ivory Coast. The rather lengthy description of the latter (52–61) contains quite a number of inaccuracies (e.g., there was no formal Protestant mission in Ivory Coast prior to Prophet Harris’s ministry; John Ahui was not appointed by the Protestant churches as an emissary to visit Harris in 1928), but these should not detract from the otherwise fresh, sympathetic, amply documented, and well-translated—French to English—presentation we have here of a most unique African religious movement.