KIMBANGUISM: AN AFRICAN INITIATED CHURCH

Authors

  • Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot Sorbonne University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7833/113-0-101

Keywords:

Kimbanguism, African Initiated Church, Black Identity, Holy Trinity, Incarnation

Abstract

 During the early 1920s in what was then known as the Belgian Congo, a Christian revival movement was initiated by an African, a Baptist catechist named Simon Kimbangu, who immediately challenged the colonial order by preaching to and healing the local population. The Kimbanguist Church, an African Independent Church born from this movement, considers itself as a tool of identity recon-struction, empowering the believers to express their suffering and challenge the racial inequalities still extant in the post-colonial context. A member of the World Council of Christian Churches since 1969, with an estimated membership of 17 million today, the Kimbanguist Church has evolved, as the American sociologist Susan Asch explained, with two parallel dimensions. The first is made up of the educated minority, which is struggling to bring about theological reform, while the second one, composed of the tradition-oriented majority, has imposed popular beliefs, throwing the church into a conflict with the World Council of Churches since the year 2000.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot, Sorbonne University

 CNRS-GSRLInstitute for Signifying Claremont Graduate University 

Downloads

Published

2014-04-17

How to Cite

Gampiot, A. M. (2014). KIMBANGUISM: AN AFRICAN INITIATED CHURCH. Scriptura: Journal for Biblical, Theological and Contextual Hermeneutics, 113, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.7833/113-0-101

Issue

Vol. 113 (2014)

Section

Articles

License

Authors retain copyright and grant the Journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this Journal.

This is an open access journal, and the authors and journal should be properly acknowledged, when works are cited.

Authors may use the publishers version for teaching purposes, in books, theses, dissertations, conferences and conference papers.

A copy of the authors’ publishers version may also be hosted on the following websites:

  • Non-commercial personal webpage or blog.
  • Institutional webpage.
  • Authors Institutional Repository.

The following notice should accompany such a posting on the website: “This is an electronic version of an article published in Scriptura, Volume XXX, number XXX, pages XXX–XXX”, DOI.  Authors should also supply a hyperlink to the original paper or indicate where the original paper (http://scriptura.journals.ac.za/pub) may be found.

Authors publishers version, affiliated with the Stellenbosch University will be automatically deposited in the University’s’ Institutional Repository SUNScholar.

Articles as a whole, may not be re-published with another journal.

The following license applies:

Attribution CC BY-NC-ND 4.0