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.