c. 1996 Religion News Service

KINTAMBO, Zaire _ A hymn-singing crowd of some 3,000 spills into the dusty streets around a former brothel that is now an Assemblies of God church in this suburb of Zaire’s capital city of Kinshasa.

Across the main highway, another Pentecostal congregation packs the abandoned auditorium of an agricultural college; a few streets away, a cluster of Baptists meet in someone’s backyard. In Kinshasa, the faithful attend services held everywhere from storefront churches to sports stadiums.

In Zaire, a free-form brand of Christianity is booming. Religious revival here is enthusiastic and varied, but critics say many of the nation’s newest preachers are opportunists who prey on the spiritually hungry.”It is almost unbelievable the growth the church is experiencing here,”said the Rev. Diafwila Mbwangi, of the Church of Christ of Zaire, the government-recognized organization to which all Protestant churches in the country belong.”We have something like 100,000 new people coming to evangelical churches alone every month in Zaire, while every week we have a new church opening up in Kinshasa,”said Mbwangi.”We have far too many people becoming evangelists these days because it is about the best business in Zaire to be involved in.” Some 95 percent of Zaire’s 42 million people are Christians, but until recently, Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s all-powerful dictator for 30 years, held as tight a grip on the church as he did on all other activity. In 1972, Mobutu decreed that only six organized religions could operate in Zaire: the Protestant Church of Christ of Zaire, the Roman Catholic Church, the indigenous Christian Kimbanguist Church, Orthodox Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

But the moves toward democracy in much of Africa, combined with a worsening economic situation and Mobutu’s eroding popularity, forced the government in 1991 to loosen its grip on society, including organized religion. The result was an abundance of new preachers establishing new congregations.

While the explosive growth of new Protestant churches is filling a spiritual need for many Zairians long denied true freedom of religion, it has also introduced some problems. Both the Catholic Church, which has lost members to the new churches, and established Protestant denominations argue that many new congregations are poorly organized and lack effective leaders with a sound knowledge of theology.

Even worse, they say, many of the emerging religious leaders in Zaire are in it for the money.”There is no easier way to make money than to tell people you can save their soul if they give a bit of money here and there,”said Mbwangi.

Established Western churches certainly have no corner on morality. Televangelists in the United States have gone to jail for financial and sexual misconduct; the national treasurer of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. has acknowledged embezzling more than $1 million. And pedophilia scandals continue to plague Roman Catholic clergy. But some of Zaire’s powerful pastors make Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker look like jay-walkers.

One of Zaire’s most celebrated pastors is now in jail. He is the Rev. Fernando Kuthino of the independent evangelical Army of Victory Church. Kuthino was once an Assemblies of God minister who left that denomination to establish his own ministry. He frequently preached on television and had several thousand followers before he was arrested in April by government soldiers and charged with arms trafficking.

While many of his supporters claim he was imprisoned because he was encouraging people to rise up against the government, others here say Kuthino was not beyond getting involved in arms deals.

Jacques Vernaud, the Swiss pastor of the La Borne Assemblies of God Church, has known him since Kuthino was a teen.”He was an ambitious young man,”said Vernaud.”He was a great speaker, but best of all he knew what … Pentecostals like, he knew how to excite them. He got a lot of support from Europe and from the Haitian community in the States. When he came back here he built a huge congregation and started making an enormous amount of money. This man had bodyguards from the security forces, and a big villa. He was quite powerful.” Vernaud believes though that the Zairian government had Kuthino arrested more because he took business away from other powerful Zairians rather than because he posed any threat to the government or broke any laws. “But Kuthino is only the most obvious example _ you know, there are many others,”said Vernaud.

Vernaud related one experience he had with self-styled evangelical preacher Sony Kafuti.”Now here is a man who is quite far from Christian ethics,”said Vernaud.”Sony runs a pretty big church here and is well known around Kinshasa. He used my name and the name of my church to order several million dollars of medicine from a company in Switzerland.”When the company sent the stuff down here and never got payment they came looking for me. It was the first I had heard of it. One of the pharmacy company’s representatives actually accosted me after service one day here and accused me of stealing from the company. Well, this man tracked Sony down and later apologized to me about it but nothing ever happened to Sony,”said Vernaud.

Then there is Honore Ngbanda, the former head of the national intelligence service, now an independent televangelist on the Zairean airwaves, raising money by preaching adherence to biblical principles. Ngbanda also runs a”Christian cafe”in Kinshasa, where patrons consume food and Ngbanda’s unique brand of preaching.

Here he is still known as”the”Terminator”because of his reputation for eliminating suspected enemies of the state. Ngbanda is still a close associate of Mobutu, according to Willy Katupa, a journalist with the Kinshasa daily `Le Soft.'”Ngbanda is a powerful man who is making a lot of money and all the while he is under the full protection of the president,”said Katupa.”When you are with guys like Ngbanda and Kuthino you can’t really speak of them as preachers. There is absolutely no link between them and God.” Zaire’s boomtown Protestantism and the dubious characters and practices it spins off have much to do with the dire straits in which the nation finds itself. Crime is rampant in the cities; the economy is in a downward spiral; joblessness is on the rise. The average Zairian who does work earns about $500 a year. Social services, always slack, have nearly ceased to exist, especially in the countryside, where the church is often the only provider of medicine, education and hope. “People in Zaire are desperate,”said the Rev. Pierre Bosangia, an official of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Kinshasa.”People are looking for miracles, and there are a lot of these new pastors out there who are taking advantage of that. I know personally several of these pastors who are former intelligence operatives who are using their positions to carve out their own territory. It is a big money-making business.” But profiteering goes beyond rogue individuals. In some cases it is institutional.

Many mainline Protestant churches are using money collected from their congregations to invest in commercial ventures, critics say. Missionaries here point to examples of church leaders starting banks and small businesses with money collected from their congregants.

Also, some churches painstakingly record donations from individuals, exerting pressure on members to reach monthly tithing targets _ a practice that is frowned upon by religious leaders and missionaries.”We have a number of churches in Zaire, including mainline Protestant churches, that have a very controlled way of tithing,”said the Rev. Dale Garcide, dean of the International Center of Evangelism, a pastoral training center near Kinshasa sponsored by a variety of evangelical churches in the West. “In some churches, indeed many, each member has to have a membership card,”said Garcide, a missionary with Evangelism Resources based in Lexington, Ky.”That card is used almost solely for tithing. The church treasurer marks off each week when you tithe. This is a very strong form of control by the church leadership, but it is ingrained now and will be very difficult to get them to change,”he said.

MJP END FLEMING