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David Emmett
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This book examines W.F.P. Burton’s resilience in attempting to form an ideal relationship between Congolese and British Pentecostals in a Belgian colonial setting. I openly proclaim my personal history of activism within both Pentecostalisms. The work that follows is my best endeavour to benefit from my personal history while still pursuing objective scholarly research.

My parents went as Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM) missionaries to Kipushya in 1948. I was born in 1957 at Katea, a mission station of the CEM. The family returned to Birmingham, UK in July 1959 for a twelve-month furlough. This was eleven months before the Congolese were given independence from the Belgian colonisers.

Some of my earliest childhood memories in Birmingham were driving around in the back of a Land Rover, which was supposedly going to go ‘back home’ with us to Congo. The disorder and conflict following Independence stopped that happening. At that time, the whole family was living downstairs in a semi-detached house in King’s Heath, Birmingham. It had been made available for CEM missionaries to use. There was a downstairs toilet and washbasin and an upstairs bathroom with a bath, which we could use only once a week.

My childhood years were spent in Birmingham during which time Burton was an occasional visitor to our family home, which was a few hundred yards up the road from what we called ‘the missionary house’, which continued to give a base for numerous CEM missionaries on furlough. These ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’ with their children visited our house and some became close family friends. On one of Burton’s visits, he painted a picture for my parents while I sat next to him for much of the time. The last time he stayed with the family was June 1970. Burton filled a page in my autograph book with minuscule writing about the promises of God. During that same stay, he showed me how to make a whistle out of a laurel leaf. He then made a crown of laurels and placed it on my head, telling me to run in such way as to get the prize. As well as this, my memory of Burton was seeing him as the one who painted pictures, did magic tricks with peanuts disappearing out of his hands and appearing in my ears, did origami explaining the meaning of the cross and always arrived with two very small cases in which he said were ‘all his worldly possessions’.

In 1981 I became a CEM missionary in the small village of Kipushya, Burton had been the first western missionary to visit there. I was asked to be the head of the secondary school in 1983. One of the school cleaners, I discovered much later, was the widow of Shalumbo, a man Burton introduced to pentecostal experience, but who had preceded Burton in bringing the Christian message to the whole region. Several of his family became friends of mine, his son was my pastor for ten years. A few years later I was invited onto the Executive Council of the Congolese Pentecostal Church for the Kasai provinces and served as their General Treasurer until I left Congo at the start of 1991. During that time I witnessed much church growth and when I left the Congolese Pentecostal Church had over one thousand churches.

I became increasingly concerned by 1986 that the CEM was not working sufficiently alongside the Congolese church leaders. I resigned from the CEM in 1987 and continued to work in Congo with the Congolese Pentecostal Church.

I returned to the UK in 1991 but maintained contact with Congolese friends by letter at first and then by mobile phone from around 2004. In 2006 I returned to Congo for a short visit and returned on a regular basis, three or more times a year for the following ten years.

I have a history with both CEM missionaries and Congolese Pentecostals. In 2012 Allan Anderson pointed out to me that no academic biography had ever been written on Burton. I realised I was well positioned to fill that lacuna in pentecostal historiography. I knew I would be able to literally go the extra mile in my digging for primary sources with regard to Burton and his Congolese co-workers. I have not just examined and discovered extant written archival sources, but also taken oral sources seriously. I have travelled to cities and small villages in Congo to interview elderly Congolese in my efforts to reify Pentecostal folklore by peeling back the layers until the reader can feel as though they have met Burton and some of his Congolese co-workers face to face.

As an individual who is open to the Spirit, I recount and examine the narrative predominantly as an emic observer. I am willing to seriously consider the accounts of healing that I read and hear about. I share in Burton’s idealism, but I also share in the cultural and spiritual frustrations found within the biographical detail of this Pentecostal. By recounting at the start my personal involvement, there is not a credence-giving naiveté over everything I read. I aim to steer a course between unbridled subjectivity and impossible objectivity. The reader will be the judge of the success or otherwise of that.

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