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It took six months for a rebel alliance to march into Zaire's capital, Kinshasa, ending in May dictator Mobutu Sese Seko's 32-year reign. With Laurent Kabila now in charge of the country—renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo—Christians wonder how long it will take for church and missionary work to resume fully and freely after the looting, evacuations, and killings.

Starting last October from the eastern region bordering Rwanda, Kabila's Alliance of Democratic Forces swept through the former Zaire, swiftly capturing towns with little serious opposition from Mobutu's unruly government army. It was an amazing military feat, given a dilapidated road system and great distances in Congo, a country of 45 million people that stretches across 905,000 square miles, an area roughly equivalent to the United States east of the Mississippi River.

As the rebels advanced westward, government soldiers retreated, attacking civilians and pillaging along the way. Western missionaries who did not pull out ahead of the revolution scaled back and evacuated as Kabila's fighters began to score victories. Local church officials who bravely remained at mission bases often suffered maltreatment from Mobutu's troops.

ON THE RAMPAGE: Near the end, desperate, greedy soldiers assaulted members of the Communaute Evangelique en Ubangi-Mongala (CEUM), a church with about 114,000 members in Mobutu's native northwest region.

CEUM's 872 churches and preaching points are supported by the Evangelical Covenant Church, which began missionary work in the country in 1937. Near CEUM headquarters at Gemena, soldiers put guns in the ears of national church president Luyada Gbuda and demanded that he give them "the dollars that the American missionaries had left," according to Barbara Johnson, Covenant Church Africa missions director and a missionary nurse who served in Zaire for 23 years. When Gbuda explained no such money existed, they "hit him around the head with their guns," Johnson said.

The troops stole the church leader's truck, hit him again, and left. He and other Covenant church leaders fled to their home villages as more soldiers rushed through Gemena.

"We are in Mobutu territory, and we will definitely feel the results of the retreating soldiers who will now have no job, no future, and are going to take everyone else down with them," Johnson told CT.

In the ensuing days, troops pillaged Evangelical Free Church residences and Wycliffe Bible Translators' offices in Gemena. Headquarters of the Congolese Free Church, completed last year, sustained heavy damage, and a seminary at Goyongo, jointly run by the Free Church and Covenant Church, was destroyed. Looters peeled off the roofing and followed students into a nearby forest to steal personal goods the seminarians took with them. Renegade soldiers beat the seminary director.

The trials of Covenant and Free Church leaders are not unique in the crisis.

Steve Wolcott of Africa Inland Mission (AIM) reports that a Bible institute professor, A. Alege, died in March after being hacked to death by rebels.

Former soldiers beat Etsea Ang'apoza Kile, president of the AIM-affiliated Evangelical Community in the Center of Africa (CECA) church, and two teachers at a seminary in Bunia after AIM evacuated last December. Walcott says other pastors have been beaten in outlying areas, and at least one pastor in the Bondo area where Norwegian Baptists have worked was killed in January.

In Kinshasa, the capital, the evangelical relief agency World Vision reports that on May 17 armed Mobutu soldiers robbed and threatened country director Daniel Kawata Aji-Pash and his family just before Kabila's forces arrived.

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July 14 1997, Vol. 41, No. 8