Fulfilling the Christian Mission Through Law

A new article by Matilda Arvidsson and Simon Larsson examines how Swedish missionaries became legal actors in Lower Congo between 1881 and 1908. Published in Studia Theologica – Nordic Journal of Theology, the article focuses on the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden (Svenska Missionsförbundet) and its activities during a period that stretched from pre-colonial Bakongo societies into King Leopold II’s Congo Free State.

The article asks how Swedish missionaries understood and practiced law as part of their Christian mission. Rather than treating mission work as only a matter of preaching, education, or conversion, the study shows that law became central to how missionaries imagined and attempted to build a Christian society in Congo. Their work took place in a setting marked by legal plurality, where Bakongo normative traditions, missionary theology, and the emerging colonial legal order overlapped and competed.

The Trials notebook, Kingenge 1904, by Swedish MCCS missionary C. N. Börrisson. Note: Riksarkivet (RA), Svenska Missionsförbundet-Missionskyrkans arkiv (SMF-SMK) SE/RA730284, Missioner och missionsstationer, Kongomissionen missionsstationer, Kingenge Missionsstation, Handlingar rörande församlingar och rättsväsende, 1904–1936 (F2:1). 

At the centre of the study is a remarkable archival source: a notebook from 1904 entitled Rättegångar — “Trials” — kept at the Kingenge mission station. The notebook records cases in which Swedish missionaries adjudicated disputes involving Christian parishioners as well as people from surrounding villages. These cases concerned matters such as kinship, slavery, compensation, violence, marriage, and local forms of justice. They reveal that missionaries were not only religious teachers but also practical arbiters of social conflict.

The article argues that the Swedish missionaries did not simply operate according to a clear separation between church and state. Although the Mission Covenant Church in Sweden valued the distinction between religious and secular authority, the situation in Congo was far more complicated. In practice, missionaries acted as colonial legal intermediaries. They drew on Christian moral ideas, Bakongo legal and social categories, and Congo Free State regulations in order to settle disputes and assert authority.

This makes the Swedish mission an important case for understanding how Christian mission, law, and colonial state-building became entangled. The missionaries sought to create a Christian social order, but doing so required them to engage with existing Bakongo institutions and with the limited and often violent authority of the Congo Free State. Their legal practices were therefore neither purely theological nor simply colonial. They emerged in the uncertain space between multiple “kingdoms”: divine authority, local authority, and colonial state power.

By focusing on everyday legal practice at a mission station, the article contributes to broader discussions of law, colonialism, and Christianity in Central Africa. It shows how missionaries helped reshape social relations not only through preaching and schooling, but also through adjudication, registration, discipline, and conflict resolution. The Trials notebook offers a rare window into these processes and into the role of Swedish missionaries in the legal history of Congo.

Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/0039338X.2025.2470720