In Migration and Christian Identity in Congo (DRC) Emma Wild-Wood examines the evolution of the Anglican Church in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Eglise Anglicaine du Congo (EAC), over its first century with a focus on developments in the church since the time of the Congo's independence from Belgium. Wild-Wood seeks to show two things. First is how Anglicanism was used by one set of its African adherents to shape a Christian identity. Second is how the various migrations of African peoples across east central Africa since the time of the Congo's independence in 1960 have prompted multiple reformulations of this identity. As she explains, Anglicanism provided its adherents with a “home in a new place” where ever their journey took them, but that home was under almost constant reconstruction.

Wild-Wood dedicates her first substantive chapter to a depiction of the Anglican Church during the era of European colonialism. As she stresses, the EAC was from the first an African initiated and an African maintained church. The church traces its origins to the evangelical efforts of Rev. Apolo Kivebulaya, a Church Missionary Society (CMS) priest who preached along the Semeliki escarpment on the border separating the DRC and Uganda starting in 1896. Kivebulaya's sermons found an audience especially among the Hema people of the region, and by the time of his death in 1936, a prosperous Anglican Church, narrowly associated with the Hema, had been established. Following in the traditions in which he was taught, the church Kivebulaya founded can be characterized, to use Wild-Wood's terms, first as “gerontocratic,” meaning that the eldest members claimed authority over church matters; second as “male-dominated,” meaning that liturgical as well as pastoral initiative remained in the hands of men; third as “vernacularized,” meaning that at most points the Anglican Church experience had been fused (acculturated) with the Hema cultural experience (42). During the colonial era, Protestant Christianity was regulated by the Belgian government. The EAC fell outside of the purview of the consortium of government recognized Protestant churches. As such, during the era Anglicans suffered, if not discrimination, then certainly marginalization among other Christians. This marginalization only reinforced the sense of identity among Hema Anglicans.

Building primarily upon oral interviews collected over years of study, the rest of Wild-Wood's monograph is dedicated to relating how the Hema dominated Anglican Church of the colonial era was transformed during the Independence era by a variety of migrations, one of these being the migration of Hema Anglicans from their rural homeland to cities in search of work but another, perhaps more important, variety being the influx of new populations into Anglicanism. As Wild-Wood explains, from the start Anglicanism was associated in the African mind with “maendeleo,” a word connoting progress, advance, and self-improvement (43). Anglicanism was a Christian experience spread through schools and learning. Anglicanism was also a Christian experience expressed through ritual and ceremony, and through “heshima,” the display of proper respect for both church services and those who officiate at church services (38). These traits attracted other Africans to Anglicanism. These new populations have consistently and successfully sought to overlay the traits that led them to Anglicanism, however, with other, what they chose to see as more African, Christian sensibilities. The establishment of Anglican chapels, and ultimately parishes, in cities soon compromised the narrow association between Anglicanism and Hema ethnicity. Revivalists with roots in Uganda questioned the reverence with which earlier generations of Anglicans treated church ceremony. Perhaps the two most interesting chapters in Wild-Wood study are one that discusses how women challenged male dominance, and another that shows how young Anglicans confronted the authority claimed by their elders. At the close of the twentieth century, a religious experience that forty years earlier had had one, rather specific articulation, was now “pluriform” in expression. This transformation had not been without acrimony. But as Wild-Wood suggests, Anglicans in the DRC had come to celebrate “unity in diversity” (211).

As Wild-Wood explained her goal, she hoped to respond to Terence Ranger's plea that scholars come to see “mission churches as much less alien and independent churches as much African as hitherto has been the case” (214). Her response to the first part of that plea, the only part with which her research was concerned, should be counted as effective. Wild-Wood did two things that should make her work worthy of wide scholarly attention. First she wrote a history of a Christian church in Africa that makes almost no reference to Europeans. Building upon the work of David Maxwell on the dynamics behind “popular Christianity” in Africa (African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement, Oxford: James Currey, 2006), Wild-Wood shows how African cultural and spiritual concerns propelled the evolution of a Christian church. Arguably as revolutionary is the fact that she wrote this history about what was originally a mission church. The second thing Wild-Wood did was to give a whole new slant to the process of “indigenization” of Christianity as it occurred in Africa. Dismissing lines of interpretation such as that offered by the Comaroffs, which treat Christianity as a colonizing religion (John and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), she illustrates how what many would describe as a distinctly European religious experience was embraced and transformed by Africans for Africans.