In the north-eastern reaches of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the Uélé region bordering the Central African Republic and South Sudan, a church has been growing for more than a hundred years. The Communauté Évangélique de l'Uélé (CECU) — also known as the Free Church in Congo — was planted by missionaries connected to the Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA) and has since grown into a movement of well over a thousand local congregations with hundreds of thousands of believers.
The CECU celebrated its centennial in 2022, a milestone marked by ReachGlobal, the EFCA's global mission arm, and the denomination's international partners. The Congo Consortium — a network of churches and individuals partnering with EFCA's Congo work — has rallied around this landmark, contributing to discipleship, leadership development, and ongoing church planting in a region that remains one of the world's most challenging for consistent ministry.
What the CECU represents is significant for the whole free evangelical family: a church that began as mission has become a self-governing, self-propagating, self-supporting movement of its own — thousands of kilometres from its historic founders, shaped by the Congolese context, and extending the free evangelical tradition into communities that have never heard its name.
ReachGlobal maintains active teams across Cameroon, DRC, Kenya, Malawi, and Tanzania, with the Congo work representing one of its most historic and substantial African partnerships. The CECU story is, among other things, a demonstration of what the free-church tradition looks like when it takes root deeply in a non-Western context: indigenous, evangelical, believers-constituted, and multiplying.
