Chief Albert Luthuli was the first African Nobel Laureate, a confessing and practicing Christian within the Congregational Church, and an anti-apartheid activist who was President-General of the African National Congress from 1952 until his untimely death in 1967. Guided by the notion that particular and contextual theological reflections possess broader, catholic significance, the paper discusses Chief Luthuli’s ecclesiology as it emerges from his autobiography ‘Let My People Go’. The paper argues, along with scholars of autobiography criticism such as Smith and Watson (2010), and Coullie et al (2006) that autobiography, which is part of history-making, inscribes one’s personal identity and subjectivity, challenging imposed identities and implicating the lives of others by framing them as friends or strangers in the narrative. In this way, autobiographies create associations or distance between the self and others, resulting in entrenched or contested hierarchies, and the possibility of reconstructing or fabricating social realities and political communities. The paper argues alongside Gary Comstock that autobiographies are by nature “made objects, artefacts that authors selectively construct and reconstruct… [they are ultimately not] dust-free mirrors of the past that unproblematically tell us how things happened. They are… imaginative constructions of authors who are trying to make a single story out of many disparate pieces” (Comstock 1995: 14). Autobiography is marked by the intervention of fallible memory, and performs rhetorical acts of assertion, justification, judgment, conviction, and interrogation which intersect with idiosyncratic acts of remembering. The rhetorical acts performed by Chief Luthuli in Let My People Go disclose an ecclesiology that functions effectively as a political theological critique of apartheid South Africa. In Let My people Go, Luthuli describes the Church as a multi-ethnic community drawn together through an allegiance to Christ as revealed in the Gospels, whose goal is to equip its people concretely to live life here and now; it is a witnessing community whose roots extend back in time, with many exemplars whose faith and praxis ought to be imitated. For Luthuli, while the Church and its ministers are not political per se, the witness of the Church will and ought to be subversive when its primary allegiance to Christ and the praxis that emerges from that allegiance runs counter to state and other ideologies. The discussion of Luthuli’s ecclesiology is set within the historical, theological, and political context of apartheid, while recognising both the constructed nature of autobiographical texts and raising a query as to the appropriateness of appending the label ‘evangelical’ to Luthuli’s outlook and witness, especially as those who self-identified as evangelicals at the time often gave theological endorsement to, or were reticent to critique apartheid. The main contribution of this paper is to furnish theological reflection on an autobiographical narrative cognisant of the intricacies of the genre of autobiography, and adding to broader descriptions and instantiations of evangelicalism as it emerges in the Global South.