[2][3] George Augustus Stallings Jr., then a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington,[4] founded the Imani Temple African-American Catholic Congregation as a single congregation in Washington, D.C., on July 2, 1989.

[5] In 1994, the Imani Temple African American Catholic Congregation, purchased the former Eastern Presbyterian Church,[6] designed by noted Washington architect Appleton P. Clark Jr. and opened in 1893.

[7] In 2006, the excommunicated Catholic archbishop Emmanuel Milingo (who married a woman from South Korea in 2001 at the same ceremony as Stallings)[8] performed a conditional consecration for Stallings and three other married Independent Catholic bishops at the Imani Temple church in Washington.

[9][10] In 2014, the denomination decided to relocate to Prince George's County, Maryland, and hence sold the Imani Temple in Washington to property developers.

Unlike the Latin Catholic Church, it does not as a rule, require celibacy of its priests.