Catholic Information Service for Africa (Nairobi)
Henry Makori
28 March 2008
opinion
No doubt Kenya is healing. Slowly, we are emerging from the darkest period of our independent history. Everyone is talking peace - even notoriously hawkish politicians now strive to sound nice. Hopes are rising. There are great expectations of the new grand coalition government; a general feeling that the post-election carnage should become truly a turning point in our national life.
For Christians, the nation's majority, this is also a most appropriate time for soul-searching. The politicians have rethought their agendas and methods and, for the sake of the nation, made compromises unimaginable a few months ago. One of the happiest outcomes of the negotiations is dismantling of the 'imperial presidency', condemned for years by advocates of democratic reform, including the Church, as the foundation of dictatorship and corruption.
It is no longer business as usual in the political arena. What about the Church? Are not changes needed there too? Houses of prayer fill up every Sunday (or Saturday). Yet, as professed followers of the Prince of Peace, whose law is love, Christians turned on their neighbours with demonic barbarity. They killed, maimed, looted, raped, torched and evicted. They fuelled hate through telephone and email messages, called others names, laughed at their ethnicity. They became agents of evil.
What can possibly explain this blatant hypocrisy? Poor Church leadership? Already, Protestant and evangelical pastors publicly admitted that their voice was "swallowed up by the cacophony of those of other vested interests." They called on "Church leaders to recapture their strategic position as the moral authority of the nation." The Catholic bishop of Nakuru Diocese, Peter Kairo, expressed similar sentiments at Easter. "I accept that we have come from trying moments where at times it was hard to keep to our Christian values. But I urge you to come back to Christ and beg for forgiveness."
New evangelization
But the problem appears to be deeply-rooted, not merely a lapse of judgment on the part of the clergy and the faithful in the heat of political passions. Despite the huge Christian numbers, people's daily lives generally do not seem to be sufficiently influenced by the faith. Some theologians have concluded that it is because African converts to Christianity never received a positively transformative evangelization. They were taught only to "pray and obey." The evangelization also destroyed African cultural identity and disempowered the people by disconnecting the Gospel from the deep human desire for holistic development.
Believers were not taught that salvation also meant liberation from every form of oppression; that authentic Christian living included not only going to church and doing justice, but also demanding it for everyone from the holders of authority. It is apparent that consciences still remain largely untouched by the social justice dimension of the faith. On their part, Christian political rulers in Africa took advantage of infused obeisance and went on to become dictators who drove their people to great misery.
Though the Church has played a role in the advancement of good governance in Africa, that role has mostly been limited to outspokenness of the clergy, and not "conscientizing and mobilizing the masses into political activism in the mould of the biblical prophets," as Father Iheanyi Enwerem says in an article in the current issue of the Catholic journal, African Ecclesial Review.
In mostly Christian Kenya, for instance, the Church's involvement in civic education has not boosted public awareness of governance issues. A national survey conducted last year by the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission (CJPC) found that "only a tiny proportion of Kenyans" had been exposed to civic education. How much is civic formation a priority for the Church?
Prophetic role
African Church leaders must rethink their prophetic role, says Fr Enwerem. Future pastors should be trained in political activism so that, like the prophets of old, they too "can take a critical stance on situations around them and by their own lifestyle, word and action, challenge those values which their society holds dear, with the ultimate aim to persuade the members of society to commit themselves towards the realization of an egalitarian and God-fearing society."
Ugandan theologian, Fr Dr Deusdedit Nkurunziza, also writing in the African Ecclesial Review, calls for a paradigm shift , "not just to prolong and repeat day after day, year after year, the evangelization inherited from European missionaries," but to restore the identity and dignity of Africans, "with emphasis on the right to development." The African should no longer be seen as "an object of charity."
The Church, he continues, must "empower and enable Africans to become free individuals who must remain unfettered to act, speak, work, associate and accumulate wealth motivated by faith in the Risen Lord for the good of the community." To that end, Fr Nkurunzuza proposes inclusion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the African Charter for Human and People's Rights of in African catechisms.
These, indeed, are the issues that the Church in Kenya should ponder as it coughs out the phlegm that muffled its prophetic voice. But there is an even bigger internal problem of exercise of power. Fr Enwerem says the Church is "neither a democracy nor democratic." How then can it identify intimately with, and effectively advance, the people's democratic aspirations, when it is still governed as a monarchy?
[Henry Makori is CISA Editor. The views expressed in this article are personal]
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