The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Office of Church Growth sponsored the event, and Philip Lotspeich and Craig Williams led conference activities. Lotspeich is coordinator of church growth for the General Assembly Council and Williams is on the Office of Church Growth field staff and director of new church development for the Presbytery of the Cascades. “We are very much aware that we need to be instructed by those who often see God at work better than we do,” said Williams. To help those within the American context to be encouraged and trained in their work planting new churches, they invited two conference speakers with new church development experience: Muriithi Wanjau, pastor from Kenya, and Jose Joao Mesquita, pastor from Brazil, to challenge participants with stories and testimonies of what God is doing in the majority world.
Wanjau, pastor of Mavuno Chapel, is a third generation Christian. His grandparents heard the gospel from missionaries who came to Kenya from England and Scotland. “Those young missionaries gave their lives in pretty hostile environments and as a result Christianity is the fastest growing faith in that part of the world,” he said.
“There is a saying in your culture … ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’” Wanjau pointed out in recounting the beginnings of the Mavuno Chapel, one of five different congregations that was created out of a very successful “mother” church. “But God was saying to us, break it and distribute it.”
And they did.
On the first Sunday in July 2005 what had been one large congregation the week before became five new congregations distributed across the city of Nairobi. His NCD chose the name Mavuno, which means “Church of the Harvest.” Kenya is considered to be 80% Christian, though, according to Wanjau, when you look at the actual figures only about 16% go to church on a given Sunday.
“God began to instruct us to go and listen to those outside the church and to begin to understand their culture,” the pastor recalled. They didn’t want to reach those who had already been churched, but those who had, as he put it, no business being in church.
“We went through a lot of criticism from other churches because they couldn’t understand what we were doing,” he admitted. The first thing that those in leadership began to say to each other following worship was, “Guess who came to church on Sunday?”
Not only did they break up, they are distributing — with a vision to reach all 52 capital cities on the African continent.
“ … There is a generation that is bright and the hope of our nations,” Wanjau pointed out. But in the past the church has stayed away from such people, preferring to go to the “easier places,” working among those who are less educated and less financially well off. This younger, brighter generation is often highly critical of the church and assumes it has no need for it. But, urged Wanjau to those gathered, “the reason we are here and not in heaven is that we are supposed to reach those who are not reached, not ourselves.”
The Kenyan pastor challenged those at the conference.
“What tradition is God asking you to die to in order that you might reach the next generation … what … ‘new’ are you being called to create?”
