Megachurch Christianity Reconsidered

Millennials and Social Change in African Perspective

Wanjiru M. Gitau

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780830873746
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christlicher Dienst

Christianity Today 2019 Book of the Year Award, Missions/Global ChurchBuilding from a behind-the-scenes case study of Kenya's Nairobi Chapel and its "daughter" Mavuno Church, Wanjiru M. Gitau expands their story into a narrative that offers analysis of the rise, growth, and place of megachurches worldwide in the new millennium. In contexts experienced as deeply volatile, and on a continent reeling from the structural incoherence imposed in colonial times, megachurches provide a map of reality to navigate by, with the gospel as their primary compass. Gitau shows that recognizing the psychological, spiritual, and social destabilization of modernizing societies is the first step to valuing the place of megachurches in contemporary Christianity.Through analysis of social demography, theology, philosophy of ministry, leadership development, and strategy, Megachurch Christianity Reconsidered makes integral sense of the historical and social forces that give megachurches their growth opportunity, and reclaims them as a subject of serious theological conversation.This engaging account centers on the role of millennials in responding to the need for "a home for new generations" amid the dislocating transitions of globalization and postmodernity in postcolonial Africa and around the world. Gitau gleans practical wisdom for postdenominational churches everywhere (mega- and otherwise) from the lessons learned in Kenya's remarkable urban, evangelical renewal movement.Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

1

Oscar Muriu

Bold Leadership in a Liminal Decade

NAIROBI CHAPEL: RISING OUT OF A DISORIENTED DECADE

Nairobi Chapel was started in 1952 as a small fellowship for colonial settler families. Since Kenya was a British colony, settlers generally paid homage to the Anglican All Saints Cathedral that met at what was then the edge of Nairobi. But a few families who could not quite fit in with the Anglicans began meeting instead at the Girl Guides headquarters. Their worship services and leadership structure reflected the traditions of the Plymouth Brethren. Congregations in this tradition did not recruit pastors, because they would come from among the elite and congregants deemed themselves sufficiently educated to interpret the Bible without appointed clergy. This group registered as the Nairobi Undenominational Church and built a little chapel near a newly established college that would grow into Kenya’s premier research institution, the University of Nairobi. Gaining visibility through a radio program named The Bible Hour, they quickly experienced what was then significant growth among settlers and soldiers. However, when Kenya gained independence from the British in 1963, growth was reversed as most of the British returned to Britain. In subsequent years, although the University of Nairobi expanded around the Nairobi Chapel premises, students thought of it as a boring church for old white people and were not interested.

By the late 1980s, membership had dropped to sixteen people, only two of whom were Africans and the rest of diverse European origins. Barely able to keep the lights on, Nairobi Chapel faced closure. The story goes that these remaining members spent six months praying and fasting about the future of the half-acre property on which it stood. They sensed that God was asking them to “indigenize” the church. In 1989 they requested the Reverend Mutava Musyimi, who was then pastor of Nairobi Baptist Church (and would later head the National Council of Churches of Kenya, join politics as a member of Parliament, and subsequently vie for the presidency), to help. Musyimi visited as a pastor for a while and took some time to understand this little congregation. He then explained that to indigenize, the leadership would have to adjust their Plymouth Brethren community to bring on a lead pastor, open up participation in Holy Communion, and create room for young people. Attracting young people would mean rethinking their methods of worship, outreach, and organizing for regular fellowship. Not fully grasping what this meant, the members agreed.

Oscar Muriu, a young man who had a passionate sense of call into pastoral ministry, was at the time just finishing his master of divinity degree at the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology. Musyimi had known Muriu for several years, observed his deep commitment to the Lord, and admired his unshakable conviction that he was called to be a pastor. He presented the dilemma of the Nairobi Chapel to Muriu. The only downside, he informed him, was that the little church did not have funds to pay a salary that would be adequate to sustain his young family. Muriu accepted a stipend that was partly subsidized from Nairobi Baptist’s funds for a time. Toward the end of 1989, Muriu, his wife, Beatrice Wambui, and a team of other young people from Nairobi Baptist were commissioned to lead Nairobi Chapel.

In a year Muriu was confirmed as the pastor of the little church. With a new focus on evangelism to university students and revamped worship, Nairobi Chapel soon found itself flooded with students who eventually came back as young families. By 1993 the tiny sanctuary that had been built to accommodate under a hundred people was packed with more than two hundred, mostly students. They knocked down side walls to expand the wings, tucked in more benches, and creatively maxed out the space to hold four hundred people. Soon they had to run two services, then three, then four. The numerical growth continued year by year. By the late 1990s, Nairobi Chapel had to hold seven weekend services to accommodate up to three thousand adults, most of whom were former students now with young families. A separate Thursday night worship service for university students, called SALT (Serving a Living Transformer), was also started. In 2000 Nairobi Chapel embarked on a major capital campaign to move to a large piece of land. However, in another few years the church changed course when it decided to divide up and spread out around the city in five separate congregations. The Mavuno Church was planted out of this decision as a congregation of four hundred members.

What was it about Muriu’s leadership that turned this declining church into a successful megachurch and precipitated the success of Mavuno and the other church plants in the next decade?

Muriu was born in 1965 to a father who was a businessman. He attended Lenana High School, a boys’ boarding school founded in the missionary era with a reputation as a leading institution for brilliant young men. After high school his father sent him to India to obtain a bachelor’s degree in zoology. He came to Christ while he was in India and responded to the call to serve God when he was at a retreat in the mountains of northern India, where he witnessed a Hindu devotee’s futile quest to find God by staring into the blazing hot sun. When he returned to Kenya, Muriu was planning to pursue a higher degree in science so that he could serve God as a leading scientist, but Mutava Musyimi challenged him instead to pursue a master of divinity degree to prepare to be a pastor. In 1986 Muriu joined the recently established Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST). This school had been started in 1983 by Association for Theological Education in Africa (ACTEA) as a part of a vision to train evangelical leaders for the growing church in Africa. It was at the end of Muriu’s studies at NEGST that Musyimi once again approached him with the proposition that he should pastor Nairobi Chapel.

Muriu was not raised in a church, so even with his theological education, he had to learn pastoral leadership on the job. But this placed him at an advantage, since he didn’t have to spend time unlearning old habits and models in order to lead innovatively. Since Nairobi Chapel was also in transition from the old missionary-shaped reality to a new era, there was no preprogrammed script for him to follow as a leader. So he created a path by walking in it.

Initially Musyimi supervised the younger man, but quickly realized that he was wholly capable of thriving on his own. Musyimi stepped back, initially to the loud protestations of the unassuming Muriu. But then Muriu owned his leadership role and gave it his all. When asked how Nairobi Chapel grew phenomenally under his leadership, Muriu would simply comment that the elders who commissioned him figured out, “With a church of under twenty people, we couldn’t do much damage. But we didn’t know what we were doing. . . . We were learning on the go.”1

A leadership position is usually understood in one of three ways. Autocratic leadership is based on a traditionally assigned role, usually within an inheritance structure such as a monarchy. Bureaucratic leadership is holding an office under legal or contractual arrangements with stakeholders who have defined responsibilities as well as privileges. Democratically elected leaders, CEOs, and other office-based positions are seen this way. Charismatic leadership is usually contingent to a situation that comes up rather unexpectedly, requiring a gifted personality to rise to the occasion and guide the people. The success of charismatic leadership is based on the intersection of personal gifting and a kairos moment. While there are no hard lines between these three leadership models, there are definite expectations associated with each of them.

But this was not the case with the assignment that Muriu came into as a young man; he was simply a pastor. In fact, pastoral work wasn’t even referred to as leadership at that time. Muriu was in uncharted territory, particularly because of the marginal place that Nairobi Chapel occupied. Anthropologists use the term liminal to describe that place where individuals and society “don’t really know what they are doing.”2 Liminality is the threshold between two worlds, one an old, often-decaying order, and a future that is vaguely imagined, yet to take shape. But it is precisely that threshold where there is potential for new possibilities.

The decaying world in which Muriu became the pastor of a nondescript little chapel sandwiched between university residential halls was the 1990s, a disorienting decade for the whole Kenyan population. Under the presidency of Daniel arap Moi, Kenya was experiencing profound confusion. In 1978 Moi had taken over after the death of the first president, Jomo Kenyatta. In the first five years of his rule, Moi fared well under his fuata nyayo philosophy—that is, following in the footsteps of the founding president as a unifying leader. Beginning in the 1980s, Kenya, like many African countries, was hit by a series of misfortunes: a failed military coup in 1982, drought and famine, the emerging crisis of HIV/AIDS, and the implosion of the war-torn neighboring countries of Somalia, Uganda, Congo, Sudan, and Ethiopia. Throughout this time Kenya was under immense pressure. Internally, the country fell into disrepair with collapsing infrastructure, endemic poverty, rampant crime, and escalating political dissent. By the late 1980s President Moi’s leadership was being challenged by increasing opposition demanding open democratic space through multiparty politics and better distribution of national resources. In reaction, Moi and those closest to him tightened their grip on power in unconventional ways that made Kenyans cower in deference. This was a time of severe political repression, with the disappearance or torture of supposed dissidents. In turn, ethnic communities and the rural poor turned against each other in anarchic conflict.

One of the devastating sects that arose around this time was a quasi-religious group known as the Mungiki. This ethnically fundamentalist group came into the limelight in the early 1990s, following ethnic clashes that targeted Kikuyu people in the Rift Valley Province. Rallying disaffected Kikuyu youth, Mungiki compelled adherents to abandon Western lifestyles and Christianity to worship the traditional Kikuyu god Ngai and to practice ritual customs such as female circumcision and prayer and sacrifices facing Mount Kenya. All this was to awaken the apparently oppressed Kikuyu people. Organizing with army-like discipline, the movement gained a massive following of about two million youth at the height of its visibility. To fund its activities, the Mungiki established a parallel government in crime-ridden, low-income settlements of Nairobi. The movement also took control of the chaotic Matatu transport and construction industries, levying protection tax and dishing out informal justice to offenders in these areas. Basic law enforcement and justice systems were so broken and corrupt that low-income and rural residents welcomed Mungiki protection for a fee. With time, however, these actions spiraled into extortionate vengeance.

While Mungiki had the greatest visibility, there were other similarly organized and politically funded fundamentalist militia groups that galvanized their communities by reasserting traditional lore and identity over against other perceived “enemy” tribes and invasive modernity. Such groups included warriors from the Kalenjin communities, the Sabaot land defense force from the Elgon district, Chinkoro of the Kisii community, the Mombasa Republican Movement from the coastal Kwale district, the Taliban Luo group in Nairobi’s informal settlements, and Jeshi la Mzee, among others.3 Such groups caused considerable civil unrest throughout the 1990s.

FORMING AND LEADING A CREATIVE COMMUNITAS

This was the larger world in which Muriu pastored and grew Nairobi Chapel from twenty people to three thousand: one shadowed by poverty, political repression and retaliation, and fundamentalist ethnic mobilizing around traditional lore. Opposition politicians, civil societies, and NGOs all tried to make sense of the chaos through political activism and humanitarian-driven work. A new brand of Pentecostal churches also thrived in this decade (which will be explored further in chapter two). Yet much of this action—whether political, ecclesial, economic, or cultural—only increased the number of dissonant voices without a coherent vision to guide the country to renewal.

Anthropologists point out that the reconstructive possibilities of a liminal period of time lie in both the decaying order and the potential in a forgotten or alienated part of society. Although Muriu jokes that he couldn’t do much damage with the few white folks who remained at Nairobi Chapel, they were not the objective of his ministry efforts. The university students were his interest. For all practical purposes the university fraternity was forgotten by the political class. There was plenty of restiveness within public universities, including frequent strikes in protest of botched political processes. But to shush them, President Moi would tell young people to await their turn tomorrow. Likewise, Christians in the university had become disconnected from existing churches. Student movements such as FOCUS (Fellowship of Christian Unions), Navigators, and Campus Crusade (New Life) were quite active in the universities. But these Christian groups were not addressing the volatile concerns of the time and so remained relatively small, as they were deemed out of touch with reality by the majority of students.

Muriu inherited a church that had a successful beginning with the Plymouth Brethren. In its prime back in the 1960s, it had run a radio ministry and attracted quite a following among the British. This history gave Muriu and Nairobi Chapel some legitimacy that was not available to the new, unaffiliated Pentecostal startups that were all over the place. Muriu was not tied down by a board of elders, nor were there administrators to consult on day-to-day decisions. Autonomy from political, economic, and ecclesial control brought opportunities for new and experimental possibilities in evangelism, community formation, and particularly leadership and leadership development.

As a graduate of NEGST, Muriu was aware of how African churches and theologians had wrestled with the problem of foreignness in the structures and methods of the older missionary generation. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the challenge was to shift power, resources, and structures from the missionary generation to African leaders. By the 1990s, there was not so much a foreignness problem as a generational one. The younger educated generation had increasingly lost touch with the church, and significant portions of the church had become out of touch with what was happening in wider society. Muriu did not come as a prophet to that larger social sphere, but he reawakened the university-educated generation to start to develop a social consciousness that would extrapolate the implications of the gospel for a wider world.

But passing on the agency of the gospel did not necessarily start out as conscious effort. Muriu’s passion was simply to evangelize. Recognizing the possibilities that were latent among the intellectually astute students, Muriu directed evangelism and community organizing activities toward them. He and his team of seven young people from Nairobi Baptist took to the pastoral task of reaching out with the energy of youthfulness. They went door-to-door in the residential halls, witnessing and inviting students to church. For Sunday worship, the trusty old organ was replaced with drums and electric guitars. Hymnals were replaced with the newer technology of an overhead projector. They projected a mix of hymns and contemporary Christian music (at the time the Hosanna! Integrity and Maranatha labels were the trend). A band of young students led music, which stood in contrast both to the more precision-driven music of the missionary hymns and the loud choruses of the Pentecostals. The band not only experimented with musical instruments, but also learned to mix the trendy contemporary worship music with the rhythms of African beats, eventually adding African dress.

Between Sundays Muriu worked tirelessly as he prayed, read, and visited with students. He was convinced that God had a great future for Nairobi Chapel. Praying through Isaiah 54, he asked God to give him thirty students to join him in reaching the university. He followed his prayers with plans to engage first-year students because they would be easier to influence and retain than older students. A buzz spread through the university community, and soon the church was flooded with curious and spiritually hungry students who resonated with Muriu’s style of thinking intellectually about the faith. His closeness to them in age was also a huge plus.

A few influences shaped Muriu’s intellectual approach. First, trained as a biologist in India, he was adept at using statistical and empirical evidence to prove his point. He would make broad appeal to the scientific and natural world, including his love for gardening. Another influence was his key mentor, the British Anglican pastor John Stott, who occasionally visited and stayed at Muriu’s home. A third was his persuasive communication skills, not in the charismatic style of the Pentecostals, but rather honed through disciplined reading of a wide range of literature.

By the mid-1990s, Nairobi Chapel had many former students returning as young families. The Sunday worship service was piped into a room for nursing mothers, which was then a new approach in churches. They put up prefab classroom facilities at the back of the chapel to accommodate the young ones. Muriu’s wife, Beatrice Wambui, an art teacher by profession, organized the children’s classes according to grades and recruited all her friends as ...