Church in Limuru

Yesterday we went to church at All Saints in Limuru, a small town outside Nairobi, in the beautiful tea country out toward the edge of the Rift Valley. Wachira was the guest preacher, a role he takes once a month. It was a glistening day, and after some hustling we arrived barely on time to a small stone chapel built by the British settlers who once lived there. The cemetery around the church is full of them—including the famous Louis Leakey—but now the church is full of Africans, with the exception of Popie, me, and a Korean couple who teach at the nearby St. Paul’s seminary. It was good to hear our friend preach—a thoughtful and practical meditation on the book of Ruth---and to participate in the solemn, joyful, hospitable life of an African church. It was a wonderful mix of traditional Anglican worship and informal African spontaneity, which can seem almost haphazard. There were actually two services, one in English—full to bursting, probably two thirds people under 30—and one in Kikuyu, not quite full. Between services we were invited into the vestry for tea and arrowroot. We greatly enjoyed people watching as well as worship. When we left Kenya in 1982, women almost never braided or straightened their hair; now they do amazingly elaborate things and hairdressers are making big money. The men do not seem to have upgraded.

Some of the music was familiar British hymns, sung in a distinctively Kenyan way, and on one number the choir sang, such polyphony occurred that Charles Ives would have been in ecstasy. When African choruses came along, the singing and dancing was a complete contrast—lively, energetic. And it was the same with the liturgy, which was more or less traditional but interjected with new elements, such as the pastor interrupting some singing to make us start over because we needed to up the tempo and sing with more life. This photo is of the choir singing outside the church as we exit—I think you get some sense of it.

Nobody who attended such a service could think for a minute that African Christians are merely imitating Europeans in their religion; they have taken on a lot of freight that came with the missionaries of an earlier era (and of today’s too, in the Pentecostal churches that are more typical in the cities) and used it to create something stamped with their own spirit. It’s hard to exactly convey this, combining friendliness and laughter and ceremonial gravity, but it is unmistakably its own thing.