You may not have heard of Rev. Kamau wa Macharia. I hadn’t too until about a week ago. What i can tell you is that he is not your ordinary man.
He is a retired minister of the word in the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA) where he served for three decades. That’s not what makes him extra ordinary though.
But after the thirty years being a Church minister and preaching the Gospel of Christ, he has denounced the Christian Faith, embraced the African Traditional Religion, and even penned a very interesting book titled ‘Elements of GODLESSNESS in CHRISTIANITY and ISLAM’.
I got hold of the book a few hours before i penned this article, and as such can’t comprehensively give a review. But a cursory glance at it reveals an area of personal interest and i believe to millions of other believers: the place of religion, colonization and faith in relation to God.
Rev. Kamau represents a growing number of disillusioned Africans trying to decipher the dissonance between the message of Christ and the messenger. Most Africans can’t reconcile the God of such immense love as presented in the Bible and preached by the colonist founded Churches, with the colonist messenger who visited such untold atrocities to the same African.
He revisits the issue of slavery, largely a domain of ‘Christianity’ in West Africa and ‘Islam’ in East Africa. Then came colonialism and the savagery unleashed by the Missionary-Colonist, with the attendant injustices. When you consider the mass killings of Africans by the Missionary-Colonist, the displacement from their lands, the open theft of natural resources, the dehumanizing acts of subjugation and all the atrocities committed by the Missionary-colonist, you begin to understand the revulsion of the African with the ‘Christian God’ as represented by the Missionary-Colonist.
As Rev. Kamau posits in his book, Africans had faith in God even before the coming of what he calls the ‘White God’. The colonist demonised everything African, including our religious practices, our foods and generally our way of life in the name of civilizing the heathen and dark continent.
Clearly, religion became facilitative of the colonialism agenda. This then was perpetuated by the ‘independent governments’ in many parts of Africa. In our Kenyan context, we saw the rise of neo-colonialism by the ruling African bourgeoisie that simply extended the same class divisions and religion as a pacifier of the masses.
The rise of individual founded churches has not helped matters. As many ran from the mainstream Churches seeking salvation, they have fallen into more disillusioning religious platforms of promised miracles and false instant spiritual gratification.
The neo-colonist agenda has continued to get support from the West. As they put up more industries to employ and feed their people, they encourage us to put up more Churches here and pray for prosperity and salvation, even as they siphon our natural resources to feed their economies.
The Church has to introspect itself and reinvent its teachings if it has to reengineer its relevance in a society that is not satisfied by just being told ‘The Bible says’.
The Gospel of slaves obeying their masters and awaiting their reward in heaven has to be called out for the foolishness it propagates. The hope of golden mansions in a heaven beyond our current life as the preachers collect the real gold here and put up actual golden mansions for themselves right here on earth must be rebuffed for the outright con it is.
We must refuse to be ruled by a religion of fear that we will be punished by a certain God when we refuse to heed the selfish dictates of our earthly masters.
The beautiful message of Christ has to be isolated from the colonist messenger and todays neo-colonist and exploitative prosperity gospel marketer for it to have the meaning it was meant to be.
And that’s the challenge the Church has to take up. There are many more Rev. Kamaus out here quietly questioning religious edicts preached and practiced for decades. Like a Priest friend of mine posited after last Sundays Missive, ‘Has the Christian God disappointed His own?’
Like the original Apostles, it’s time preachers of the word sought and taught God in Truth and Spirit. It’s time too that every believer sought God at a personal level, to have a personal relationship with God.
Else, you’ll search and find God neither in a building, however magnificent, nor in a religion however pious. You were born with God in you, and that’s the starting and ending point; the rest are in between details which are neither here nor there.
Have a truly God finding Sunday, and a great week ahead.
(Feedback to gkimando@gmail.com)
