Teaching Team

Chanukah in Kakamega

By Daniel Lancaster  | Comments (8) | Posted on December 12, 2007

This year I spent most of Chanukah in Kakamega, Kenya. While my wife and children have been home lighting the candles each night, I have been doing the same halfway around the world. Chanukah lights are supposed to be a light in the darkness, and the Dark Continent is really dark at night. Today, the seventh day of the festival, I am in Nairobi, waiting for a plane, but I spent the first six days of the festival of lights in the Kenyan city of Kakamega. The previous week we were in Tororo, Uganda with the Messianic orphanage and missionary work Acts for Messiah.

While in Uganda, I had the opportunity to speak in a small Pentecostal church in the remote village of Icaaly. Messianic Jewish missionary Emily Dwyer of Acts for Messiah had already been at work in this primitive village for several months teaching HaYesod to the people and pastors that would gather to listen. Mr. Luton and I were invited into a mud and thatch church nestled in a banana grove. Crammed into the little church, seated on the packed, cow-dung floor were several hundred sweating Ugandan Christians. Seated on the floor directly in front of us were a few dozen Mummah’s and their children and babies. The men had the chairs along the walls. After hours of spirited worship, endless civil protocols and acknowledgements between the various pastors, long ceremonious welcomes, more drums and singing than even a Charismatic Messianic congregation would tolerate, I was given the opportunity to address the people with the assistance of a translator.

I taught the words of the Master from Matthew 5-7. The people listened intently. As a white-man in their midst, I had their complete and total attention. The words of Yeshua seemed to enliven the hearts of the people. At the end of the session, I allowed the people to ask questions. The high calibre of their inquiries demonstrated that they had been listening intently. One woman asked how she could love her enemy. A young pastor asked about 1 Thessalonians 4 in regard to clean and unclean food. Another asked about Mark 7 in the same regard. One young mother asked about Jewish understanding of baptism.

After several questions like these, one old man stood up, delivered a short statement in the local dialect, turned and walked out of the church. The translator explained, ‘He says he had heard there would be a white man here today. Since he had never seen a white man, he walked here all the way from his home up in the mountains. Now that he has seen a white man, he is going home.’

By the end of my session, the senior pastor felt moved to deliver an impassioned sermon about the prohibition on eating pork. I had not been teaching on that subject at all, but it had come up in the question and answer session. It was the pork-issue that he latched onto. His congregation looked rather shocked as he issued a complete ban on eating pig.

After spending several days in Uganda, we travelled to Kakamega for the conference.

Kakamega is about an hour and a half of pot-hole tortured roadway into the hills from the city of Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria. It is near the great rift valley of Kenya and the Kakamega rainforest. I was in Kakamega with my friend Grant Luton of Beth Tikkun in Akron, Ohio to teach at a week-long conference about the Kingdom of Heaven. We were there at the gracious invitation of Bishop Peter Onguko who is familiar with the work of FFOZ and desires the churches under his shepherding to begin to move toward an understanding of Messianic Jewish teaching.

Each day Grant and I offered the conference attendees a few lectures. Attendance at the conference grew steadily. Hundreds were in attendance by the last day. Though most Kenyans are fluent in English, the first language tends to be Swahili, so we worked with translators, line by line, phrase by phrase.

In preparing for this conference, I wondered about what approach to take. Kenyan Christianity is heavily Pentecostal, and it tends to follow the Pentecostal and Charismatic modes common in American Christianity. In fact, a great deal of African Christianity has been imported wholesale from American Pentecostalism. Kenyan churches enjoy fabulous, spirited praise and worship. They practice ecstatic prayer and expression. They hear long, impassioned sermons, only loosely related to a biblical text, but they suffer from a dearth of actual exegetical teaching. That is to say, they have not learned to read or understand the Bible in a literal manner. They have not thought about questions of faith critically, and are largely unaware of the place of Israel. Though they are biblically literate, the Bible remains a collection disconnected holy sayings to them.

Mr. Luton taught lessons from the book of Exodus, employing midrashic-styled methods of hermeneutics to draw out pictures and lessons from the narrative texts. The Kenyans responded with great enthusiasm. Grant Luton’s gentle nature and vivid teaching style seemed to mesmerize everyone in attendance. For his last session, he taught on the Ten Commandments, driving home the importance of the Sabbath.

For my part, I introduced the conference attendees to the concepts of discipleship and the Jewish backgrounds of the term ‘Kingdom of Heaven,’ and then chose a single text to work through. After the success of the Sermon on the Mount in the village church, I decided to stick with it. We systematically studied our way through Matthew 5-7. I don’t think that they had ever heard teaching done in this manner, and they seemed uncertain of what to make of it. It was hard-going, and the translators often were at a loss. Nevertheless, the words of the Master struck home, and by His grace, many pastors and Christians in Kakamega, Kenya were introduced to the concepts of Torah and discipleship.

At the end of the conference, the Bishop asked people to bring an offering for the people of Israel. The Kenyan people, by and large, are desperately poor. They suffer under grinding poverty, but they possess an unquenchable spirit of optimism and generous hearts. They came and gave out of their need. They gave generously for the people of Israel, raising more than 6,000 Schillings. The money represents an act of love comparable to the story of the widow’s mite. The money will go to Israeli Jewish believers.

As Grant Luton and I have lit the Chanukah candles each night here in Africa, we have hoped that the seeds we have planted will germinate and grow. African Christianity is primitive, but it is vital and living. I am certain that it represents the future of Christianity as Western nations drift further into the post-modern malaise. Therefore, it is crucial that Messianic Judaism take root on this soil while African Christianity is still in its formative stages. Thanks to the generosity of congregation Beth Tikkun and First Fruits of Zion, we have had the opportunity to make a few small steps in that direction.

D. Thomas Lancaster
Seventh Day of Chanukah, 5768

About the Author: Daniel Lancaster is FFOZ’s Director of Education and regular contributor to messiah magazine. He is the author of Torah Club Volumes Two, Four and Five, and the FFOZ books Mystery of the Gospel, Restoration and more.

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