Doug and Pastor David Mwema
Prostitutes as Parishioners
What do you say to the prostitute who is one of your parishioners and wants to quit her work, but can’t get another job and has two children to feed? Such is one of the many dilemmas facing church planter David Mwema whose church is in Kibera. A cesspool of hopelessness, Kibera is one of the most difficult places to plant a church in Kenya.
Tribal Stew
It has been often reported in the world-wide media that Kibera is the largest slum in the world. It’s not, though it may be one of the biggest in Africa with a population of over 170,000. Perhaps the reason for this exaggeration is due to the wide-spread negative media attention Kibera receives. Whenever rioting breaks out in the county, Kibera is often reported as a hotbed of hostility. Why? It is one of the major “tribal stews” in the country.
Poverty has thrown together peoples who would ordinarily want nothing to do with each other. Africa’s chief version of racism is tribalism. In the 2009 census, of the 38 million plus respondents, only 610,000 chose to refer to themselves as Kenyans. The others insisted on identifying themselves first with their tribe.
God Makes the Stew
The leadership team of the Vineyard in Kibera is composed of several different tribes. A deliberate strategy. An effort to let God make the stew. David, who at the age of 33, who was thrust into the role as church planter, recognized early on that traditional religious approaches to church would not work in this hostile environment. God had prepared him. He moved to the big city, Nairobi, seven years earlier to make money. After working seven days a week for four years, his mother called him and said she was praying that he would lose his job because he had lost sight of God. Jobs are like gold in Nairobi so he was not happy with his mother. He was even less happy when he lost his job and wandered for a year and a half with a wife and two children to support. In the end the prodigal came home to his own faith when he joined a Vineyard home group meeting in the slum.
God Will Get You Drunk!
Now David leads a band of broken people in a broken slum. David says, “It’s funny, I discover that while I had no enemies, I didn’t have any friends either. Now the wounded are my friends. In a sense they need me and I need them. We are doing this together. One morning the scripture reader was drunk. It made for an interesting service. Another Sunday morning I called up an alcoholic at 5:30am because he was suppose to give his memory verse that morning in the service. Many of the illegal brewers open up shop as early as 6am and he might not have the strength to resist. I told him, ‘God will get you drunk’. He came to the worship service. One of my goals is to get people to stop expecting that the kingdom is about getting things. For so many, life is a discouragement and they need hope. Others need to be challenged. I tried my mother’s prayer on one woman whom I had been sharing Christ with and was involved in illicit trade. I told her I was praying that her business would fail. It did. She is now part of the Kibera Vineyard and doing great.” God puts all sorts of odd people together when He cooks His stew, but somehow it comes out smelling great!
Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. Psalm 34.8
