I went to prison yesterday....

Well I visited a prison, I didn't get arrested. More about that later....

Wednesday, as you know, is office day. We began our day with the weekly staff fellowship. One of our members and fellow PCEA Minister, Rev. Esther, came to teach the lesson. She's the chaplain at one of the local universities and often guest-teaches/preaches at Sukari. Yesterday was the first time I've had the opportunity to hear a woman preach since I've been here. While there were still many obvious theological differences in her thinking and mine, it was still refreshing to see a lady in the pulpit.

After staff fellowship we had office hours. We had a couple come in to discuss becoming full members of PCEA after they became inactive members. Their situation is quite complicated. The young man is divorced and was married in this church a year and a half ago to another member of Sukari. For the record, divorce is completely taboo around here. He now lives with his new partner and they have a 3-month old child together. This is also completely taboo. They had their civil wedding (ie. paid the dowry) and in pre-missionary times this would have deemed them married. Now, it is expected that you do the civil wedding and have a church ceremony which they have not done. The couple came to meet with the pastor to discuss what they need to do in order to have their child baptized in the church. After a long discussion, it was decided that the couple must complete the catechism class to become full members, do 4 months of premarital counseling, have a church wedding, and then take a baptism class to have their child baptized. While the church does not condone this behavior, it does allow for them to come back into the community which was honestly a surprise to me. After speaking with the pastor, they went to meet with the Evangelist, so they could set up a time to do their first catechism class.

After taking a cup of tea, Pastor George and I headed into the city to visit one of the national prisons. The Mission and Evangelism Committee has a history of doing prison ministry and they were looking to establish a relationship with a new prison. So we went to meet with the prison chaplain and get a date scheduled to go meet with inmates. The meeting went well and we will be doing prison ministry later this month with members of the congregation.

After that we found a cellphone store in the middle of Nairobi. Thankfully we found an iPhone charger (aka I can start taking pictures again). We had parked at St. Andrews Church and ran into the Rev. Peter on the way back to the car. He invited us in, gave me a tour, and explained the church's history to me. It was founded in 1908 (aka at the very beginning of the Christian movement in Kenya) as one of the headquarters for the missionaries. It was almost exclusively for missionaries until the late 1960s when British Colonial rule ended. By then the PCEA had been established and the property became a regular church instead of a church for missionaries. Now it is one of the largest PCEA parishes and has over 3,000 members. St. Andrews has 4 pastors which is very unusual in the PCEA and because most churches are much smaller and have only 1 pastor. The structure and function of St. Andrews is very similar to most churches I've interacted with in the US.

In the evening, we met a couple at the office for their fourth premarital counseling session. Last night's topic was the roles of each spouse in marriage. I had sat in on this session with another couple a few weeks ago and still struggle with the topics discussed in the same way I did the first time. I have lots of thoughts on it, but for now I'll just say I'm going to have a lot to discuss in the Marriage and Family Therapy course I'm taking this fall.

~ Nell in Nairobi