| Anglican Church of Kenya | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Classification | Protestant |
| Orientation | Anglican |
| Scripture | Protestant Bible |
| Theology | Anglican doctrine |
| Polity | Episcopal |
| Primate | Jackson Ole Sapit |
| Associations | Anglican Communion,GAFCON,Global South |
| Headquarters | Nairobi,Kenya |
| Territory | Kenya |
| Members | 5,860,000 |
| Official website | www |
TheAnglican Church of Kenya (ACK) is a province of theAnglican Communion, and it is composed by 41dioceses.[1][2] The current Leader and Archbishop of Kenya isJackson Ole Sapit. The Anglican Church of Kenya claims nearly 6 million total members.[3][4] According to a study published in theJournal of Anglican Studies and byCambridge University Press, the ACK claims 5 million adherents, with no official definition of membership, with nearly 2 million officially affiliated members, and between 310,000 - 400,000 active members.[5] The church became part of the Province of East Africa in 1960, butKenya andTanzania were divided into separate provinces in 1970.[6]
The church was founded as the diocese of Eastern Equatorial Africa (Uganda, Kenya,Tanzania) in 1884, withJames Hannington as the first bishop; however, Protestant missionary activity had been present in the area since 1844, whenJohann Ludwig Krapf, a Lutheran missionary of theChurch Missionary Society, landed in Mombasa. The first Africans were ordained to the priesthood in 1885. In 1898, the diocese was split into two, with the new diocese of Mombasa governing Kenya and northernTanzania (the other diocese later became theChurch of Uganda); northern Tanzania was separated from the diocese in 1927. Mass conversions of Africans began as early as 1910. In 1955, the diocese's first African bishops,Festo Olang' andObadiah Kariuki, were consecrated by theArchbishop of Canterbury,Geoffrey Fisher, in Uganda. In 1960, the province of East Africa, comprising Kenya and Tanzania, was formed withLeonard James Beecher as archbishop. The province was divided into two, with Festo Olang' being the first African archbishop of the new province of Kenya in 1970.Manasses Kuria was the Archbishop of Kenya from 1980 to 1994.
The Anglican Church of Kenya has been politically active throughout its history. As the official church of the colonial power, the Anglican missions enjoyed a privileged position, and Anglican preachers sharply denounced the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s. A number ofKikuyuloyalists who rejected Mau Mau were active church members.[7] When PresidentDaniel arap Moi moved to consolidate his power by suppressing free speech and limiting political opposition, Anglican leaders spoke out in defense of civil rights.David Gitari famously denounced election controls in a 1987 sermon that received considerable criticism from Moi supporters, but other church leaders soon joined in Gitari's criticisms. In 1990, BishopsHenry Okullu andAlexander Muge criticized the state's investigation of the murder of moderate foreign ministerRobert Ouko. Bishop Muge was killed in a suspicious automobile accident later in the year after receiving open threats from a government official. His death spurred bishops Gitari, Okullu, and other Anglican leaders to take an even more active public role, vocally supporting the move to multi-party democracy.[8] Gitari became archbishop in 1995 and continued the church's active engagement around civil rights, using his position to promote constitutional changes such as term limits and fairer elections.
As of 2008 there were 4,500,000 Anglicans out of an estimated population of 43,000,000, that formed 10.6% of Kenyan's population.[9] In 2017, peer-reviewed quantitative research found that the ACK reports more than 5 million total members while the churches' provided statistics reported 1,565,056 active members and 3,711,890 adherents.[10]
The primate of the Church is theArchbishop of All Kenya. Thesee is fixed at Nairobi. He was previously styled "Archbishop of Kenya and Bishop of Nairobi", but theDiocese of Nairobi has now been divided into two. TheBishop of Nairobi has the geographically larger diocese, whilst there is a separate diocese of All Saints', based aroundAll Saints' Cathedral, Nairobi. The primate's title is now "Primate and Archbishop of All Kenya".[11] The current archbishop is the sixth since the Province ofEast Africa was divided into the Provinces of Kenya and Tanzania.
Wabukala announced he would retire on 26 June 2016.[12] An election for a new archbishop was held at a special meeting of synod at All Saints' Cathedral in Nairobi on 20 May 2016, andJackson Ole Sapit was elected as the new primate.[13] Sapit was installed as the sixth archbishop and primate of Kenya at All Saints' Cathedral on 3 July 2016.[14]
The polity of the Anglican Church of Kenya isEpiscopal church governance, which is the same as otherAnglican churches. That is, headed bybishops from the Greek word, "episkopos", which means overseer or superintendent. The church maintains a system of geographical parishes organized into dioceses. It has been proposed since before 2005[15][16] that the quickly-increasing number of dioceses should be organised into about four or five internal ecclesiastical provinces, each headed by a metropolitan diocesan archbishop, with one primate over all. While a plan was apparently approved in 2008,[17] as of 2018 this would seem not to have been implemented.[18]
Each diocese is divided intoarchdeaconries, each headed by an archdeacon, who is apriest. The archdeaconries are further subdivided intoparishes, headed by arector. Parishes are subdivided into sub-parishes, headed bylay readers.
The Anglican Church of Kenya, like all Anglican churches, embraces the three traditional Orders of ministry: deacon, priest, and bishop. A local variant of theBook of Common Prayer is used.
The center of the Anglican Church of Kenya's teaching is the life and resurrection ofJesus Christ. The basic teachings of the church, orcatechism, includes:
The threefold sources of authority in Anglicanism are scripture, tradition, and reason. These three sources uphold and critique each other in a dynamic way. This balance of scripture, tradition and reason is traced to the work ofRichard Hooker, a sixteenth-century apologist. In Hooker's model, scripture is the primary means of arriving at doctrine and things stated plainly in scripture are accepted as true. Issues that are ambiguous are determined by tradition, which is checked by reason.[19]
Like many other Anglican churches, the Anglican Church of Kenya is a member of the ecumenicalWorld Council of Churches.[20] In October 2009, the Kenyan Church's leadership reacted to the Vatican's proposed creation ofpersonal ordinariates for disaffected traditionalist Anglicans by saying that although he welcomedecumenical dialogue and sharedmoral theology with the Catholic Church, the currentGAFCON structures already meet the spiritual and pastoral needs of conservative Anglicans in Africa.[21]
The Anglican Church of Kenya is a member of theGlobal South and theGlobal Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON). They declared a state of impaired communion with theEpiscopal Church of theUnited States over the question of allowing blessing of same-sex unions and non-celibate gay clergy, and have supported theAnglican Church in North America as a new province in creation of theAnglican Communion.[22] However, there are dioceses of The Episcopal Church and of the Anglican Church of Kenya that continue to partner with one-another.[23] The ACK is also the second member church of GAFCON toordain women to theepiscopate.[24][25]
The secondGlobal Anglican Future Conference was held atAll Saints' Cathedral, Nairobi, from 21 October to 26 October 2013. The focus was the shared Anglican future, discussing the missionary theme, "Making Disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ".[26]
The Anglican Church of Kenya was represented atGAFCON III, held inJerusalem, on 17–22 June 2018, by a 75 members delegation, including ArchbishopJackson Ole Sapit.[27] In 2021, Dioceses in Western Kenya broke with a moratorium imposed by GAFCON against the ordination of women as bishops when the Diocese of Bondo and theDiocese of Butere elected two women as bishops.[28][29][30] This sparked controversy within the ACK as some clergy noted that conservatives claim "Western Kenya dioceses are liberal and are ordaining women. [But most] of the Kenyan Anglican dioceses are conservative,' [a cleric] added."[31]
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| African provinces | ||
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| European provinces |
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| Extra-provincial churches | ||
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| Member provinces | ||
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| Related | ||
