My life as a seminarian has never yet been boring so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when the opportunity arose to spend a month in Kenya during the summer break. Amidst the busyness of exams and the general palaver of concluding my first year of studies at Allen Hall in London, I was not able to give the matter much thought until I found myself in Heathrow early one morning in July. Our trip was arranged courtesy of Missio in conjunction with the Mill Hill Missionaries, with a view to giving us an experience of the missionary face of the Church in a different part of the world. The thinking, I believe, is that having a broader perspective on the global Church should ultimately (God willing), make us better and wiser Priests.

My brother seminarian and comrade, Mac Ahmed and I would eventually make our way to the rural parish of Luanda in the Diocese of Kakamega, where we would spend the best part of a month living with two Mill Hill Priests and a Deacon. Our time over those weeks would be spent tailing our hosts as they went about their busy ministerial lives, visiting the sick, bringing Communion to the housebound, saying Mass at the parish and its various outstations and in the homes of parishioners.

I am conscious of the fact that a detailed account of our time in Luanda would run to many pages and would try the patience of the most diehard reader, so I will try to focus instead on those highlights and insights which at the time of writing, (just over a week after my return), loom largest in my mind.

Think of the children

A graph representing the population of Kenya by age looks like a wide based pyramid with gently sloping sides; the equivalent for Britain looks like the side-on view of a dollop of whipped cream. The difference is manifested in the superabundance of children we encountered wherever we went in Kenya. If I had had a shilling for every time I heard a child’s voice calling out, “Mzungu! How are you?” I believe I could have upgraded to first class for the flight home. As the only Mzungus in town, Mac and I found ourselves catapulted to the status of minor celebrities among the local children, such that I often felt I was playing the part of a roving Blue Peter presenter in the glory days of that programme.

Perhaps my single favourite memory of Kenya is of arriving by car for one of our sick visits to be met by a group of ten children emerging from the trees. These children would follow us into the house of the sick man we were visiting and cluster around us at his bedside, singing hymns as he received the Sacraments at the hands of the Priest. I believe if I had been one of those children, my consciousness of the call to priesthood would have been awakened at that moment, so I like to think this would have been true for at least one of those present.

The Church is everywhere Holy and nowhere perfect

I should qualify the above statement. Nowhere on Earth is the Church perfect, although I think as Catholics we tend to be very good at idealising other times and places. At first glance Kenya might appear to be Shangri-La, and in some ways indeed it is. Amongst Catholics it has close to the highest rate of Mass attendance of any country outside Vatican City. The Offertory appears

to be everybody’s favourite part of the Mass and it takes seemingly forever for the stream of offerings (cash, food, animals and miscellaneous goods, etc.) to dry up. The Church is impressive in its reach and structure, with each parish subdivided into a number of Jumuiyas, or Small Christian Communities, which meet once a week, and of which everyone is at least nominally a member. The Church in Kenya is young, vigorous, and in many ways inspiring to a Catholic outsider, but it is clearly not without its problems. This is not the forum in which to discuss what those problems might be, but it is all too easy to imagine the country over the next generation or two following in the footsteps of European churches that have seen their congregations evaporate, and I think this an assessment that more seasoned observers of the country would support. We can only pray that there are some wise heads among the bishops of Kenya who are able to chart a happier course.

The Word is Incarnate in History

In my younger days I studied early Medieval history at university, with much of the focus being on the Christianisation of England and Scandinavia. Missionary heroes like St Augustine of Canterbury, St Ansgar and St Boniface featured prominently but were nonetheless shadowy figures of a distant past. With this background it was fascinating to visit a country whose primary evangelisation is a matter of such comparatively recent history. I found myself reflecting on how a millennium of Christendom has shaped my own culture, but also on the ways in which European tendencies might have made their mark Christendom as it developed. What might the Church look like today if the currents of history had washed the other way, and it was the scions of an ancient African Christendom who had first brought the Church to England in the 19th and 20th centuries? It would be the same Church for sure, but who knows what latent glories might have been unfolded in that history, or what familiar treasures might still lie hidden in the sculptor’s block?

These are just a few of the thoughts that have remained at the forefront of my mind, but our time in Kenya was so rich in incident and fresh experience, that I expect to go on thinking about it and having my thoughts informed by it for many years to come. Maybe one day, dear reader, you will sit at Mass somewhere in the Diocese of Plymouth, listening to a middle-aged priest droning on about his Kenyan odyssey, and you will look back to this moment and think to yourself, “He used to know when to wrap it up.”