From Galaxies To Governments

By Njonjo Mue

Worth Noting:

• But shortly after I left Kenya for my graduate studies in the UK in late September, God ‘left’ me and depression set in in such a vicious way that, to this day, I am convinced that had I not given my life to Christ before leaving for the UK, I would not have made it out alive.
• It is as if God told Satan the same thing He told him about Job in the Bible, “Take everything from him but do not touch his life.”
• However much I tried, I could not see, feel, touch, or hear God. The same God who had been so close a few months before was now nowhere to be found. It was confusing and heart-breaking.

 [Previously in our on-going series on lawyer activist Njonjo Mue: In Episode One, we sat with Njonjo as he joined a multitude of excited Kenyans in celebrating the promulgation of the new Constitution of Kenya in August 2010. In Episode Two, Njonjo took us to a time before the beginning of his lifelong journey advocating for democracy and social justice, where we met his parents and grandparents, the rocks from which he was hewn.

In Episode Three, we were transported to Njonjo’s hometown of Thika where he enjoyed a magical childhood that laid the foundation of the man he would become. In Episode Four, Njonjo spoke of the early years when he began to hear echoes of injustice that he found impossible to ignore and that would eventually transform him from a curious child into a restless activist.

In Episode 5, Njonjo explained that despite his Alma Mater, Alliance High School having a mixed record as far as its contribution to the fortunes and misfortunes of Kenya is concerned, he was proud to have been counted among a short list of those alumni who have pushed back against dictatorship and oppression, and advocated for democracy, good governance and social justice in independent Kenya. After six years at Alliance, Njonjo joined the University of Nairobi’s Law school for his LL.B degree. In Episode Six, Njonjo took us back to 1989, a momentous year when the world was engulfed in revolutions that toppled autocratic communist rule in Eastern Europe and threatened despotic one-party dictatorships in Africa. It was also a momentous year for Njonjo as he attended an exchange programme with American students, travelled abroad for the first time, and engaged in his own personal act of resistance against empire by working in London without a work permit.

In Episode Seven, Njonjo took us back to February 1990, a time when he took part in the first of many peaceful demonstrations when he joined other university students in condemning the gruesome assassination of Foreign Minister Robert Ouko. In Episode Eight, Njonjo spoke about his upbringing in a Christian home, attending a Christian school and his own journey towards finding faith.

In Episode Nine, as the world marked the thirtieth anniversary of the first assassination of an elected leader in post-colonial Africa, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, and as allied armies gathered for the mother of all battles in the Persian Gulf, Njonjo’s love for music drew him in to a church meeting where in spite of his best laid out plans for that warm Thursday evening, God finally caught up with him and he surrendered his life to the saving power of Jesus Christ.

In this Episode Njonjo shares his pilgrimage from a purely personal faith to embracing the wholistic salvation of the true gospel of Jesus Christ who is King and Lord of all and who presides not just over individual lives, but also reigns over galaxies and governments. ]

***

17th January 1991 was a critical milestone on my journey of faith which I mark every year as my spiritual birthday.

Jesus Christ made it clear in John 3:3 that no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again. John 3:16, which has been called the gospel in a nutshell, states unequivocally that “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

These are both well-known scriptures, but another verse in the same book of John had always tugged at my heartstrings long before I gave my heart to Christ. Now it excited me to no end that I could actually finally claim that promise for myself.

It was John 1: 11 – 13 which says, “He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God – children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”

I liked the idea of being granted the right (not the favour or the possibility) to become a child of God.

Following my salvation, I had a period of accelerated spiritual growth. I enjoyed reading my Bible every day and listening to worship music. All my prayers seemed to be answered accurately and promptly. I became a regular churchgoer, not only for Sunday service, but also for the Tuesday evening prayer meeting at NPC.

For a number of months, my friend Julie from law school invited me to her church, the Nairobi Lighthouse Church, which at the time used to meet in a hall in the basement of the Silver Springs Hotel, the same hall which was also serving as the hotel’s Silver Mine discotheque, and so we would have to arrive early on Sunday morning to clean up the hall of beer bottles and spilt alcohol and arrange the chairs before church began.

Every Thursday late afternoon after work, I would join other young people from Lighthouse to hold an evangelistic crusade at the Railways Bus Station.

Just over one month after the momentous event of 17 January 1991, I was invited by a friend to go for an Easter weekend youth retreat at the Word of Life Camp at Ukunda on the Kenyan coast.

There, I met many young professionals who were both well accomplished in their fields and also totally in love with Jesus.

This was such an eye-opener for me. We had such great fun, food and fellowship, culminating in a sunrise Holy Communion service on the beach followed by a great, humourous sermon by Rev. Chris Mwalwa. I did not know Christianity could be so much fun!

I made many new friends and was invited to join a Bible Study that met in Nairobi every Monday night known appropriately as ‘Monday Nite Live!’

I joined MNL as soon as I got back to Nairobi and have never left since.

I also met Bill Hunt, an American missionary working with Life Ministry, and he invited me to join a discipleship group through which I really got to grow in my faith.

The rest of 1991 was an exciting period of walking in increasing intimacy with God. He was so close that I could almost touch him and audibly hear him when we spoke through prayer and Bible study.

But shortly after I left Kenya for my graduate studies in the UK in late September, God ‘left’ me and depression set in in such a vicious way that, to this day, I am convinced that had I not given my life to Christ before leaving for the UK, I would not have made it out alive.

It is as if God told Satan the same thing He told him about Job in the Bible, “Take everything from him but do not touch his life.”

However much I tried, I could not see, feel, touch, or hear God. The same God who had been so close a few months before was now nowhere to be found. It was confusing and heart-breaking.

However, looking back, I now know that ‘God leaving’, despite its painfulness at the time, is a gift to us believers.

Eugene Peterson explains it beautifully in his book, ‘ Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places ’. Referring to God’s silence as his children of Israel languished in 430 years of slavery in Egypt, Peterson writes, “We need this Exodus validation that a sense of the absence of God is part of the story, and that it is neither exceptional nor preventable nor a judgment on the way we are living our lives.”

It’s as if God deliberately withdraws from us to grow our faith and make us pursue him more intentionally.

Peterson adds, “Our witnesses of God’s absence are necessary to keep us alert and attentive to the mystery of God whose ‘ways are past finding out’. Necessary to prevent us from reducing God Almighty to god-at-my-beck-and-call.”

As a person who always cared deeply about social justice, before I became a Christian, I was disturbed by the way the Christian faith had been presented to us, as an individual matter between the believer and God with few if any implications for the wider society.

I felt uncomfortable whenever a Christian introduced themselves and stated, “Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior,” and how many Christians tended to shy away from politics and issues of social justice and to treat their salvation merely as an insurance policy to save them from hell.

This misunderstanding of faith may have been partly responsible for my having been so reluctant to become a Christian sooner.

However, when I became a believer and started to study the Bible I came to learn, especially from the book of Exodus and the Old Testament prophets, that God was a God of liberation and justice. The Psalms state unequivocally that justice and righteousness are the foundation of God’s throne.

I also began to understand that the Jesus that was taught in many churches was not the Jesus of the Bible. There seems to have been a deliberate effort to present Jesus as a harmless itinerant preacher who never challenged the status quo but simply taught his followers to turn the other cheek.

Many believers also had been made to think that politics is dirty and worldly and they should therefore have nothing to do with it. This is the faith and the Jesus I had largely encountered on my journey to faith.

However, as I studied the Bible for myself, I met a Jesus who was not so much different from the one I had encountered earlier, but one who was so much more.

I came to understand that although he never formed a political party or ran for public office, Jesus’s message was very political.

He declared himself (not Caesar) to be Lord, he proclaimed the coming of his kingdom, in contradistinction with the reigning empire of the time.

The religious and civic powers of his time were so threatened by his message that they arrested him, conducted a sham trial, sentenced him to death and not just any death, but death by crucifixion which was reserved for rebels who threatened the existence of Roman rule.

I also came across the writings of theologians such as Miguel De La Torre, who explained that:

“It is not surprising that a hyper-individualistic culture would reduce sin and salvation to the personal. For many Euro-American Christians, sin is an action, or omission, committed by an individual who now stands guilty before God. This individual action (or lack thereof) creates alienation between the individual and God. Sin becomes universal with sin being defined by those in power.

“Salvation is also reduced to an individual act. The act needing remedy is the sin committed by the individual, and the act providing the remedy is Jesus Christ’s death on the cross. It is therefore common to hear sermons and religious admonitions within Euro-American churches that focus on and encourage personal piety.

“Yet sin always manifests itself socially, through laws and regulations that permit the few to live in privilege and the many to live in want. Laws, customs, traditions, moral regulations and so-called common sense are constructed by society to normalize and legitimize the prevailing power structures. By making sin a private matter, little is done to challenge or change structural sin. Those benefitting from how society is structured may recognize that sin may have been individually committed, but ignore that because we are communal creatures; it affects other humans.”

I was introduced to other theologians who accurately depicted God and Jesus and other Bible actors.

I came across Abraham Kuyper who once famously declared, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: Mine!”

I read about Christians who had dedicated their lives to the cause of justice, including political leaders like William Wilberforce, preachers like Martin Luther King Jr., Desmond Tutu, and Allan Boesak, and priests such as Oscar Romero.

Closer to home, I recalled the lives of Bishops Henry Okullu, David Gitari, Alexander Muge, Reverend Timothy Njoya, Maurice Cardinal Otunga and Archbishop Ndingi Mwana’a Nzeki, and Christian lay people like Professor Wangari Maathai, all of whom had taken great risk to stand up to the single party dictatorship of Daniel Arap Moi when few other Kenyans would dare to speak out.

I realised that far from salvation being an obstacle to what I perceived to be my calling, the pursuit of justice, it was actually an integral part of that call.

As the Bible clearly states, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it; the world and all those who dwell in it.”

This being the case, we children of God had a divine mandate to be God’s hands and feet in standing up against injustice, and defending the weak and the vulnerable in a way that would lead to the flourishing of God’s creation.

As Corneliu Constantineanu writes in his introduction to Paul’s Letter to the Philippians in the NIV Justice Bible:

“According to Paul, being a Christian is not about being religious. It is rather about being faithful to the one who was crucified and rose again and brought into being the new creation, thus fulfilling God’s story to redeem the world, to bring peace and justice and love. To live according to the gospel is to be concerned with justice and human flourishing in anticipation of God’s final restoration. In Christ, a new world is possible. This is the good news.”

The idea that Christians should not get involved in politics is the greatest lie told by those in the world and of the world who would rather have a monopoly over the affairs of nations.

Believers have a mandate and a responsibility to exercise dominion over God’s creation dating all the way back to Genesis 1:28.

What is more, if politics is everything to do with how power and resources are allocated in a society, we must exercise our stewardship in that realm and take our seat at that table.

We are the body of Christ and Christ rules over all thrones, powers, principalities, and dominions, whether visible or invisible. It would be ridiculous, therefore, to suggest that Christ is Lord over all and yet say that we as His body should have nothing to do with politics or the pursuit of social justice.

I like the way Eugene Peterson puts it in the Message Bible in Ephesians 1:20 – 23 –

“All this energy issues from Christ: God raised him from death and set him on a throne in deep heaven, in charge of running the universe, everything from galaxies to governments, no name and no power exempt from his rule. And not just for the time being, but forever. He is in charge of it all, has the final word on everything. At the centre of all this, Christ rules the Church. The Church, you see, is not peripheral to the world; the world is peripheral to the Church. The church is Christ’s body, in which he speaks and acts, by which he fills everything with his presence.”

My faith in Christ therefore informs my life of activism and my advocacy for social justice as I endeavour to walk in the footsteps of those biblical, historical and modern day prophets, and of Jesus Christ himself.

Along this journey, I have suffered loss but I have also been recognised by my peers and received several awards. One award that I treasure more than most is the one I was given in 2016 by the Kenya Christian Professionals Forum (KCPF).

During their second Utumishi Bora Awards, which aim to recognize Christian Professionals who have done exemplary work in different spheres and impacted the society positively, KCPF members voted to give me the award for crusading for justice in society.

I was deeply humbled to receive the award at a ceremony held at the Sarova Panafic Hotel during which I shared the following few acceptance remarks, which capture my understanding of my calling to pursue social justice in the name of Christ:

“When you devote your life to crusading for justice and fighting for human rights, you quickly learn to come to terms with two realities:

“First, there are very few rewards this side of eternity. Second, the road to a just society is long and winding and treacherous.

“And along that road, one often encounters low moments – whether one is sitting in a cold police cell, or being tear gassed or beaten by the police for participating in a peaceful protest, or one is denied opportunities for career advancement because of being too vocal and refusing to support the status quo.

“In these moments of self-doubt, it is easy for one to lose sight of the ultimate destination. At such times, one needs a signpost to reassure them that they are still moving in the right direction.

“To me, this Utumishi Bora Award is one such signpost.

“And so, I wish to thank the Kenya Christian Professionals Forum for this recognition, this signpost.

“I wish to thank my friends and colleagues in the civil society. Some of you here may not always agree with what civil society does or how it does it, but as Lord Acton pointed out a long time ago, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So civil society plays a critical role in keeping power in check and holding the powerful accountable.

“Finally, I thank my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who died an unjust death, but rose again, and thereby became our abiding inspiration by demonstrating that ultimately justice triumphs over injustice, good wins over evil, right overcomes wrong, and life conquers death.”

(To be continued…/)