A gospel breakthrough with Kenya’s Maasai

A Kenyan nurses’ strike earlier this year helped a local Pentecostal church and a U.K. medical missions team gain access to a staunchly traditional tribe in the East African nation.

Over 28 years, Elim Pentecostal Church of Kenya planted over 400 churches all around Kenya except in the Kajiado region, a largely rural territory the size of New Jersey. The Maasai make up the bulk of the population in the area. The semi-nomadic indigenous group does not oppose churches but is deliberate in preserving its culture and traditional institutions. “We would like to be agents of our change rather than victims of change,” says Kakuta Ole Maimai, managing director of the Maasai Association.

“We’ve been here since 2016, praying and fasting,” said Martin Muita, secretary general of the Elim Pentecostal Church of Kenya. “But the local traditions and beliefs are too strong.”

In the United Kingdom, Dr. Akinfemi Akingboye, his colleagues, and other Christians founded the humanitarian nonprofit TOSOL Initiative in April 2023, after he recovered from a heart attack.

“I just wanted to help sick people,” said Akingboye, 52, a surgeon at the Russell Hall Hospital in the West Midlands, England. At a friend’s suggestion, he began planning a medical mission to Gambia, a West African coastal country across the continent from Kenya.

The 17-member team traveled to Gambia for its first medical outreach in December 2023. Over four days, the team partnered with government officials and several nongovernmental organizations to treat over 500 locals for malaria and mild infections without charge. Akingboye performed a surgery at the national teaching hospital. About 200 people received free eyeglasses, and 50 received dental treatment. The group gave food and financial aid to 40 women and more than 50 children during the trip, which was days before Christmas.

Next, the team headed to Kenya. “We had difficulty getting the required government permits,” said Adebisi Ajileye, 50, a biomedical scientist who attended TOSOL’s first meeting with her husband. “So I thought linking up with a local church could help replicate our success in Gambia.”

The group connected with the Elim Missions partners in Kenya.

In March, the Kenyan nurses union went on strike in the Kajiado district after a long dispute with the government over poor wages and working conditions. At least 650 nurses walked off the job.

During its eight-day Kenya trip in April, the TOSOL team of 20 people donated surgical equipment and taught new, minimally invasive surgical techniques—also referred to as keyhole surgeries—to doctors in Kajiado. They also performed appendectomies on two teenagers and a thyroidectomy on a 47-year-old woman. The team treated 197 locals for eye conditions, and over 500 people received free treatment for seizures, malaria, joint pains, and field injuries, according to the nonprofit’s newsletter. One couple that received treatment and medication had suffered for years from spinal and rib injuries after a car crash.

“God plans in wonderful ways,” said Paul Sikolia Sahale, 51, a pastor at Bisil, about 18 miles from Kajiado. “TOSOL couldn’t have come here for a medical outreach at a better time.”

“The outreach gave the church volunteers great visibility among the locals,” said Ajileye, the TOSOL team’s biomedical scientist. “Their ID tags with Elim Church proudly displayed helped them connect as they ministered to the teeming Maasai sick.”

However, Akingboye said that, after the outreach, the exhausted team members felt despondent. “It didn’t feel like the great success of the Gambian program,” he said, adding that, due to the strike, the turnout of sick locals had been overwhelming. “We felt we didn’t plan well enough.”

But the next day, Muita called, bearing a flood of good news. Across 11 villages in the region, locals who received treatment at the outreach donated 20 acres of land to Elim Pentecostal Church of Kenya to build new churches. In one village, Paranai, they had so many converts that the new church started off with 60 members.

“While laying the foundations on the two acres we were given at Paranai, a village elder gave us two additional acres, and he was very specific in insisting that we build a Bible school on it,” Muita said. “One major challenge has been getting trained ministers, and now we are so encouraged. We are looking forward to 100 churches in the region by 2027.”

“Our mandate is shifting towards strengthening infant local churches everywhere we go,” Akingboye said about the group’s future plans. “I am asking God to make our next outreach a revival.”