young members, poverty, modern polygamy

Nairobi, Kenya • Denis Mukasa, who oversees a handful of Latter-day Saint congregations in this East African nation, is 39 — a year older than Joseph Smith when he died in 1844.

Like the famed 19th-century church founder, the Kenyan convert presides over a surging faith — with members largely in their 20s and 30s — while relying on the energies of young leaders, unschooled in the faith, to fill volunteer positions in sprawling congregations.

Mukasa, of course, isn‘t starting from scratch. Unlike Smith, the African stake (regional) president can draw on nearly two centuries of history, precedent and an organizational superstructure found within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with headquarters more than 9,000 miles away in Salt Lake City.

Still, many of the problems he encounters with his inexperienced leaders and members are more like those in the faith’s infancy than in the neatly ordered U.S. congregations with “prophets, seers and revelators” in their 70s, 80s and 90s.

“I would say the median age [Kenya’s members],” Mukasa says, “is around 23.”

These youngsters are drawn to the American-born faith mostly “because they’re able to relate to the missionaries, and then also because of rural, urban migration,” the soft-spoken Latter-day Saint leader says. “The church is very strong in the urban areas, and the youth who come [are] attracted to the church’s programs.”

That means the lay male clergy have been in the church only a few years before finding themselves directing Kenya’s congregations of newcomers.

“That’s a challenge in some of the units — to find leaders who are experienced in the church,” says Mukasa, who also serves as the faith’s regional humanitarian manager. “It calls for a lot of training to catch up with the growth that the church is experiencing.”

Indeed, church headquarters purposely limited Kenya’s growth “over concerns about leadership‘s ability to administer adequately to an expanding population,” says Latter-day Saint Matt Martinich, an independent Colorado-based researcher who tracks church movement at ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com. Officials felt “there wasn‘t a good base of leadership who knew what a functioning church looked like.”

So they sent many young Kenyan missionaries to serve and learn in Europe and the United States, he says, but too many of them wanted to move there, instead of returning to build up the church in Africa.

This comes at a time when Latter-day Saint membership on the African continent is skyrocketing, the demographer says, closing in on 1 million.

Kenya’s Central African neighbor, the Democratic Republic of Congo, has 135,000 members and seems to be growing almost exponentially, while Nigeria, in West Africa, has more than 250,000 Latter-day Saints.

For decades, Latter-day Saint growth in Kenya — made famous by the Oscar-winning Meryl Streep-Robert Redford film “Out of Africa” — was far behind.

But in the past five years, Martinich reports, it has escalated.

Today, Kenya is home to two missions, four diocese-like stakes, more than 70 congregations (including a branch in a Sudanese refugee camp) and 21,000-plus members. (The demographer estimates “convert retention has exceeded 65% for most years during the past two decades”.)

And the nation now has its first Latter-day Saint temple, in the capital of Nairobi, surrounded by a high-voltage electric fence, rising above a muddy road filled with street vendors under corrugated tin roofs.

“People didn‘t know about us before, but the church is coming out of obscurity,” says Calisto Marwara, a bishop in Nairobi. “Now everyone is asking about us.”

Kenya’s ‘pioneers’

At the beginning of his tenure, church President Russell M. Nelson visited Nairobi during his 2018 whirlwind world tour.

“You perhaps don‘t think of yourself as pioneers,” Nelson told the throngs of Kenyan Latter-day Saints who greeted him, “but you’re just as much pioneers here now as Brigham Young and his associates were following the martyrdom of the prophet Joseph Smith.”

It was a satisfying moment for members who saw the church mushroom from a smattering of small branches, largely made up of expatriates with the U.S. Agency for International Development, meeting unofficially in houses in the 1970s, according to “Reaching the Nations,” an almanac cataloging church growth co-written by Martinich. “The first local members joined in 1979” — the year after the church removed its priesthood/temple ban of Black members.

Joseph Sitati, who converted in 1986, once told The Salt Lake Tribune that when he attended his first Latter-day Saint worship service, something new “stirred in his soul.”

There was “a very good spirit there,” he said, a feeling the mechanical engineer and former Quaker “was unfamiliar with.”

When he was baptized, he was “overwhelmed by the feeling of love,” Sitati said. “I loved everybody and everything. It invigorated me.”

Sitati emerged as a Latter-day Saint superstar of sorts, leading a successful delegation to Kenya’s president in 1991, persuading him to recognize the church. He later became the faith’s first Black native-born African general authority.

From the start, though, Latter-day Saint evangelizers ran into opposition from other Christian faiths, including U.S. sects such as the Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses that had been in Kenya much longer.

They “shunned Latter-day Saints as cultic and anti-Christian,” Religion News Service reports. “In particular, they disapproved of the faith’s rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity, in which God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are believed to be three persons in one deity.”

Mormonism‘s “mode of evangelism and doctrine were viewed by mainstream churches,” the Rev. Martin Munyao, a senior lecturer at Kenya’s Daystar University, told the news agency, “as veering away from the evangelical mainstream doctrine.”

Among African countries, Kenya has seen the most hostility to Latter-day Saint theology from other Christians, Martinich says. “It is seen as on the outskirts of traditional Christianity.”

To Sitati, though, opposition was “imported from America.”

Christians who were trying to protect their own faith “spread bad stories about Mormonism,” he said in 2009. “There is no Indigenous hostility to the church.”

These days, the public perception of the church has softened considerably, says Gladys Mbithi, who joined in 1992 at age 12 with her large family.

At her boarding school, “the persecution was very severe,” she recalls in an interview. She was regularly excluded and insulted. Everyone was afraid of sharing food with her, believing that “she might kill them.”

After the church’s Humanitarian Services built toilets and classrooms for the school, Mbithi says, “they don‘t call us devil worshippers anymore.”

Even if they are not interested in joining, many Kenyans can see that “the church is a good place,” says Eunice Kavaya Mukasa, wife of the stake president, “and that we as members of the church are good people.”

‘Warmness … was there’

Eunice Mukasa had just finished high school when she met Latter-day Saint missionaries in a neighborhood market. They were “teaching me more of the good things that I had really learned in my [African Christian] home,” she recalls. “The first time the missionaries invited me to their sacrament meeting, I felt the warmness that was there. People were so warm, smiling, so inviting. That’s what made me come again and again. I felt like this is a community that I would want to be a part of.”

Her husband, Denis Mukasa, was moved by the church’s doctrines and organization.

“For the first time, it made sense that little children below the age of accountability [8 years old for Latter-day Saints], don‘t need to be baptized,” he says. “The other thing that appealed to me was that in the church, we don‘t have paid lay ministers. Our bishops or teachers, branch presidents — we don‘t pay them. That was something that also was endearing to me, because I knew when I was giving my tithing, it was not going to someone’s pocket but going to do the work of the Lord. The other thing that appealed to me was just the order that exists in the church and the support of members.”

The couple — who both served full-time church missions; she at Temple Square in Salt Lake City, he across the continent in Ghana — met in a church choir. They married in 2014 and now have three children.

Though neither faced serious opposition to Latter-day Saint membership, some friends did tell Denis that he “was joining the wrong church” and that he would “regret it.”

After two decades, he says, “I have not yet regretted it.”

The strength of villages

Beginning in the 1990s, little by little, the Utah-based faith continued to build.

The first organized branch (a congregation smaller than Utah’s more common Latter-day Saint ward) was in Chyulu, a rural hamlet where members sat on makeshift pews in a field, amid roaming goats and chickens, and listened to sermons.

The faith slowly migrated to other villages, renting space in existing structures or building small meetinghouses along a principal two-lane highway.

“Receptivity was high in these areas,” Martinich says, even in “places so small they don‘t show up on area maps.”

But that brought its own set of obstacles, mainly transportation and poverty.

“We had to ride our bikes to church,” recalls Mbithi. “It was 24 kilometers [nearly 15 miles] from our home.”

Difficulties continue to plague rural areas, where the church is growing rapidly, says Denis Mukasa. “Sometimes they have to travel one or two hours just to go to a unit, and it is oftentimes very expensive for them. Many people don‘t have a regular source of income or salary. So that poses a challenge in terms of transportation costs.”

Even in cities, members’ needs can be overwhelming.

“Nairobi is home to one of the largest slums in the world… where as many as 1 million people live in extreme poverty,” Martinich says. “Still, the dangerous and poor living conditions have not prevented the gospel from reaching these areas.”

Cultural conflicts

Kenya includes more than 40 tribes, each with its own language, culture and traditions — some colliding with Latter-day Saint norms and expectations.

One African practice is the so-called bride price, a dowry that the groom‘s family pays to the bride’s family, in cash, livestock, goods or property, and can be so expensive it borders on gouging.

It can be “a hindrance for the young people when they want to get married and the parents are insisting on a bride price,” Mukasa says. If the couple doesn‘t have the resources, “they end up living together without going through the normal processes…which is contrary to the commandments.”

The church has asked members not to follow the traditional practice, but it is hard for many to give up.

Even Mukasa paid a bride price for his wife, Eunice, but it wasn‘t too tough, he says, “because we had the support of our family…and we didn‘t have to pay everything at once.”

For his part, Sitati, the emeritus general authority, sees it as a generational issue.

“We married right in the middle of that [bride price] culture,” he says in an interview. “When we joined the church, our children were small. We learned about the principles of the church, and we determined that this is not something that is going to happen in our family.”

The couple have never taken a dowry for any of their three daughters, but when one son (of two) wanted to get married, the bride’s family — new church members, who “did not understand very much” — wanted to continue that tradition.

“We went to them,” Sitati says, “and talked to them out of it.”

A bigger problem could be polygamy, which has been legal in Kenya since 2014, especially in rural areas.

About 9.2% of married Kenyans live in polygamous relationships, according to the country‘s census. And they’re not just Muslims, for whom it has long been acceptable.

It’s not against the law to proselytize among Islamic believers, Mukasa notes. “We have had Muslims who have joined the church. In fact, one of our former bishops was a Muslim convert.”

Given that 85% of Kenyans are Christian, it is not surprising that “hundreds of thousands of Christian men in this East African nation … have multiple wives,” Religion News Service reports, “despite Catholic and other church teachings.”

Latter-day Saints allowed polygamist marriages from the 1830s into the early 20th century. The church now ousts polygamists from their faith and does not allow a polygamist to be baptized.

In Kenya, that means any polygamist who seeks baptism must end all but one marriage.

Water, self-reliance and schools

Though Kenya long has had one of the strongest African economies, some 7.6% of the population makes less than $2 U.S. dollars a day. That means nearly 9 million people in this East African country live in extreme poverty. And the rate of unemployment creates additional stresses for the church and its people. For many, even education is out of reach.

At government-run schools, first through seventh grades are free, but high school can cost anywhere from $400 to $600 a year.

Poverty presents immense challenges to Latter-day Saints as well, Mukasa says. “A large part of our members are struggling with the temporal needs, so the church has come in strongly with the self-reliance program to help them boost their abilities.”

In 2024, the church provided various countrywide projects, says church spokesperson Irene Caso, two for food security, nine aimed at health and health and disability, and 68 for water.

One simple example: There is a Latter-day Saint chapel in Nairobi’s Upper Hill district, not far from the slums. It’s surrounded by a fence and protected by security guards. On the grounds, the church “drilled a borehole that is yielding enough water for our use and for the community,” says Caso. “The church shares the water at no cost to the surrounding community. Individuals bring their jugs. Other small businesses like food vendors are also accessing the water.”

The church’s Humanitarian Services also has completed at least nine school projects.

In a rural district near the coastal town of Mombasa, the church donated more than $50,000 to add three classrooms made of coral bricks for grades seven through nine at a school mostly made of red mud and sticks. It still has no electricity.

Getting an education is so important to villagers, says Rinda Hayes, a Utahn who co-founded Kenya Keys, a nonprofit organization to help pay school fees for needy students. “They will walk miles and miles to get it.”

Some 655 Kenyan students are enrolled in the church-sponsored BYU-Pathway Worldwide online degree program at “a fraction of the normal fees,” the church says. “The cost per class in Kenya after application of a scholarship is only $9.75 per class. The total tuition cost borne by a student who earns a bachelor’s degree in Kenya is just $287, or slightly more than 1% of the cost of an on-campus degree.”

It has, the church says, “brought hope to many.”

The appeal of Mormonism

So what draws these Kenyans to such a seemingly exotic faith? History, teachings, community and a sense of order that can offset the chaos and confusion that abound in this buzzing East African country.

Caroline Wangu Theuri was a 30-year-old mother of two when she met missionaries. Through Latter-day Saint theology, she says, she came to know her “divine identity” and that God cares about her individually.

She related to Mormonism‘s history, the story of a young farm boy who said he saw God and the little bands of believers that were persecuted as they gathered.

“They faced the same things we face,” Theuri says. “I get stronger and stronger every day when I think about what the prophet Joseph Smith went through. It keeps me going.”

Eventually, she and her husband (who never converted) divorced. She has served in many volunteer “callings,” including as the local women‘s Relief Society president, and, most recently, as a full-time missionary to train leaders.

The church provided a lifeline for her with many meaningful group activities like “homemaking enrichment,” shows with singing and dancing, and other activities “that brought people together.” She mourned the loss of connection when Sunday services moved from three hours to two and that Relief Society women no longer met every week.

“We knew each other, and it worked quite well,” Theuri says. “Three hours worked miracles. It was quite bonding.”

Marwara, bishop of the Riruta Ward, loved to read about world history in school, so he had heard of the faith’s foundational scripture, the Book of Mormon. When he saw two missionaries on the street, he asked for a copy. They declined but beckoned him to come with them to church. Not long afterward, the determined scholar joined and was called to serve as the ward librarian.

During that time, congregations used to stage variety shows and hold sports competitions for young single adults and “that’s how I met my wife, [Gladys Mbithi],” he says, laughing. “There were not enough men to play [soccer] against, so we had to join a ‘sisters’ game — and they beat us.”

From there, they started talking and now are raising their four children in the church.

At 17, Sarah Ishainzah attends Latter-day Saint seminary (religious classes for young members) on Saturdays with a handful of mild-mannered teens. Not all of Sarah’s family are church members, which has been hard, she says, but “without God, we couldn‘t do it.”

Being a Latter-day Saint in Kenya is not the same as being one in America, Denis Mukasa says. “We are still in our young growth stage. Some of our programs are not run in the ideal way they are supposed to be run.”

The African experience might be different, the modest Latter-day Saint leader says, but “faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is the same.”

Given all the adversity the members encounter, he adds with a smile, the Kenyans’ faith might be “even stronger.”

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