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In the 1950s, while Kenya was still a British colony, a group of white expatriates started a church. Since they were from free church backgrounds, largely Plymouth Brethren, they called it Nairobi Undenominational Chapel. The church was located near the Governor's house, within a secured area where Africans were not allowed. So the church had no African members.

After the Mau-Mau Rebellion, as whites left Kenya for Rhodesia and South Africa and other places still under British rule, the church dwindled. In the meantime, the University of Nairobi, in the center of the city, began growing and occupying the land around the Chapel. But until 1989, the church had no university students, and only one African family among the remaining twenty members in the congregation.

That's when the congregation approached an indigenous African church to take over. And a young graduate student named Oscar Muriu became the pastor of Nairobi Chapel.

Today the church has planted 25 congregations in Nairobi, with thousands of members, and is planning to plant churches in Asia, America, and Europe. Andy Crouch of the Christian Vision Project interviewed Oscar at the recent triennial Urbana missions conference.

What happened to change Nairobi Chapel from a dwindling group of discouraged whites to a vibrant, international, church-planting fellowship?

They began to pray that God would show them what to do, and they sought new leadership to help them reach the African students around them. That's how I got to come to the Chapel. I was finishing my studies at Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology.

Any given Sunday maybe ten, sometimes only four people were there! They probably figured, "He can't do much damage."

Did you have a plan?

I knew nothing about church leadership. My core prayer was, "Lord, give me 30 university students," the number I believed was the critical mass needed to turn the place around. And one of the first students who came along is now an associate pastor with us, and several other students who came are now pastoring congregations we planted.

Last year we divided the main church up into five different congregations. I'm pastoring one of the new church plants that's meeting in a tent on Ngong Road.

Since about 65 percent of Nairobians live in the slums, we made a commitment that for every church we plant to reach out to an educated elite, like us at the Chapel, we would intentionally plant two churches that were unlike us, in the slum areas. So of the churches we have planted, seven or eight are like the Chapel, and the others are in the slums.

Is church leadership different in slum areas than it is in educated areas?

For me, planting churches among the university educated is easy. They are like me. I only need to be myself to be like them. The challenge comes when I cross the social divide of status and wealth. That's been hard.

My hope had been that we could be a multi-economic church, where the poor, the rich, and the middle class were together. But it's not turning out that way. Partly because of the location, partly because we communicate in English, partly because of what the different groups understand. When I deal with university students and the educated elite, I'm using statistical evidence, I'm quoting historic figures and world leaders, I'm citing books and movies.

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