Ninety-two-year-old Julius Wafula lives in an old, rusty-iron-roofed mud house in Bungoma County, Kenya. Nearby, amid avocado trees and banana plantations, a new seven-bedroom house that he built for his children and grandchildren stands empty.
Before his wife, Mary, died in 2018, Wafula’s children visited often out of love for her. Now they rarely come. Sibling quarrels and broken relationships with their father have split them apart.
Wafula has felt increasingly lonely and isolated since his wife’s death. He regrets being drunk and violent when his 12 children were growing up, and he recognizes that his neglect as a father drove a deep-seated wedge between him and his children.
After Mary’s death, Wafula encountered Jesus when his old friend and now pastor visited him and explained the gospel. Wafula then committed his life to God. He stopped drinking and smoking and got baptized. But his efforts to reconcile with his children have failed, as they remain divided over who should take care of him and over their religious beliefs. Three of his children converted to Islam, and others attend different Christian churches.
This Christmas, Wafula hopes the infighting will end. He’s asked his pastor, Matthias Wanjala, to mediate a family gathering to help them resolve their differences.
Kenyans often celebrate major family events—anniversaries, weddings, and graduations—during the Christmas season. Among Christians, the holiday also serves as a time for dedicated reconciliation gatherings. When attempts to mend conflicts fail, church leaders step in to heal families and communities.
Wanjala leads the local Pentecostal Evangelistic Fellowship of Africa church and has been helping families reconcile for more than 30 years. He sees Christmas as a time to make amends because the birth of Jesus brings renewal. As the year ends, he said, Christians can welcome Christ into their lives and start the New Year clean.
“Christmas should have a purpose in our lives, and there is nothing more pleasing to God than seeing a family celebrating the sacrifice of forgiveness,” Wanjala said.
The grandfatherly pastor, who is in his early 90s, was born in Bungoma and knows most of the families who live there. Whenever there is an irreconcilable conflict, he visits them at home to learn more and sets a date for mediation. Wanjala calls each family member personally, inviting the person to the meeting. Because people in the community respect him as a pastor, they nearly always say yes.
At these meetings, Wanjala brings along three or four associate pastors to pray, read the Bible, and teach the aggrieved parties about forgiveness. He closes their time together by encouraging the family to admit their mistakes, repent, and ask for forgiveness from each other.
Wanjala hopes to pass on this practice to younger pastors. “I am aging but will love to see my junior pastors continue [family ministry] with [the same] spirit,” he said.
Pastor Anthony Juma of Full Gospel Church in Kitale town said family feuds don’t just hurt the family—they also hurt the church. When a churchgoing family fights, some family members may stop attending church or may suffer in their spiritual lives because of the conflict.
“When families fall apart, the Devil takes advantage,” Juma said. “As a pastor, I have the trust of the society to ensure I bring [the family] together.”
Churches extend the practice of reconciliation to community conflicts too. Phanice Mulamula, a pastor at Glory Tabernacle in Kakamega, organizes a special reconciliation meeting every year during Christmas. The church invites widows, orphans, and the elderly, regardless of their religion, to the event and supplies them with food and clothing while guest speakers teach from Bible passages about reconciliation, such as Ephesians 4:32.
“We emphasize love and forgiveness because we are the body of Christ,” Mulamula said. “Let nobody cross to the New Year with old grudges, hatred, and disunity.”
During these meetings, church members stand up to share their testimonies, confess their wrongdoing, and ask others for forgiveness. The congregation then enters a time of cheering, hugging, and dancing. The meeting ends with a special meal and take-home Christmas packages filled with rice, bread, chicken, clothes, shoes, blankets, cooking oil, sugar, and money for those in need.
“This is the true spirit of Christmas: when families reconcile and the poor [are] remembered,” Mulamula said.
In the six years since Glory Tabernacle began holding Christmas reconciliation services, several nonbelievers have participated in it. So have members of other churches.
Jacinta Muthoni, who is a Christian but not a member of Glory Tabernacle, has attended the reconciliation services for three years now. Her neighbors had let their animals destroy crops on her farms or let their children cut down her fruit trees, which resulted in bitter quarrels and demands for compensation among them. After hearing about Jesus’ message of forgiveness, Muthoni asked her neighbors to come to the church and sought to make amends with them.
“It gives me the opportunity to forgive all those who wronged me as I also ask for forgiveness from those I wronged,” she said.
Christmas also provides a time for bridging generational divides. Sometimes children flee home over forced marriages or arguments with parents. When youth who live far from home return to visit their parents, pastors can mediate conflicts face-to-face.
Pastor Rose Zadock of Holy Peace Fire in Kakamega helps reconcile these divides. She said a common cause of conflict comes from parents arguing with children about romantic relationships. When teens sneak out to visit their boyfriends or girlfriends, some parents react in a heavy-handed way. Zadock said it drives teenagers from church when they feel accused of sexual immorality or bad friendships. She helps parents respond less harshly and teaches teenagers how to pursue romantic relationships without falling into sexual sin.
Kenyan elders often initiate reconciliation. Bringing younger people, especially Gen Zers, to reconciliation meetings can be difficult, Zadock said. They can become defensive when corrected and don’t always respect the authority of parents and church leaders.
“The Gen Zs … look at parents as illiterate or primitive,” she said. “But we keep on talking to them through the power of the Holy Spirit.”
When families are home for Christmas, Zadock sets up face-to-face meetings for them. She and her husband, bishop Zadock Lubira, pray. Then they let the parents explain their concerns and allow the children to respond. After listening to both sides, she and her husband offer biblical teaching and ask everyone to hold hands in a circle and pray. Zadock said these mediations usually succeed, though reconciliations over conflicts that involved police take more meetings.
For Wafula, bridging these generational divides with his children, who range from 30 to 68 years old, is foremost on his mind this Christmas. All 12 of them have accepted Wafula and his pastor’s invitation to meet at Wafula’s home on December 23 and stay at the new house through the holiday.
Wafula plans to ask his children to forgive him and each other. He has dedicated one cow, two goats, and several chickens for the Christmas feast, hoping to celebrate a joyous family reunion like the father of the Prodigal Son did in Luke 15:11–32.
“I don’t want to die before my children come together and forgive each other,” Wafula said.
