Three important events occurred on the faith front in Kenya this week.

My Anglican friends now have a new Archbishop, the Right Reverend Eliud Wabukala. It was an exciting process, with the Daily Nation telling us ethnic and regional realpolitik weighed in some, and the Standard insinuating some money might have been 'poured'.

As was the case with his predecessor, Dr. Benjamin Nzimbi, I was privileged to attend university with Wabukala's son.  If sons are true reflections of their sons, I aver Wabukala will be a primate worth observing, particularly on Church renewal and social justice concerns. His son Samuel is your version of Franklin Graham, typifying in Sudan the heartbeat of his father's mission within both the Anglican Church and the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK).

Rev. Wabukala ascends to power when the nation is in transition, and when many Christians yearn for prophetic voices that will speak truth to power in a way that will redeem the wider Church's real and perceived acquiescence in the first Kibaki administration, the lead-up to the disputed 2007 polls and the months following.

Within the Anglican Church itself, there is on-going introspection regarding the place and role of young people, the appropriation of contemporary elements in praise and worship, missions and related world-view issues, and the perennial question of secret societies and their influence on the Church's leadership and operations.

The other event worth noting came in the person of Mama Sarah Obama, Kenya's poster-woman of delayed but evergreen grandeur. The Church, the Nation told us, had lost out in the contest over President Barack Obama's grandmother's allegiance. Reactions from immediate family members to her expected public conversion and baptism were fast and furious, later amplified by some leaders of the Islamic faith.

It will be interesting to see if any decent debate about the history of Christian-Muslim relations in Kenya emerges, as indeed the entire question of whether or not either side could open up to honest scholarship on its theology and means of proselytizing.

But I think my highlight of the week would be a Church service I attended today at All Nations Tabernacle of Revival in Abington, Massachusetts.

The Church is an initiative of colleagues with whom I attended university in Kenya, and with whom we carried out evangelism and some community work in Kinanie and Kimongo villages, two areas around Daystar's Athi River campus that typify Kenya's land and poverty dilemma. Jamleck Wairimu, an elder at the Church, told me they desire to grow a multi-ethnic and multi-national faith community in a city in which Kenyans, and specifically Gikuyu, have a pretty strong presence.

My three hours in the near-capacity service captured for me the promise and fears of an African Church away from Africa, with the ever nagging need to express authentic faith in ways that respond to the human condition and also glorify the risen Christ. The Church, Pastor Philip Kihato said, will be concerned with "deliverance, salvation and healing." The service reminded me of River City Church, another indigenous African effort to reach out to Africa's elite in Washington, D.C, by Emmanuel Mutangana, a Rwandese minister with whom I also attended Daystar.

African Christians, away from Africa, present to me an interesting experience in global Christendom, with personal tales of triumph and tragedy that would make ushuhuda somewhere in rural or urban Kenya sound like a fairy tale. The knowledge of God as a real and intimate friend in strange lands stirs in tales of the tax man, immigration authorities, broken families, messy job situations, postponed academic dreams, disappointment with God and the attendant faith crises -- the totality, in short, of the human experience.

I'll be keeping close tabs on the Boston and DC affairs.

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