I am amazed by this fascinating book where Ian S. Markham and Joshua Daniel summarizing the writings of Martyn Percy. The writing of Martyn Percy is seriously engaging and how they weave through my African Quaker theology. It reminds me that when the early Quaker missionaries arrived in Kenya to establish the first Quaker church in Kenya, they came expecting to establish a Quaker church with Quaker traditions as was known in the USA. But they found that the context under which the Kenya people were could not absorb the traditional Quaker worship as was known to be silent worshipping or sit in waiting for the spirit to minister. They realized that Africans would connect and find their Spiritual satisfaction through the noise (singing and drum biting). Since the missionaries had come to Kenya to establish a Christian church through the Quakers, they went on to establish the churches under a contextualized ministry.<\/p>\n
The Quaker church that was established in Kenya is of its unique character that different from the original Quakerism. This happened so that the church would be accepted in the African context. Interestingly, Percy did his research in the impact, theology, and practices emerging from John Wimber, the founder of the Vineyard churches. John Wimber was a Quaker, but when he exercised the full power of the Holy Spirit in ministry, he was told to get out of the Quaker church, which led him to establish the Vineyard Churches. Percy focuses on the use of music in the church worship and essential it is. \u201c\u2026 To ignore the theological impact of music is surely a mistake. The melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic dimensions of music are all value-laden. Music imprints its hard logical meaning no matter how hard this is to articulate.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n The Quaker church in Kenya was established on a contextual theologian of the three early missionaries. It was very dramatic that their dynamic approach to evangelism was more socially progressively positioned where women were encouraged to pastoral ministry against the cultural practices. Just as the book describes the describes context as problem and predicament, the early missionaries found themselves in a severe problem in the manner the church was introduced in Kenya. The idea of context, along with the comparative method, is also central to ontology, and have been at the background of discipline\u2019s sense of epistemological and ethical grounding, alongside its exploration of the ontologies of different worlds.[2]<\/a> The church was established on purely Africa context, and despite the challenges, the missionaries had with the sending body in the USA and recalling some of them back and replacing with others; the situation did not change at all.<\/p>\n One of the interesting things was in 1927 during the prayer conferences the missionaries did round the region in western Kenya led to the pouring of the Holy Spirit to the people who started speaking in tongues and the church was not ready on how to deal with at all. This created confusion in the church, and some people we expelled from the church who later formed another church called The Holy Spirit Church. This was a problem brought due to the contextualization of Quakerism in Kenya. As it is written in the book that the Anglican sentiment says, \u201c as a church, we tend to cook issues slowly\u201d and to refer positively to the \u201crich time\u201d of the church.[3]<\/a> This is a true reflection of the current Quaker church in Kenya which is very good in talking about its prosperous past and not striving to sustain or making other good times to be emulated by the generation coming as they talk about their good history. We are known as the historic peace churches, which promoted peace, but now there is ward among themselves than ever before, but still talk about peace as their value. Therefore, Markham and Daniel have written issues facing the churches including the Quaker churches in Kenya<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> (Markham Ian S. & Daniel Joshau 2018, Loc 302 Kindle Edition)<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> (Markham Ian S. & Daniel Joshau 2018, Loc 847 Kindle Edition)<\/p>\n