Project Pokot - Part Two

In 1976, when I first began working in the bush of Kenya, there were few Protestant missionaries who had ever worked or even seen the people of Pokot and Turkana. By the mid-80’s there was a flurry of mission activity in Pokot because of better roads, though few missionaries actually lived or worked down in the rugged conditions of the bush. My doctoral research in 1991 revealed that, though there were many churches in Pokot, the percentage of Pokot people who attended those churches was remarkably low as the majority of Christians in the district were actually people from other tribes who lived and worked in Pokot. Even more startling in my findings was how few Pokot men were reached with the Gospel. My thesis was, and is, it’s not how many churches that are planted that’s important, but how effective is outreach to those who have never heard. Planting one church for every one thousand people may mean a saturation of churches, but that doesn’t translate into making the Gospel relevant to those who do not accept that message.


In my dissertation I concluded that missionaries (national as well as foreign) needed to move away from traditional African missions (TAM) and create a strategic African mission (SAM) outreach. SAM can only be accomplished by (1) learning the questions of their culture and (2) develop a contextualized approach in presenting the Gospel.

Next year I will be spending more time in Kenya training Kenyan missionaries how to implement SAM (though I will still be teaching in India as well as other places in the world). The goal of my research is to live in Pokot and to revisit the issues I addressed 18 years ago. Because cultures are not static, what has or has not changed among the Pokot since 1991?


- How has their worldview changed?

- Has their family structure changed?

- Do they still practice polygamy, bride price exchange and still practice rites of passage such as sapana and female circumcision?

- Have the churches in Pokot become more or less indigenous?

Every missionary endeavor, in my opinion, should be asking the similar questions as they create a strategy of mission for their target people group. Methods may be easier to create, but it is only when we do the hard work of asking the questions that a true contextualized message can be presented.