Faith should not withstand oppression

President William Ruto and First Lady Rachel Ruto at Rhema Feast, Uhuru Park. [PCS]

There is a version of faith that kneels only in the sanctuary and stands only for itself. It sings on Sunday, sighs on Monday, and settles by Tuesday into whatever arrangement keeps the lights on. This is faith reduced to furniture. And furniture does not undo oppression.

If you believe in the God revealed in Scripture, you cannot make peace with oppression. The two do not share a room. God affirms the dignity of human beings made in his image; oppression diminishes that image. To call this God your God while accepting arrangements that diminish his image-bearers is a translation error.

Belief in God is therefore not private comfort but a public claim: this order of things is not the final order. Pharaoh is not God. Caesar is not God. No government, institution, tribe, party or individual holds the authority to determine another human being's dignity. Belief in God must make us defenders of freedom — not freedom as an idol, but freedom as part of the dignity God has given us.

But to believe in freedom is not simply to hope for it. It is to master the undoing of oppression, which requires more than indignation — moral clarity, knowledge, organization, strategy, persistence.

Oppression does not always arrive wearing a uniform. Sometimes it arrives as a regulation, a procurement file, a clause quietly inserted into a law. Kenya knows this lesson. We have sung freedom songs while leaving oppressive systems untouched, preached justice while tolerating injustice. Faith that only feels and never masters produces beautiful language and unchanged conditions.

Courage confronts

This is why the recent Rhema Feast matters. It demonstrated that the church is capable — it can gather people, inspire hope, mobilize thousands. People do not gather in such numbers because they were hired; they gather because they were inspired. But the greatness of a gathering is measured not by its size but by what the crowd becomes when it goes home.

Can spiritual energy become moral energy? Can prayer become public responsibility? Can inspiration become institution? The church has shown it can gather. The harder question is whether it can multiply what it gathers — moving from episode to seed.

That question becomes urgent beside the reported abduction of Standard Group Associate Editor Alex Kiprotich, seized by armed men along the Gilgil–Nakuru road on September 1 and found alive nine hours later near Masinga Dam. The incident raises serious questions about the safety of journalists and the security of citizens.

The Rhema moment demonstrated the power of assembly and collective conviction. The abduction on the other hand reminded the country how fragile freedom becomes when citizens can be intimidated, silenced or forcibly removed from ordinary life. One moment showed the church’s capacity. The other exposed the country’s need—and that need must become the church’s work.

Apostle Joshua Selman, speaking at Rhema Feast, offered a striking formulation: “Killing greed is a security strategy.” It is a profound observation. This is precisely where the church’s values work becomes public work.

The church cannot treat its gatherings as ends in themselves. A greed-infested nation requires spiritual courage for disinfection to happen. The church must therefore move to forming people—people capable of confronting abuse of power.

Courage has different forms—the Nathan form, confronting power with truth; the Moses form, standing in the gap between an angry God and wayward people; and the Joseph and Esther form, exercising wisdom and strategic intervention. Their calling is the same: to stand faithfully in undoing oppression.

The church must transcend party politics without transcending the problems of the nation. Non-partisanship is not non-prophecy. It should refuse to become a trumpet of any party while remaining engaged with the moral questions of public life — carrying a vision that inspires politics rather than merely responding to it.

Values transform

That vision must have values at its centre: truth, justice, integrity, human dignity, freedom, accountability, compassion, stewardship, hope. These must become habits in people, practices in communities, principles embedded in institutions. Transformation becomes visible in how people lead, govern, spend public resources, exercise power and treat the vulnerable.

The church does not save Kenya. Christ does. The church does not redeem the nation. God does. But the church bears witness to Christ, forms people in his way, confronts what contradicts his kingdom, and speaks truth to power. It is not the saviour of the nation. It is a witness to the King.

This is why prophet Amos matters. He did not merely speak beautifully about justice — he named the merchants who tilted the scales and trampled the poor. Naming is the first act of mastery. You cannot undo what you refuse to name. A church that will not name corruption, exploitation or the suppression of dissent has not fully embodied the freedom its Gospel proclaims.

The abduction of Kiprotich makes this concrete. A journalist's freedom to work without intimidation is not merely a media issue. It is a human dignity issue, a freedom issue, a values issue. The church cannot speak passionately about dignity in the sanctuary and go silent when that dignity is threatened in the public square.

But the undoing of oppression also requires refusing despair, which is oppression's favourite disciple. It teaches people to expect nothing, and a people who expect nothing will organize nothing, demand nothing, imagine nothing beyond the cage they were handed.

Hope is not merely a feeling; it is a creative discipline—the stubborn Christian insistence that the resurrection has practical consequences. This matters especially for young people, who are not spiritually empty. The church must translate their spiritual hunger into moral imagination and civic courage, helping them see how faith shapes how they lead, work, vote, create, protest, serve and build.

Post Rhema Feast, the continuous task is to convert capacity into consequence. The question is no longer, Can we gather? We have answered that. The question is: Can we transform? Can the prayers of thousands become the values of millions?

So let the pulpit say it plainly: if you believe in the God revealed in Scripture, you cannot make peace with oppression. If you believe in freedom, you cannot merely celebrate it — you must defend it, deepen it, extend it. Name what diminishes human dignity. Turn values into habits, habits into cultures, cultures into systems.

Because freedom is not an event. Freedom is an ethic. It must be preserved, defended and extended — from event to ethic, from gathering to culture, from inspiration to institution, from courage to character.

Know what your belief in God demands: that you participate, patiently and courageously, in the undoing of every arrangement built on someone else's diminishment. Refuse to call oppression normal. Refuse to bow simply because power has entered the room. Anything less is not the fullness of Christian faith. It is decoration.