Evangelism and folk Islam: a case study in South Coast Kenya

Abstract

The Islamic religion has become a challenge to Christianity due to its rapid growth around the world today. Christianity and Islam are both devising strategies on how to reach out to each other with their conflicting messages. Christian missiologists have come up with several approaches of doing Mission to the Muslims. However, because of the Islamic practices and beliefs that vary in different contexts or from place to place, some of the approaches are not effective in some areas. The nature of the cultural context has more often made it progressively difficult for the Christian churches and missionaries to do Mission among the Muslim countries, including those at South Coast of Kenya, the Digo folk Muslims. The call for a suitable understanding of an evangelism approach among the Digo folk Muslims is an essential concept for an effective Mission to them. There is no doubt that in Digoland, there is still a great challenge in evangelising the Digo people. Even though currently there is a good number of un-indigenous churches in this area, the problem remains that the Digo Muslims have not effectively responded to the Gospel of Jesus Christ at large. It is also clear that the evangelism approaches that the Christian churches are using have not been effective. This thesis analytically examines evangelism approaches to Mission among the Digo folk Muslims by seven selected Christian churches from different denominations in the South Coast of Kenya. The study investigates the effectiveness of the evangelism approaches, which these churches are using with the Digo folk Muslims in sharing the gospel. Mostly using data collected from oral interviews, the study finds that Mission involvement to Digo Muslims is slow and not as effective as evidenced by the small number of the Muslim background believers in the selected churches. The churches and the Muslim background believers face challenges that include fear due to threats from the Muslim community as they perceive the Christians as adversaries who are stealing their members. Moreover, the few Muslims are, at times threatened with death. The churches also face challenges from the lack of effective training in Muslim evangelism in context including the financial constraints for Muslim Mission in the area. The research concludes that significantly, there is a need for the selected churches to reexamine and reconsider their evangelism approaches to Digo folk Muslims with a view to improving their ways of engaging in sharing the gospel with them. Finally, the study formulates and proposes a practical biblical model for effective Mission to these Digo Muslims.