| Primate | Archbishop of Kenya. The Most Rev. Eliud Wabukala |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Nairobi, Kenya |
| Territory | Kenya |
| Members | 1,500,000 |
| Website | http://www.ackenya.org/ |
| Anglicanism Portal | |
The Anglican Church of Kenya is part of the Anglican Communion, and includes 30 dioceses. The Primate of the Church is the Archbishop of Kenya.
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The Church became part of the Province of East Africa in 1960, but by 1970 Kenya and Tanzania were divided into separate Provinces.
The church was founded originally as the diocese of Eastern Equatorial Africa (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania) in 1884, with James Hannington as the first bishop; however, Anglican missionary activity had been present in the area since 1844, when Dr. Johann Ludwig Krapf landed in Mombasa. The first Africans were ordained to the priesthood in 1885. In 1898, the diocese was split into two, with the new diocese of Mombasa governing Kenya and northern Tanzania (the other diocese later became the Church of Uganda); northern Tanzania was separated from the diocese in 1927. Mass conversions of Africans began as early as 1910. In 1955, the diocese's first African bishops, Festo Olang’ and Obadiah Kariuki, were consecrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury in Uganda (Olang’ would be elected the first African archbishop in 1970); in 1960, the province of East Africa, comprising Kenya and Tanzania, was formed with Leonard James Beecher as archbishop. Tanzania seceded from the province in 1970 and was created as its own province. Manasses Kuria was the Archbishop of Kenya from 1980 to 1994. The current archbishop is Eliud Wabukala.
Today, there are at least 1,500,000 Anglicans out of an estimated population of 30,700,000.
The Primate of the Church is the Archbishop of Kenya. The See is fixed at Nairobi. Previously styled "Archbishop of Kenya and Bishop of Nairobi", the current title is "Archbishop of Kenya and Bishop of All Saints' Cathedral Diocese". The current Archbishop is the fifth since the Province of East Africa was divided into separate and autonomous Provinces of Kenya and Tanzania.
The polity of the Anglican Church of Kenya is Episcopal church governance, which is the same as other Anglican churches. That is, headed by bishops from the Greek word, "episcopos," which means overseer or superindendant. The church maintains a system of geographical parishes organized into dioceses. There are 30 of these, each headed by a bishop:
Each diocese is divided into archdeaconries, each headed by a senior priest. The archdeaconries are further subdivided into parishes, headed by a parish priest. Parishes are subdivided into sub-parishes, headed by lay readers.
The Anglican Church of Kenya, like all Anglican churches, embraces the three traditional Orders of ministry: deacon, priest, and bishop. A local variant of the Book of Common Prayer is used.
The center of the Anglican Church of Kenya's teaching is the life and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The basic teachings of the church, or catechism, includes:
The threefold sources of authority in Anglicanism are scripture, tradition, and reason. These three sources uphold and critique each other in a dynamic way. This balance of scripture, tradition and reason is traced to the work of Richard Hooker, a sixteenth century apologist. In Hooker's model, scripture is the primary means of arriving at doctrine and things stated plainly in scripture are accepted as true. Issues that are ambiguous are determined by tradition, which is checked by reason.[1]
Like many other Anglican churches, the Anglican Church of Kenya is a member of the ecumenical World Council of Churches.[2] In October 2009, the Kenyan Church's leadership reacted to the Vatican's proposed creation of personal ordinariates for disaffected traditionalist Anglicans by saying that although he welcomed ecumenical dialogue and shared moral theology with the Catholic Church, the current GAFCON structures already meet the spiritual and pastoral needs of conservative Anglicans in Africa.[3]
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