Category Archives: Apologetics

Who are the chosen few?

Has God decided who will be saved and who will not? Are people predestined to hell or heaven prior to their existence? Do people have any say about their destiny?

Most people will argue that if God knows the beginning to the end, it means he already knows those who won’t choose Him; in that case do they have the will to change their fate. It is classic predestination vs free will which is too big a theological debate for us to handle in one article.

But God has opened the window to his word just enough for Continue reading Who are the chosen few?

So you have questions……

Questioning God‘I’m just wondering why this is happening to us, what did we do wrong? Didn’t we pray enough?’ Those were the words of one of the members of our small church group after we were kicked out of a public park as we were having our picnic. I will tell you how that happened.

As part of our activities we decided as a group to go outdoors to have fun, discuss some topics and just bond. So we went for a picnic in one of the parks in Nairobi. It was a beautiful sunny day and we found ourselves a good shade to enjoy the day.  As we relaxed and got comfortable after our lunch, a guard came by and he asked if we had paid for parking fees (one of us had a car). We showed him the receipt and he went his way.

Barely two minutes later he came back; asking if we had paid for the meeting. ‘Pay for a meeting in a public park?’ Continue reading So you have questions……

Is Christianity a white man’s religion?

Christians in South Sudan. (photo credit:REUTERS)
Christians in South Sudan. (photo credit:REUTERS)

In one form or another most of us have encountered this question; that Christianity is not an African religion, that we Africans abandoned our gods in favour of the white man’s religion, that our traditional religious practices were good enough but then we embraced Christianity because of the goodies it came with.

My real encounter with this question came when I was a 1st year student in Russia. The few Russian friends I had made kept inquiring about my religion and when I mentioned that it was Christianity they would feel like the answer was not complete. They would comment that Christianity was the religion brought by the white man and so I should tell them my ‘African religion.’ I could not, Christianity is what I knew and still know to be my faith. From their comments I could tell that they could not reconcile the fact that I was a Christian, and I later realized that ‘being a Christian’ meant different things to us.

But it is a fair question and it deserves a Continue reading Is Christianity a white man’s religion?

What does Halal mean to Christians?

halalGetting married comes with its changes and adjustments, like having breakfast at home. I always had my breakfast in the office prior to the ‘friendly invasion’; am not a morning person and that means that I used to wake up just in time to refresh and be at the office just barely on time. Having breakfast at home means having all that is necessary for a good breakfast and honey is one of them. One morning as I enjoyed my tea and honeyed bread, I took the honey bottle and started reading the sticker. I noticed the halal logo on the sticker and wondered why it was there. I always thought halal was about meat since I have seen it mostly on restaurant posters in town and in butcheries.

Questions welled up in me; what really is halal? Is it some kind of Islamic spiritual cleansing? Have Islamic prayers been spoken Continue reading What does Halal mean to Christians?

How or Why? Which came first?

whyhow2

It is amazing how some simple things can elude even the brightest of us. Only after carefully thinking that you realize how close or far we can be depending on how we initiate our thought process. OK, let me cut the chase and get to the slaughter.

Sometime back I visited an uncle of mine and found my cousin watching some program on Discovery Science channel. The program had been running for like 5hrs in a row, thank God Continue reading How or Why? Which came first?

Can bible stories be taken literally?

A few days ago I was watching on preacher/pastor being interviewed in a TV program. They were talking about different stuff; politics, church history, the bible and so on. Then after some time into the interview the presenter said something that made me alert, he made a statement and followed it with a question. He said ‘I went to catholic school and so I studied the bible and I also studied with some Jehovah witnesses and I always thought that the bible stories were to be taken literally, but as I grew up I realized that most of the stories are just there to give us a moral lesson, it’s not like those things really happened’, then he asked the preacher ‘do you believe that Jonah was in the belly of a fish for three days?’. The preacher man answered very plainly ‘I don’t believe Jonah was in the belly of a giant fish for three days’. I was surprised, I expected Continue reading Can bible stories be taken literally?