Nearly 7,000 Churches Await Registration in Kenya
Religious groups in Kenya are lining up by the thousands to seek legal recognition as churches, said the country's attorney general.
Kenya's registrar general is said to have 6,740 pending applications for church registration, attorney general Amos Wako told the East African Standard newspaper.
The department readily admits that it is facing difficulties processing the applications with thousands backed-up and about 60 applications added each month.
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"There is an astronomical increase in the application for the registration of religious societies, some of them turning out to be either wolves and sheepish or formed purely for financial gain, and take advantage of the unsuspecting public," Wako said from Nairobi.
News of corrupt African preachers have been increasingly reported in the past few months. Many Christian leaders have cautioned against and condemned the growing number of "evangelists" who use the Gospel for their own financial gains.
Earlier this year, the president of the All Africa Conference of Churches told Christians to beware of churches who exploit people in the name of the Gospel.
The Rev. Dr. Nyansako-ni-Nku, who heads the fellowship of 169 churches and Christian council in 39 African countries, criticized Pentecostal prosperity churches in Africa of taking advantage of the vulnerable to get rich themselves.
Pentecostals today represent about 12 percent, or about 107 million, of Africa's population according to the World Christian Database. Charismatic members of non-Pentecostal denominations make up another 5 percent of the population, or about 40 million. The proportion of Pentecostals and Charismatics combined was less than 5 percent just over three decades ago.
There are an estimated 400 million Christians in Africa.
AACC's head called on mainline churches to help protect the people, noting that politicians have failed and now the people trust the Church more than the government.
"This means the Church must take its mandate very seriously as we are the mantle of the continent of Africa and if we let the continent down, it would be a disaster for everyone," he said, according to an AACC report.
Kenya's attorney general and others in the department admit the government lacks a system to filter the masses of applications for church status, making it difficult to distinguish genuine religious organizations from the "big business" under the guise of evangelism.
There are already 8,520 registered churches in Kenya.
