As rain pounded outside, 20 Nairobi Catholics huddled in a small, 12-foot by 12-foot shelter in the informal settlement of Waruku. After praying the rosary and reflecting on the upcoming Sunday Gospel, the St. Kizito small Christian community, known as an S.C.C., began discussing the Kenyan Catholic Justice and Peace Department’s booklet, “Building a Just and Peaceful Kenya.”
The week’s topic was ballooning debt, excessive taxation and government corruption. This initiated a probing conversation on how to maintain Christian morals in the face of skyrocketing bread prices, deepening poverty and the constant pressure to give and take bribes. Asked who the St. Kizito S.C.C. represents within the local Catholic Church, the group’s leader, Ben Wanjala, responded succinctly: “We are the people on the ground.”
Founded over 20 years ago, St. Kizito is one of nearly 50,000 Catholic S.C.C.s in Kenya and 200,000 S.C.C.s in the nine nations comprising the Association of Member Episcopal Conferences of Eastern Africa. As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday in July 2026, Amecea marks 50 years since the region’s bishops made the formation of small Christian communities the key pastoral priority for eastern Africa. They remain an unsung story behind the dynamic growth and impact of the Catholic Church in modern Africa.
As the global church continues to move forward on its synodal journey, African S.C.C.s have much to teach about how a parish can truly walk together as a “communion of communities.”
Small Christian communities emerged in eastern and central Africa as part of the Catholic Church’s efforts to implement the Second Vatican Council’s ecclesiology, which highlighted the participant role of the people of God. Rather than depend on missionaries, catechists or members of the clergy operating out of parishes and outstations, laypeople were called to live out their baptismal vocations, evangelizing and embodying their Christian faith within their families, rural villages and urban streets.
“The small Christian community is a place where people come together to share the word of God, to witness with their lives and to help one another,” says Nicholas Obiero, C.P. Father Obiero is a member of a S.C.C. himself and the dean of Tangaza University’s School of Theology in Nairobi.
The birth of small Christian communities also reflected a postcolonial moment when both Western missionaries and African church leaders recognized the need to build a self-propagating and self-sustaining local church, exemplifying Pope Paul VI’s famous 1969 exhortation that “you can, and you must, have an African Christianity.”
African S.C.C.s were not a simple recreation of their better-known base community cousins in Latin America. They have been described by Father Gerry Proctor, a researcher and diocesan priest from England, as “an African response to an African problem.”
In fact, this model of church emerged simultaneously across the Catholic world, including in Asian countries like South Korea, India and the Philippines. In turn, the post-1980s decline of Latin American comunidades eclesiales de base was not mirrored in Africa, where S.C.C.s continued to grow and diversify well into the 21st century.
The success of African S.C.C.s is explained in part by the strong support for them from the institutional church in Africa. In 1994, the First African Synod of Bishops embraced the ecclesial image of the church as the family of God, and Pope John Paul II’s post-synodal exhortation argued that “the Church as family cannot reach her full potential as Church unless she is divided into communities small enough to foster close human relationships.”
Nairobi’s Hekima University College and Tangaza University developed seminary courses on S.C.C.s so that future priests could be equipped to collaborate with these lay leaders. Echoing Pope Francis, Sister Mary Wambua Nzilani, a professor at Hekima, offers a direct message to the seminarians in her class: “Go and smell the smell of the sheep—don’t just talk in the parish office. Go to the ground!”
In the 2020s, S.C.C.s—known in the region’s Kiswahili language as jumuiyas—continue to flourish in Nairobi and throughout Kenya. Meeting weekly on Saturdays, Sundays or weekday evenings, the “church in the neighborhood” gathers for an hour or more to pray the rosary, reflect on the upcoming Sunday’s Gospel and share food and intercessions.
Elected to three-year terms by their own members, S.C.C. leaders include a moderator, catechist, treasurer, secretary and at times a liturgist or justice and peace coordinator. All are entrusted with helping members to study the Scriptures, learn and share their Catholic faith, prepare for Sunday liturgy and deepen their relationships with families and neighbors.
S.C.C.s have been an especially fruitful incubator for women’s leadership within the Catholic Church. “The priests cannot run the church without these female [S.C.C.] leaders,” says Philomena Mwaura, professor of religious studies at Kenyatta University. In turn, every member of a parish is simultaneously enrolled in a neighborhood S.C.C., and all those aspiring to receive a sacrament must receive the formal endorsement of their S.C.C.
Many priests welcome an approach that brings the church closer to the regular lives of parishioners. “People are reached fast,” says Father Nicholas Omulo, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in the rural area of Ikombe, Kenya. “You are able to see them well, and you are able to serve them better.”
Yet S.C.C.s are more than devotional prayer groups or base-level sectors of the parish bureaucracy. They raise funds to support funerals, weddings or graduations while also sponsoring charitable works like visiting orphans, the elderly or prisoners. During the Lenten season, S.C.C.s spend a portion of their meetings reflecting on the Kenyan Conference of Catholic Bishops’ “Lenten Campaign” booklets, which focus on local inequities or social harms, like government corruption, environmental degradation, human trafficking and youth and technology.
This faith-justice linkage has inspired some Nairobi S.C.C. leaders to move into formal community action work. Formerly a leader of Holy Cross Parish’s St. Marcellino S.C.C., Brian James Omondi started the Dandora Community Justice Center at age 24 to monitor elections, protest police abuse and protect human rights in one of Nairobi’s toughest neighborhoods.
This is not to say that Kenyan S.C.C.s lack challenges. In many communities, women’s participation outstrips that of men by a factor of as much as four to one. “Men think S.C.C.s are a women’s thing,” Father Omulo says.
Leaders of St. Michael the Archangel S.C.C. in Nairobi’s Kibera slum see the gender discrepancy as a matter of divergent priorities. “Women are eager to hear. When they heard something about Jesus, they ran toward that…. Men don’t give themselves to Jesus so easily. They are going to watch [soccer], going to drink and talking about politics.”
Likewise, the church is grappling with how to keep Gen Z engaged. S.C.C.s at Kenyatta University gather 200 students for praise and worship and Eucharistic adoration while running a network of student-led “family groups” in neighboring apartments.
Enterprising young Kenyan Catholics have started online S.C.C.s, using social media to reach their peers. Alloys Nyakundi, leader of the Young Adult Seekers Online S.C.C., argues that “we [Catholics] should see modern technology not as a crisis, but an opportunity.”
Mary Wahome, a member of the community, appreciates how the smartphone opens up wider opportunities for engaging daily readings, novenas and online S.C.C.s. Collins Ongoma, another member, agrees, “If the jumuiya is the church in the neighborhood, then the smartphone is your immediate neighborhood.”
Worryingly, many Kenyan S.C.C.s feel burdened by excessive parish fundraising requests. Leaders openly wonder if their faith-sharing communities have been subsumed by calls for “michango, michango, michango!” (“money, money, money!”). This has discouraged participation among the urban and rural poor as members experience shame at their own lack of resources.
“They don’t come for fear of [being asked for a] contribution,” one S.C.C. leader puts it.
In this sense, the global Catholic Church’s turn to synodality offers an important opportunity to revitalize Kenyan S.C.C.s. On one level, S.C.C.s already exemplify synodality’s prioritization of communion, participation and mission.
Core African cultural values of harambee (“pulling together”) and ubuntu (“because we are, therefore I am”) support a synodal vision of church far more than the dominant individualism or legalism of the modern West. A single Nairobi small Christian community can have members who speak five to ten mother tongues, reflecting a grassroots unity in diversity. In the words of Lawrence Mandere, a diocesan priest in Kisii in western Kenya, “synodality is more effective in African culture than anywhere else.”
Yet it would be a distortion to argue that the Kenyan church has mastered the synodal process. “Just because we have S.C.C.s and parish councils doesn’t mean we have synodality,” says Prof. Mwaura. “There are still many people who feel outside the church, many who feel wounded by the church.”
The opaque nature of parish fundraising is a flashpoint. Many jumuiya members are asked to donate to causes, like diocesan building projects, that will include few opportunities for collaboration. One S.C.C. leadership team member complained, “Power comes from up-down…. We are always on the receiving end down here. We want our voice to be involved in decision-making.”
For others, the challenge is not so much transparency as the financial burden itself. Located in the working-class Nairobi neighborhood of Kawangare, St. Catherine of Siena S.C.C. members wondered why their fundraising target was equivalent to that of wealthier jumuiyas. “We are low-income earners!”
And although the local bishops have been supportive of S.C.C.s, some members of the clergy struggle to delegate, consult or collaborate in a genuinely synodal fashion. “As an agent of evangelization, I need to humble myself,” says Sister Nzilani. “We think we know much, but these people on the ground may know more.”
Whatever the evident challenges they are facing, Kenyan Catholics who are active with S.C.C.s wondered how the U.S. church could even survive without a widespread S.C.C. network. “Do [American Catholics] love their church?” asked one female S.C.C. leader in Nairobi’s informal settlement of Kawangware. “Then they need to open up their homes!”
S.C.C.s remind U.S. Catholics that they are called not just to serve as development partners with our African sisters and brothers, but to learn from them concrete lessons in evangelization.
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