Actions Speak Louder Than Words

[This story was told by Rev. Grace Imathiu at the Christian Educators Fellowship Conference in New Orleans in October of 2002.]

Back in 1989, I was a student at Cambridge University in England. I was doing research on the beginnings of the Methodist Church in Kenya. And I was very curious because my Grandfather on my father’s side was among the very first Christians in my home area. And my father was so grateful for the missionaries who came all the way to Kenya that my father named all his children after the missionaries. Even my grandmother, Grace, chose to let go of her African name and take the name of Grace Alvaden (sp?), the first missionary from England to die in Nehru (sp?), my hometown. My brother Fred is named after Fred Valenda (sp?), another missionary. Oh, we loved these men and women who left their culture, their homelife, to bring us the Good News of Jesus Christ! And I was reading so much about them in 1989 - I went to the library in London where the Methodist Missionary Society keeps its papers, and I read the letters - handwritten! - by these figures who had become legends and myths and ancestors to my Christian faith.

And one letter in there was a letter from one of my Grandfather’s favorite mentors - a letter from my Grandfather’s spiritual mother and father. And in that letter, there was attached another letter from the missionary’s wife, and she was describing how one day she got homesick for the kind of food they have in England. And so she decided to cook for her husband some scones, that look like muffins. And she said that she was making the scones. And she got them ready. And she called her husband indoors. She went to the kitchen to get the tea, and she heard him say, “How wonderful - scones! And they have raisins in them!” Well, she dropped the kettle right there and then! She had not put any raisins in the scones! She rushed over, stopped him from putting them in his mouth, and they did the investigation. You would not believe, they found in the flour bin a dead mother rat and a small baby rat. And the raisins were not raisins, but - you know what! My goodness!

Now the story would have been funny if it had stopped there. But she went on to write and say, “I did not waste those scones. I gave them to my African boys. And they liked them very much, because I had put plenty of jam on them.”

And when I read that letter, I could not believe these words. And my whole world crashed right there. My entire trust in God crashed right there. How could anyone pack their suitcase and their Bible and travel all the way across the sea to innocent African people, who trust them with their very lives, who gave up their culture and their names....My faith found itself in such a slippery place. It fell, and shattered. And I promised I would not be a Christian, I would not be a Methodist, if this was what Methodism was about.