Joe Kayo, known by many as the daddy of the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement in East Africa, died on November 2, 2023. He was 86.
Kayo founded churches in 4 countries: Deliverance Church Kenya, Deliverance Church Uganda, Juba Pentecostal Church in South Sudan, and Family of God Churches of Zimbabwe. At the time of his death, he was leading the Christian Family Church in Nairobi.
Kayo described his ministry as a spot “where the facility of God is seen working with tangible manifestations, to bring back the glory of God back to the Church in these last days.”
Kayo embraced his spiritual calling as African nations were gaining independence from their European colonizers. His vision of making churches, led and financed by Africans, that contextualized the Christian faith inside African culture caught fire throughout East Africa. It also was at odds with most of the churches that traced their roots back to Western missions and with which he tangled steadily over worship styles and the presence of the Holy Spirit.
“This is the person God used to interrupt barriers and rocks that stood in front of the charismatic movement and Pentecostalism in East Africa,” said J. B. Masinde, a bishop at a Nairobi congregation Kayo had founded, in 2019. “He paid a price … this man carries scars that a few of you won’t ever understand in your life.”
The eldest of six children, Joseph Kayo Nyakango was born in Nyamira County, western Kenya on May 5, 1937. When he was 12, his mother died, and he dropped out of college prematurely on account of lack of college fees. In despair, Kayo sank into drug abuse and petty crime. Later in life, he would narrate how he attempted to take his own life 3 times without success.
More hardships got here with young maturity. Around 1954, Kayo was imprisoned for eight months after he left his job at a sugar company to take a recent one. (Because this punishment didn’t seemingly fit the offense, some have speculated that something else was amiss.) In 1957, while living within the coastal city of Mombasa, he fell seriously in poor health and was hospitalized. According to his ministry website, his nurses gave up on him, leaving him at a crusade organized by American televangelist T. L. Osborn. While there, Kayo committed his life to Jesus Christ and was miraculously healed.
Soon after that, Kayo experienced the Pentecostal baptism of the Holy Spirit and started testifying widely to God’s power. Formerly an evening club musician who entertained along with his guitar, Kayo now began using the instrument to guide worship at the exact same clubs, at a time when mainstream churches still used organs.
“I really like music and I started to play the guitar in Mombasa before I got born again. I said, if I can change this thing and play it for God’s kingdom, why not? … I discovered it was very effective,” he later said. “The guitar itself just isn’t sinful. … It is just an instrument, similar to the piano … and the songs I sing are totally scriptural.”
By 1960, Kayo had established congregations within the Kenyan coastal cities of Mombasa and Kilifi. From Mombasa, he moved back home to Nyamira, but his relations, who worshiped ancestral spirits, denounced his newfound faith and beliefs. The hostile environment prompted Kayo to relocate to Kisumu, a Kenyan city on the shores of Lake Victoria, where he lived with the American charismatic missionary Derek Prince.
In the late Sixties, Kayo moved to Kampala, Uganda, where he stayed for nearly a decade. Alongside several other Christian leaders, he pioneered the Pentecostal movement there, serving as an itinerant preacher, speaking at schools, colleges, and universities, and preaching on the streets.
As his meetings began to draw huge crowds, mainstream churches related to Western denominations felt threatened. At the time, lots of them had a proper, regimented kind of worship, and speaking in tongues was a recent phenomenon for them. Confronted by this recent expression of Christianity, accompanied by reports of miracle healings and deliverance experiences, many accused Kayo of manipulating people and sheep stealing.
“Kayo, in his characteristic stubbornness and grit, was not moved by [these] allegations,” wrote wrote Damaris Seleina Parsitau in her thesis on the history of Deliverance Church in Kenya. “He believed that God had called him to bring back vitality into the Church of Jesus Christ, a Church which had develop into lukewarm, ineffective and irrelevant within the African context.”
Over time, Kayo, who spoke Ekigusi, Dho Luo, Swahili, and Luganda, received speaking invitations for rallies, conventions, and camps from the countries he had called home in addition to Tanzania and Rwanda. His proficiency in English, honed by studying the language as a teen and practicing it with Westerners, made it possible for him not only to evangelise in English but to expand his ministry so far as Zambia.
As he fielded these speaking invitations and held open-air meetings, Kayo avoided organizing gatherings on Sunday mornings, in order to not compete directly with nearby congregations. But in 1970, after months of immensely popular Monday prayer meetings and Saturday revivals in Nairobi, he and fellow leaders decided to start out a Sunday service. On November 22 of that 12 months, 56 people attended the inaugural Sunday worship event.
Kayo led Deliverance Church until 1977, when he stepped down and moved to the United States amidst accusations of adultery and lack of economic accountability. In his absence, the church continued to expand and formalize its structures and hierarchy.
After spending time within the US, Kayo returned to Kenya and began Christian Family Fellowship Church. He wrote quite a few books and have become the publisher of Revival Digest, a magazine published through his own Joe Kayo Ministries. Beyond Africa, Kayo ministered in Canada, South Africa, England, Japan, and Hong Kong.
Kayo didn’t hesitate to criticize prosperity preachers. The FAQ page of his website includes a press release that “If the preacher teaches that God cannot bless you unless you give them money, it is fake.” To an inquirer who wondered why he didn’t encourage people to take a position in local pastors’ ministries, Kayo responded, “If that offended your pastors, then I don’t have any apologies to make, money just isn’t the gospel.”
In 2004, Kayo reconciled with the leadership of Deliverance Church. Following his death, the General Overseer of the Deliverance Churches in Kenya, Bishop Mark Kariuki, conducted his memorial service.
Kayo leaves behind a widow, Rose; three sons, Junior, James and John; and several other grandchildren.
