Saturday, September 26, 1998

Priest from Kenya visits Texas

By LORETTA FULTON

Senior Staff Writer

The Rev. Canon Zakayo Epus can hardly hold back his easy laugh when explaining why the people he serves in Kenya are happy as can be living without running water or electricity.

"When you are in Christ that gives you a difference," he said. "We have accepted to live with what we have -- even without the basic needs we are happy."

Epus, a priest in the Anglican Church in Kenya, is extremely happy to be making the trip of lifetime with the help of some people from the Episcopal Diocese of Northwest Texas who visited his Kenyan diocese this summer.

Epus is in the United States for three months, visiting this diocese, the Diocese of Mississippi, and New York City.

He will be guest preacher at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, 3150 Vogel, at 10:30 a.m. Sunday. The public is invited to hear his talk. While in Abilene, Epus is the guest of Gary and Peggy Valentine.

Peggy Valentine was a member of an 11-person group that went on a mission trip to the diocese in Kenya where Epus serves. She came back so moved by the experience that she is planning a return trip with the group next summer.

The profound happiness of the people, living in what Americans would consider dire conditions, touched Valentine in a way that she didn't expect.

"That's the very issue I was so moved with when I came back," she said. "I felt like it was a very simple but a very comfortable and satisfying way of life."

Epus is a canon to the bishop of the Diocese of Katakwa and lives in the village of Amagoro with his wife Catherine, who is a primary school teacher, and their four children. He serves as the secretary of the Department of Development for the Anglican Church in Kenya. As such, he is responsible for initiating projects and training people in ways to better their standard of living.

Epus admits he is walking a fine line in improving the lives of his people while at the same time holding onto a way of life that brings them deep happiness.

"We want to move forward," Epus said. "But let's not lose our culture, our way of life."

That way of life includes caring for the elderly in a way that is becoming increasingly foreign to Americans. There are no nursing homes where Epus lives.

"To us the elderly are the wise people," Epus said, and they must not be separated from the others.

If an elderly person's own family can't provide, "there's always an extended family," Epus said.

That attitude begins with the birth of a child, whose upbringing is the responsibility of everyone in the village.

"You say 'it's our child,' " Epus said.

If something happens to the child's parents, other family members take him in. If that's not possible, he becomes the responsibility of the community.

Although this is the first trip to the United States for Epus, he learned about western lifestyles while studying in Ireland and in Scotland where he earned a master of theology and development degree in 1996 at Edinburgh University.

That exposure was very important to Epus' view of the world.

"Before I went to the United Kingdom, I thought all white people were rich," Epus said.

He soon learned differently when he encountered homeless people in Scotland, a condition he is not familiar with in his homeland.

"I felt we are much better off than those people," he said. "We may be materially poor but spiritually we are rich."

The differences in lifestyle aren't the only ones Epus sees between church members in his country and western societies. His congregations do not question biblical authority and they believe in living as closely as possible according to biblical mandates.

Epus noticed a major difference while living in Dublin.

"The people seemed to have a different way of how they live as Christians than we do," he said. For African Christians, "The Bible is the authority -- the gospel is the word of God," he said.

Africans take Christianity very seriously, he said, and feel guilty if they miss a church service just one time.

"You want to praise and glorify your Lord," Epus said. "Once someone says he is a Christian, he is completely a Christian."

The worldwide Anglican Communion that Epus represents, which includes the Episcopal church in the United States, is experiencing its most rapid growth in Africa, and Epus sees several reasons for that. The church's focus there is on evangelism and mission, which is attractive to the local people.

"These are the things that are making the church get more people," Epus said.

The church is 90 percent led by lay people rather than clergy, which gets the lay people involved in evangelism. But the educational background of the clergy is also important to the people, Epus said.

"We have deep roots in theological training," he said.

The worldwide Anglican Communion, like many other Christian denominations, is struggling with the issue of gay ordinations and same-sex unions. At the recent Lambeth Conference, a gathering of Anglican bishops held every 10 years in England, the dialogue reached a fiery pitch, with many African bishops strongly protesting any move to sanction gay ordinations and unions.

To Epus, and perhaps his peers in other African countries, the discussion is a mystery.

"We don't have a word in our language (for homosexuality)," he said. "It's something that's very, very strange to us."

When confronted with the issue at gatherings outside his native land, Epus said African clergy are dumbfounded.

"It's something we don't know, we don't understand," he said.

He said the issue of inclusion of homosexuals is so much at the forefront in American churches that "you may think everyone knows about it," he said.

Although Epus is thrilled to be visiting his friends from the Diocese of Northwest Texas and is looking forward to seeing more of the United States, he has no doubt when the time comes he will be ready to go home.

And, he won't feel deprived returning to a village with no running water or electricity after spending three months in a land of plenty.

"I'll go back to the same life," he said. "You go back to your home."