Gifts and Grace: Kyangala Trust

Geoff Maitland and Peter Crawford

St Bene’t’s Church

18 January, 2026

2nd Sunday of Epiphany

This Sunday’s sermon was given by two members of the multi-church group who travelled to Kenya with the Kyangala Trust.

Geoff:
May the words of our mouths and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

This morning’s sermon, and the Sunday Supplement following the service, are devoted to giving you some insights from the visit last October to the village of Kyangala in central Kenya, made by group of eight of us representing the Kyangala Trust charity.  John Harrison started the Trust over 15 years ago, inspired by a young man (significantly for us called Benedict!) whose mother Josephine Msola had returned on retirement to live in her home village, as many Kenyans do. Since then the funds raised by the UK part of the Trust, including from St Bene’t’s, have gone straight to the projects and people nominated by the local trustees in Kenya.  

In the Sunday Supplement we will hear more about some of the specific projects the Trust is carrying out where further support from us would help.  In this sermon, building on the theme of gifts that we have been exploring during this Epiphany season – with the gifts of the Magi and, last Sunday, of the Holy Spirit in Baptism - Peter and I want to focus not on what the charity brings to the people of Kyangala, but on the gifts of insights into the love of Jesus Christ that this materially poor, but spiritually rich, community gave to us during our visit and which we can in turn pass on to you.

In our OT reading, we heard Isaiah explaining that he (like us all) was given by God ‘as a light to the nations, that his salvation may reach to the end of the earth’ – God’s love and redemption is for everyone, wherever they are in the world, both to receive and to pass on to others. Well, God’s light certainly shone bright in Kyangala as all the village, from young children to aged elders, turned out in force to surround our minibus to welcome us and to celebrate the commissioning of the sixth drinking-water borehole built by the Kyangala Trust.

Psalm 40 that we have just sung rejoices that ‘He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God; many shall see and stand in awe and put their trust in the Lord.  Happy are they who trust in the Lord.’  Never have I seen this so graphically demonstrated than by the children and adult groups who sang and danced at a welcome ceremony that lasted several hours to give thanks for the new borehole and the other practical and financial help they have received, facilitated by the Trust but truly seen as gifts from God.  They take none of the improvements the Trust has brought to their lifestyle, education and health for granted.  Everywhere we were surrounded by thankfulness.

Today’s Gospel reading describes the commissioning of the first disciples, and for me experiencing the centrality of Jesus Christ to the lives of these people, whose material wealth is a fraction of my own, and even of all but the most poor in the UK, brought a new insight into the meaning of discipleship, living out the Christian life as a way of making Christ’s love known to others.

I have already said how struck I was by how central God is to life in Kyangala; this is a community whose deep faith in God as Lord and provider of all, underpins how they think and all they do.  There is a thankfulness for all God provides in terms of food, resources, love, people with different talents, which comes over in small ways in conversations and in the way people are treated, in the classrooms of the Primary, Middle and High Schools, in the inspirational leadership of Headteacher Florence, in the way Mary and her team of cooks in their tall chef’s hats treasured the food they served to us.

Rather than focusing on what they don’t have, there is a gratitude, thankfulness and joyousness for what they do have in how they approach life.  They live life to the full and make the most of everything they have – the children have ambition for the future but also an underlying contentedness with the present. 

All this set into context my own problems and troubles, and the state of Britain I tend to moan about every day.  If they can be joyful and thankful, in often dire circumstances, trusting in the Lord and repeatedly thankful to him, why can’t I?  For me, and I think all of us new to life in rural Kenya, this visit was an eye-opening and life-changing experience which I hope I can continue to take to heart and live out – to take nothing for granted or as an assumed right, to treasure the preciousness of all God’s resources and to see – and give true thanks for - the impact of God’s love on my life more often than I do.

One thing I shall treasure forever is the time I spent with 80 of the senior girls and boys, talking to them about climate change and careers in engineering. The girls took notes diligently and the boys leant back, occasionally exchanging bored looks – but when it came to Q&A, they bombarded me for 45 minutes with some of the most insightful and challenging questions I have ever been asked by students anywhere!  With their help I even invented the ‘carbon dioxide’ dance to explain global warming, which I am happy to share with you afterwards.  I was infected by their enthusiasm and hope for the future and their gift to me was to cause me to think about my own specialism in ways I had never done before.

It was not all joy – we saw much suffering in visits to the homes of people receiving help from the Trust Hardship Fund.  Life here is hard and access to good medical treatment is difficult, especially as people age or have mobility difficulties.  So there is so much more for the Trust to do to help improve the quality of life in Kyangala, as we will hear later.

As well as a time of gifts, Epiphany is a time of revelation of God’s love and redemption for all peoples.  For me, the privilege of spending time with the people of Kyangala brought all these things – revelation, gifts and love - and my hope is that we can build on this close interaction with them so that some of you can encounter at first-hand what we were fortunate to experience. But of course we do not need to go to Kyangala to see Christ revealed in others. Who revealed Christ’s love to you this last week?  In which unexpected encounter will you come face to face with Christ in the week ahead?

So, over to you Peter to share your reflections about the visit.

Peter:

Now I don’t know about you, but I tend not to reflect too much on the formal greetings at the beginning of Paul’s letters. I’d rather get to the substance of what Paul wants to talk about. However, the beginning of today’s Epistle, “Paul, called to be an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ….to the Church of God at Corinth”, reminds us that the early Church evolved while working to discern the work of the Spirit in communities that sometimes differed wildly in outlook and context, much like the Church of today.

So my modern equivalent of Paul’s salutation would go something like: “Peter, Geoff, John and Rosie, congregants of St Bene’t’s Cambridge, to the Church in Kyangala, and the Anglican Church in Kenya, led by the Most Revd Jackson Ole Sapit. We keep you in our prayers and would like to say Thank You.”

Thank you… for the learning that we received through experience in your community. Learning from which we can gain as individuals and as a congregation here in Cambridge.

During the week, I work as a therapist for the NHS, treating people for depression, anxiety and phobias. Common to all the conditions I treat is the problem of not living in the present. In depression, people often ruminate on the past and find the present too overwhelming to engage with. In anxiety, including phobias, it’s the future that is dwelt on - often a hypothetical future of “what if this or that happens?”

When I went to do a workshop in the Kyangala Girls’ High School, using a story about a red blood cell and its Swahili translation, I walked into a room with a blackboard simply painted on the wall, a long table in the centre, and the pupils working, sat on metal chairs, holding their books. I showed illustrations on my laptop…no projector. Yet they were some of the most engaged pupils I’ve ever worked with. Materially disadvantaged at school, and generally at home, it would seem reasonable for them to begrudge the past, including the wages paid and living conditions during British colonialism, or to be anxious about the future. But there, as in every part of life we encountered, they engaged healthily and fully in the present moment, actually producing delightful dramatisations of their own red blood cell narratives.

Jesus’ ministry, recorded in John’s Gospel from the point of our reading this morning, focused a lot on present actions – it is not usually the case of “it’s fine if you do it next week”. Jesus also didn’t choose to work through those with the most apparent power - governmental or religious leaders - or indeed spend time tracking down any supportive magi from the East. Instead he chose fishermen and a tax collector, certainly not esteemed in society.

I think it’s important to remember this at a time when we ourselves can feel very powerless, faced with an increasingly divided world with increasingly evident hostility. Our now-friends in Kyangala are no strangers to feeling powerless. Feeling powerless and being powerless are very different things, however. I think we all felt that a powerful grace was shown in the small, everyday interactions and actions of our hosts.

I don’t need to look any further afield than myself to find someone who can be guilty of thinking about God more on a Sunday. While I’ll say grace for certain meals, I don’t generally thank God for my morning porridge, eaten in the kitchen as I’m tidying away last night’s washing up. Why not? I don’t believe God is less present. Before every meal in Kyangala, boiled by Mary and her team in pots over the fire, we prayed, reminding me of God’s presence in the everyday ritual of sharing a simple meal – the root of our communion liturgy.

Geoff has already said how everyone’s contribution was valued. I’m not sure I’ve experienced many more joyful moments in a service than watching the children delight in the dancing… or even the effort of one very young child who took about a verse to figure out what his mother and older siblings were doing beside him - and then surprised everyone with a rather sudden attempt at the splits. Sadly I can’t demonstrate this.

On our last evening, I attended Evensong at the Anglican Cathedral in Nairobi. I asked for a harmony book so I could sing the hymns…and was swept up into the choir. As a total stranger, I was welcomed with open arms by Ben, the Director of Music, with the same high level of hospitality we’d experienced during our time in Kyangala. Janet sorted out my music. Susan annotated the Order of Service so that I could navigate the various books. Edward sorted out my robes. Tom, the fellow bass on my side, helped me through the service. The anthem was “I waited for the Lord”, by Mendelssohn. It’s the first and fourth verse of Psalm 40 – we’ve already sung that this morning and you have it in this week’s Tidings. Tom’s wife was one of the two soloists - he’s been married to her for 50 years. I’ll never forget how special it was to sing next to him while the 24-person-strong choir backed the soloists in Mendelssohn’s beautiful duet. On a personal level, all this was a wonderful gift to me, that probably none of them really noticed.

I don’t think any of us thinks that one day we’ll be at the pearly gates and be judged on just the momentous moments of our lives - that great lecture on Carbon Capture and Storage, that victory in the May bumps, that PhD thesis. So we do know that it’s the small things that matter, and where we can make a difference. How will you choose to wait on the Lord? How will you notice the Lord incline to you?

And what small things can we do as individuals and as a congregation to engage further with the people of Kyangala?  At the end of the service, while those serving the tea and coffee are making a very important difference, John, with fellow Trustees Paul and Katharine from Holy Trinity Leamington Spa, will be talking a little about the specific work and projects of the Kyangala Trust. Please stay behind for however long you would like to listen and ask questions - and let’s all be inspired by the small acts of grace which can come together to make a big difference.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.