Festo Okonyene: Servant of the Word, Faith and Service
Rev. Festo Okonyene was born in the early years of the twentieth century, and his life would come to embody, more fully than almost any other, the grace-wrought transformation at the heart of the Reformed Church of East Africa’s (RCEA) founding story. He is remembered by the RCEA as one of its earliest evangelists and trainees, a man who stood at the very beginning of what would become one of the most vital Reformed communities on the African continent. He came to that calling without formal schooling, yet he would spend a lifetime championing the church’s education initiatives and literacy programmes, understanding instinctively that a reading congregation was a rooted congregation. Festo Okonyene and his wife in early 2015 Before his encounter with the Gospel, Okonyene worked as a labourer for white settler farmers in colonial Kenya — one among many young men drawn into the agricultural economy of the Uasin Gishu plateau and its surrounding highlands, where European farming enterpris...