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 enterprise had created a steady demand for African labour. His path to Bwana Loubser Mission Station, (present-day Plateau), was not that of a seminary-prepared worker but of a man drawn, in God’s providence, into the orbit of the mission.

He first served Revd. and Mrs. B. B. Eybers as a shamba boy, tending the mission’s farmland, and later as a cook within the Eybers household. These were not merely domestic roles: they placed him at the daily heart of the mission’s life, a home where Scripture was read aloud, where prayers were offered morning and evening, and where the Gospel was not merely proclaimed on Sundays but lived out quietly in the rhythms of ordinary hours.

Revd. Eybers had arrived on 27 October 1944 as the first full-time missionary of the Dutch Reformed Church to western Kenya, establishing the Bwana Loubser Mission Station in the Uasin Gishu region (Reformed Church of East Africa, “Our History,” rcea.co.ke). He brought with him sixteen years of missionary experience from Malawi, and his approach was comprehensive: preaching, teaching, educational provision, agricultural training, and medical care. Recognising that indigenous worship required indigenous tools, he provided Christian literature in Swahili (biblical lessons, a catechism, and hymnbooks) equipping communities to sustain a living faith in their own tongue and on their own terms. It was through Eybers’s faithful preaching and the daily witness of the mission household that Okonyene came to faith in Jesus Christ. Eybers, with the seasoned eye of a missionary who understood human potential, recognised in Okonyene not merely a trustworthy worker but a man of spiritual depth, communal standing, and latent gifts for ministry. He identified him for full-time Christian service , a calling that would carry this former shamba boy from the mission kitchen into the pulpits and outstations of one of East Africa’s most enduring Reformed churches.

In 1947, four evangelists formally joined Revd. Eybers, among them Festo Okonyene, now stepping fully into the vocation to which God had called him, and Paul Gudoi (RCEA Official History; Reformed Family Forum, “The Reformed Church of East Africa,” reformedfamilyforum.org). That same year, the mission celebrated its earliest fruit: the first converts were baptised, marking a threshold no subsequent development could surpass in symbolic power. Okonyene and his fellow evangelists carried with them the lived knowledge of African rural communities  (an understanding of land, kinship, language, and daily hardship) that was indispensable to any work of genuine and lasting outreach.

The evangelists who joined Revd. Eybers in 1947 directed their energies toward a task that was, in this era and this context, simultaneously educational and ecclesiastical: the establishment of schools as the first outstations of the mission (RCEA Official History). In the mid-twentieth century landscape of rural East Africa, schooling and evangelism were not merely complementary activities, they were, in the Reformed mission tradition, effectively inseparable. To plant a school was to plant a congregation; to teach a child to read was to open a door through which the Word of God could enter, take root, and be handed on. It was a vision Okonyene grasped with particular conviction: though he himself had come to faith and ministry without formal schooling, he became one of the mission’s strongest advocates for literacy and education, recognising in the schoolroom the same transforming power he had encountered in the Gospel.

His ministry in these founding years was geographically extensive. He served faithfully across the parishes of Plateau, Ainabkoi, and Eldoret over many decades,  territories that formed the early backbone of the RCEA’s congregational life in western Kenya. Generations of RCEA members were nurtured in the faith under his direct ministry; his name and his voice were woven into the texture of church life across a wide arc of the region. Each outstation established under his care became a node of transformation,  a place where children were educated, where adults gathered to hear the Gospel proclaimed, and where the seeds of a future African pastorate were quietly and faithfully sown.

Revd. Eybers recognised from the outset that an indigenous African ordained ministry was the very purpose of the enterprise, and he moved accordingly to establish a theological training school within the mission’s structures. The fruit of that vision,  prepared in no small part by Okonyene’s outstation labour, became visible within a decade. By 1956, the first three African ministers of the church were ordained: Revd. Jason Wamukota at Bwana Loubser Mission, Revd. Jeremiah Lugumira at Eldoret, and Revd. Hubert Tibanga in the Kitale district (RCEA Official History). Lugumira and Tibanga were connected to the Tanzanian stream of workers in the mission’s founding generation; their ordination, alongside Wamukota’s, marked the realisation of the indigenous ministry that Okonyene’s outstation work had helped prepare. The congregational life he nurtured across Plateau, Ainabkoi, and Eldoret was the very soil from which those first ordained ministries grew.

The arc of institutional development continued steadily. In July 1961, oversight of the mission passed officially to the Gereformeerde Zendingsbond (GZB) of the Netherlands, marking the formal transition from Dutch Reformed Church to GZB responsibility. In July 1963, the first synod of the newly constituted RCEA convened with three congregations, three ministers, and approximately three hundred members, the visible fruit of nearly two decades of faithful evangelistic labour. Full independence and the transfer of all church properties to the autonomous RCEA followed on 20 November 1979 (RCEA Official History).

Through all of these years of growth and transition, Rev. Festo Okonyene continued to serve without faltering. He formally retired in 1997, having given five decades of consecrated labour to the RCEA, from the earliest outstation schools of the late 1940s to the maturing congregations of the closing twentieth century. His was a ministry that outlasted colonial rule, witnessed the birth of an independent Kenya, and endured through the RCEA’s own journey from mission station to autonomous African church. Yet even retirement could not fully contain him: the church, recognising the irreplaceable depth of his experience and the warmth of his continued witness, honoured him by engaging him in ministry beyond 1997. This was a testimony to the esteem in which both the institution and the people held him. He continued in this way until his death in recent years, faithful to the end.

Rev. Festo Okonyene is recognised as one of the founders of RCEA and a man who played a major role in shaping the character, reach, and identity of the church he loved. His is one of the most extraordinary testimonies of grace in the RCEA’s history: from settler labourer, to shamba boy and cook at the Bwana Loubser Mission Station, to a young man transformed by the preached Word, to an ordained evangelist of the outstations, to decades of parish ministry across Plateau, Ainabkoi, and Eldoret, to a retirement honoured in continued service. He came to the church not as a trained theologian but as a working man; through the faithfulness of a missionary who saw his potential and a God who called him by name, he became a pillar of the very church he helped to build. Every congregation he gathered, every school he championed, every soul he brought to faith, and every ordained minister who stood on the ground he prepared is a living monument to his consecrated life. The RCEA stands today, in part, because of people like Rev. Festo Okonyene who answered his calling, and that his is a legacy that the church will carry forward for generations to come.

 

A NOTE ON SOURCES

This profile has been compiled from publicly available institutional histories and secondary sources. The personal biography of Festo Okonyene remains incompletely documented in these sources, and a fuller account will require engagement with primary archival material.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.    Reformed Church of East Africa. “Our History.” RCEA Official Website. rcea.co.ke. (Accessed 2026.)

2.    Reformed Family Forum. “The Reformed Church of East Africa (RCEA).” reformedfamilyforum.org. (Accessed 2026.)

3.    Van Zyl. The impact of reformed missions on the origin, growth and identity of the Reformed Church of East Africa, 1905–2000. Stellenbosch University Sun Scholar Repository. (Thesis; full author name and date of submission to be confirmed via repository access.)

4.    Gereformeerde Zendingsbond (GZB) Archives, Netherlands. [Field correspondence and administrative reports, 1961 onward; GZB, Zeist, Netherlands. Accessed 2026