A Kenyan pastor, Rev Vincent Mulwa, of Christ Pilgrim Restoration Centre, has come out to challenge the widely-held Christian doctrine that men that follow the faith should only marry one wife.
In an interview with Kenya’s Daily Nation, Mulwa said Africans bought the world views of European missionaries who brought Christianity into Africa and abandoned polygamy, a practice that was rife even among the people who lived during biblical times.
Mulwa said he wants Christian leaders to review teachings on monogamous marriages, claiming there is no verse in the Bible supporting it.
He says this is necessary to “save a generation of women who are ageing in church without husbands”.
Rev Mulwa added: “I have been in the ministry for 38 years, preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ but now I have realised that we ministers of the gospel have lost our believers.”
“I have never seen anywhere in the Bible where prophets and preachers prayed for single ladies to get married. The Bible people were polygamous and everyone had a husband,” he says, adding that widows were allowed to become concubines,” he said.
He said polygamy was commonly practiced by many African traditional communities and the Jewish culture was also polygamous, adding that it only began to fade with the introduction of Christianity.
“As far as the Bible is concerned, the number of wives or concubines that one has does not matter and is not a standard of holiness. I have come out to tell Christians that we must preach the true gospel and allow our men in the church to marry as many wives as they want. Polygamy is not about men needing many wives but it’s about women needing husbands.”
According to the cleric, the Bible has only come out strongly to condemn adultery, which is taking another man’s wife.
The reverend argues that the fact that the missionaries, who mostly came from Rome, began to preach monogamy does not mean that this is what the Bible teaches.
“It is unfortunate for the Church that today, when our dear brothers and sisters attend theological schools, they are fed with so much gentile-tilted theology that upon graduation, they are well equipped to vigorously convince the world to buy into the Roman immigration of Christianity,”
He says Christianity is not an American or European culture. Rather, it is God’s way of reaching and dealing with humankind.
