Why Kenya needs a spiritual, intellectual think tank

The Church must mainstream itself and propel its voice to the frontline—where it rightly belongs.

At a time when other power formations are burning the midnight oil to position themselves for the seats of power, the Church must shed its excessive modesty.

The petition, “Thy Kingdom come,” was never meant to anchor a hushed, or timid formation. The Teacher of that prayer died in the public square, betrayed by leaders who were promoting a vision of life neither informed by love nor disrupted by truth.

If the gospel’s central figure carried His mission into the arena where powers clashed and decisions were made, then the Church must abandon the background and step boldly into the foreground with moral clarity, intellectual rigour, and strategic courage. As things stand, just as it was not considered an essential service during COVID, the Church is not regarded as a thinking institution.

Intellectual Troop

The Church in Kenya has positioned itself as the nation’s prayer house. Yet prayer, when untethered from disciplined thought, risks sinking into pious noise. The younger generation is spiritually different.

They are not content with only being prayed for; they follow up on before-and-after scenarios and make faith decisions based on observable outcomes. Citizens are learning to reason, question, and see through manipulative rhetoric that once passed as leadership. They no longer simply repeat what politicians say — they engage with narratives and develop their own perspectives.

If the Church remains intellectually unarmed, it will have nothing meaningful to offer a public that has already moved beyond clichés. Robes, stoles, and collars are fine — but the Church must now intentionally wear a different outfit: cap, hood, and gown. Not to mimic the academy, but to signal a new posture of informed engagement — a dressed mind.

The think tank will not be a ceremonial committee or a public-relations taskforce, or a notorious allowance-chewing commission, but a real intellectual troop. A troop trained in what may be called spiritual intellect: the fusion of deep spirituality and disciplined intelligence. This is the kind of spiritual intelligence that understands the political system, decodes its motivations, detects its illusions, and speaks with a sharpened worth.

Truth is that the church has no shortage or brilliant minds — it is that they have been hidden, suppressed and even ignored. Many of its finest minds have been hijacked into preaching roles that do not fully demand or deploy their intellectual reach.

Others sit quietly on the pews, underutilised despite their professional depth in economics, law, technology, governance, health, psychology and social sciences. Meanwhile, theological schools continue to produce graduates fluent in doctrine but distant from public life—young men and women who are thinking more about getting a job, often at the expense of their mission.

Since the Church does not need to wait for intellectuals to be born, the task is to call them up, dust them off from their quiet corners, and position them for a frontline assignment to help rescue a nation stumbling under the weight of confusion and moral fatigue.

As it stands now, the public square is flooded with schemers — intellectuals for hire — whose loyalty follows the highest bidder. Even having doctors and professors at the top has not inspired the nation intellectually, nor elevated the systems that govern it.

Positioning in politics

A credible ecclesial think tank would not imagine itself as the origin of all wisdom. It would study how leading public-interest think tanks work across the world—from ethics institutes, to transitional justice centres, to civic-formation models, to research-advocacy hybrids. It would learn frameworks and modes of public engagement, and from the translations code an African, Christian and Kenyan lens. It would provide language for the nation’s frustrations and frameworks for the nation’s hopes.

This think tank would also serve as a national conscience in moments of manipulation. Campaign seasons are fertile ground for political theatrics: grandiose statements with no roots, inflated visions with no paths, and charismatic charm that disguises incompetence.

The Church must learn to intercept such illusions before they grow wings. One of the errors of the present-day church is the spectator syndrome – we watch for too long that forget our role is to speak not stare. When citizens are confronted by the packaging of empty hope, the Church must be well equipped to fact check – for the sake of truth. 

To take this role, the think tank must avoid capture—both political and denominational. Its allegiance must be to truth and the common good. It must be independent enough to critique the government, opposition and even the church without losing courage, yet relational enough to command respect across political, religious and social formations.

It must also be deeply present among citizens. Intellectualism that does not touch the ground becomes elitism. But intellectualism processed to inform the people becomes liberation.

This think tank would act as a moral compass that refuses to be the chaplain of political power and instead become the conscience of public power. It would guide congregations on how to discern propaganda, evaluate manifestos, resist ethnic mobilisation, and vote with moral responsibility rather than unthought compulsion.

It would speak into areas where political actors remain vague: corruption as a cultural system, the ethics of public expenditure, the growing mental-health crisis, economic paralysis among the youth, the truth about public debt, the crippling of education and health systems in the name of progress, and the small cluster of the rich that dominates the majority poor.

Kenya is trapped in a cycle where every state plan requires already struggling citizens to fund it. The Church must be courageous enough to say that with every new plan from the State, Kenyans are told to ‘tighten their belt.’ At this point, the State should remove that belt and check whether the citizens even have a waist left!

The Church’s intellectual troop must help the nation reclaim its imagination. It must show that good governance is evidenced by people relying on miracles less and less – why? Because systems work! Kenya needs a moral-intellectual renaissance, and the Church is uniquely positioned to midwife it—if it chooses to think again.

A spiritually grounded intellectual unit would anticipate the 2027 election conversations and, more importantly, shape the preceding campaigns. Instead of reacting to political storms, the Church must become part of the national climate-making machinery.

The think tank will inevitably be attacked from various quarters because of the political consequences of its work. But there is one response to such critique: the message they carry is higher than themselves.

They are, in essence, listeners echoing Samuel’s words: “Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening.” Their task is not personal glory, but faithful service—hearing truth, interpreting it courageously, and delivering it for the good of the nation.