The Turban and the Pulpit: How a Kenyan Akorino Theologian Is Rewriting Christianity's African Story in Texas
Dr Solomon Waigwa carries an indigenous Kenyan church into American seminaries, arguing Africa was never just a recipient of the faith but one of its sources.
When Dr Solomon Waigwa steps to the pulpit of Rhema Gospel Church in Irving, Texas, his congregation sees something most American churchgoers have never encountered: a senior pastor whose white turban marks him as a member of the Akorino, an indigenous Kenyan church born in the hills of central Kenya nearly a century ago. To the people in the pews it is a head covering. To Waigwa it is an argument — a quiet, wearable thesis about where Christianity comes from and who gets to claim it.
That argument is now travelling far beyond one Texas sanctuary. Through his research, teaching and ministry, Waigwa has become one of the more prominent voices in a growing reassessment of African Christianity, one that challenges the familiar story that the faith arrived on the continent only in the luggage of European missionaries.
A church born in resistance
The Akorino movement began in the late 1920s among the Agikuyu people of central Kenya, taking shape in the same years that colonial rule and mission churches were tightening their grip on Kenyan life. Its early believers emphasised the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit, prayer, prophecy and healing — a spirituality that owed little to the European denominations around them. Out of that ferment grew the Holy Ghost Church of East Africa, which endured persecution under British colonial authorities and went on to become one of Kenya's most distinctive Christian traditions.
For Waigwa, that origin story is the whole point. In his book, The Akorino Church in Kenya: An Indigenous Original Pentecostal Church, he argues that the movement should be understood as an authentic African expression of Pentecostal Christianity rather than a hybrid of imported religion and traditional practice. The church, he maintains, is grounded in biblical teaching while reflecting the realities of colonial-era Kenya — a faith that read Scripture for itself and arrived at its own conclusions.
From a Kenyan classroom to an American seminary
Waigwa's own path mirrors the journey he describes. Trained as a schoolteacher, he spent some sixteen years in Kenyan classrooms and served as senior pastor of the Huruma Akorino Church in Nairobi before leaving for the United States in 1996 to pursue graduate studies in theology on a World Council of Churches scholarship. He went on to earn a doctorate from Baylor University and to pastor congregations in Austin before settling in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, where he launched Rhema Gospel Church in 2016.
Today he wears two titles that would have seemed improbable for a young Mukurino teacher in mid-century Kenya: Senior Pastor in Irving, and Chief Academic Officer at the Jakes Divinity School, the Dallas institution associated with the American megachurch pastor T.D. Jakes. In 2021 he was reported to be the first Akorino clergyman to preach at Jakes's Potter's House — a moment that carried symbolic weight for a diaspora community accustomed to being a curiosity rather than a teacher of teachers.
The case for Africa as a source, not a recipient
At the centre of Waigwa's scholarship is a deceptively simple claim: that Christianity is not, and never has been, an exclusively European possession. He points to the early Christian communities of North Africa and Ethiopia as evidence of the continent's deep and independent place within the faith, long before European missionaries set foot in the interior. African churches, he argues, can interpret Scripture on their own terms and make meaningful contributions to global Christian thought.
His broader reading is that the modern movement of Africans into Europe and North America is reshaping more than economies and labour markets. It is changing the character of the global church itself, as congregations founded or led by African pastors grow in cities far from the continent. In that telling, a diaspora often discussed in terms of remittances and visa queues is also a spiritual export — one carrying theology, music and forms of worship into the heart of the societies that once sent missionaries the other way.
A tradition that resists easy categories
Waigwa is careful not to flatten the Akorino into a marketing image. The church has staked out positions that do not always sit comfortably with outsiders or with other denominations. It accepts male circumcision while firmly rejecting female genital mutilation and the use of traditional alcoholic brews. Its long-standing emphasis on prayer as a means of healing has, at times, brought it into tension with modern medicine and generated public debate in Kenya.
Its history includes friction, too. In the 1980s, Akorino members destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary at the Subukia Marian Shrine, arguing that it violated biblical teaching against idolatry — an episode that still colours how some Kenyans view the movement. And because the community has long voted in organised blocs, politicians have courted it, sometimes donning the Akorino turban at rallies. Church leaders have pushed back, warning that turning a sacred garment into campaign theatre diminishes its religious meaning. Waigwa, for his part, explains the turban as a symbol of salvation even as he declines to transplant every Kenyan cultural practice onto his American congregations.
What the diaspora carries
There is a tidy irony in a Kenyan theologian teaching American seminarians that Africa shaped Christianity rather than merely inheriting it. For decades the flow ran the other way, with Western institutions defining what counted as orthodox and what counted as folk religion. Waigwa's work, and the wider scholarship he represents, insists that indigenous African churches were never cultural compromises but centres of theological development in their own right.
For the Akorino believers scattered from Nairobi to North Texas, that reframing is more than academic. It tells them that the turban they wear in a Dallas suburb is not a relic of somewhere they left behind, but a credential — proof that the faith they practise has its own lineage, its own scholars, and a story worth teaching to the very institutions that once claimed to bring it to them. In Irving on a Sunday morning, that story walks to the pulpit and begins to preach.
