Kings Family CMS Link Letter 10, Dec 1988
by Graham Kings
Date added: 02/01/2026
Bryn Miskin, Pudding Lane, Chigwell, Essex 1G7 6BY, Dec 1988
Happy Christmas! We have very much enjoyed the visits to our link churches and been encouraged by your response to the Kenyan draft Communion liturgy and to our video of the Diocese of Mount Kenya East.
The video, based on Bishop Gitari’s paper at the Lambeth Conference and illustrated by shots of mission and church life in the diocese, is being tidied up a little and will be published by CMS sometime in the new year, under the title, ‘To Canterbury with a Camel’. The liturgy, written by students and staff at Kabare, is encouragingly reviewed in the latest Grove Liturgical Study.
It has been marvellous to spend time with our family and friends. This has been greatly facilitated by the generous loan of a house and a car. We enjoyed two weeks in Keswick in August and look forward to a week at Lee Abbey, Devon, after Christmas.
The children have settled down well. Rosalind, who goes to my old primary school in Chigwell, has quickly made some close friends, and is pleased to be chosen to play Mary in the nativity play: Miriam goes to the nursery school on the same site and Katie continues to delight us with her mimicry.
The following are some of our impressions returning to England for six months after three years in rural Kenya:
- the sheer choice of food in Sainsburys
- wonderful children’s books such as Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman
- Rosalind cheering the Kenyan runners in the Olympics
- fax machines and cordless telephones – however, I’m looking for a sticker which says, ‘I had a filofoax before yuppies were invented’
- little mention of heaven
- our delight in old buildings and the general English heritage
- plastic money, even in telephones – why don’t churches have credit cards machines, as you enter, to replace the collection?!
- the growth of some churches through home groups and all-family worship and teaching
- the rise of English paganism in the occult, with Halloween in schools and horoscopes on Breakfast TV
- the ironic pull of the house churches at a time when the evangelical movement is becoming strategically powerful in the Church of England
- the healthy English tradition that public political office is not for the provision of one’s own private wealth
- the perilous future of broadcasting with increasing political pressure and the coming re-organisation of programmes, whose quality and variety may well reflect advertising targeting rather than audience preferences
- profitability rules OK? Or does it? This seems to be dangerous if it becomes the only ruler/yardstick in society and if we come to know the price of everything but the value of nothing
- after missing my train to Liverpool, travelling on a Millwall supporters club train – no alcohol allowed
- ‘Why bother?’ painted on the back of a semi-detached house facing the Central Line between Leyton and Leytonstone – the people next door had painted, in equally large letters, ‘Why not?’
Please continued to support in prayer Moses Njoroge, who is the Principal at St Andrew’s Institute and also remember Lydia Ndambiri and Joyce Karuri. I will be picking up Lydia from Heathrow airport on 5 January; she is our top woman student and will be studying for a term at St John’s College, Nottingham, before working in a parish for a few weeks. Joyce is one of our theological tutors and she will exchanging her job from April to August next year with Joanna Cox, a tutor at the CMS training college in Birmingham.
We return to Kenya on 31 January for three more years and begin with a 10 week Kikuyu course: we learnt the general East African language, Swahili, in 1985 but are very keen to speak the local mother tongue, some of which we have picked up already. Rosalind will be going to Turi school, which is a multi-racial Christian boarding school four hours drive away from Kabare: she is very much looking forward to joining her friends there but …
The following poem comes with our thanks and prayers for you all.
Gloria
The glorious Son of God on high
is sown and grown in Mary’s womb;
The powerless Prince of Peace on earth
is killed and cased in Joseph’s tomb;
The limitless Lord of life and death
bursts the bonds of time and doom.
With love in Christ.
The index page of our 18 CMS Link Letters, 1985-1991, is here.
