For more than five decades, World Mission Sunday has helped equip the Diocese of Nakuru to proclaim the Gospel, form local clergy and serve communities across Kenya’s Great Rift Valley.
When Bishop Cleophas Oseso Tuka arrived to open a new maternity unit in a remote part of Kenya’s Diocese of Nakuru, eight expectant mothers were already waiting.
Until then, the area had no maternity facility. Women generally gave birth at home, assisted by traditional birth attendants. The new unit offered them something that had never before been available nearby: prenatal and postnatal care, trained medical assistance, and a safer place to deliver their children.
“That was the first maternity unit in that area,” Bishop Tuka recalled. “The women were giving birth at home or with the help of a traditional birth attendant in the village, but this time they got a place where the women can go for prenatal and postnatal care.” On the day it opened, he added, eight women were already there—“a good sign of just how needed it was.”
The scene also captures a much larger story unfolding across Nakuru. When the Church reaches a community, she comes first to proclaim Jesus Christ and celebrate the sacraments. Around the parish, other works often follow: a school, a clinic, a well, a formation center, or a program for families in need. The Church grows, and society grows with her.
For more than half a century, Catholics throughout the world have participated in that growth through World Mission Sunday. Their prayers and contributions have helped equip the Diocese of Nakuru with churches, schools, convents, seminaries, rectories, catechetical centers, and other institutions from which the local Church evangelizes and serves.
The record begins soon after Nakuru became a diocese.
Pope St. Paul VI erected the Diocese of Nakuru on Jan. 11, 1968, bringing together territory that had previously belonged to the Archdiocese of Nairobi and the dioceses of Eldoret and Kisumu. The new diocese entered the General Fund rotation of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in 1969. Its first World Mission Sunday allocation arrived the following year: $3,000 to help construct a church.
That grant was the beginning of a relationship that has continued for more than five decades. Research conducted by The Pontifical Mission Societies in Spain and the United States has traced more than 200 building grants in Nakuru since 1970. Taken together, they show how sustained missionary cooperation helped a young local Church develop the infrastructure needed for worship, evangelization, formation, and service.
The change has been remarkable. When the diocese was young, it had only two local priests and approximately 72,500 Catholics. Today, more than 677,000 Catholics live in Nakuru, served by more than 120 local priests in over 60 parishes.
Those numbers tell a story of growth. The institutions behind them reveal how it happened.
Nakuru stretches across approximately 7,000 square miles of Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, encompassing the counties of Nakuru and Baringo. Its territory includes fertile agricultural highlands, growing urban centers and vast semi-arid regions where communities contend with drought, hunger, and conflict over livestock, water, and pasture.
The pastoral realities vary dramatically from one part of the diocese to another. Some parishes include dozens of outstations separated by long distances and difficult roads. A priest cannot reach every community each Sunday. In places such as Mogotio, one parish has historically served more than 50 outstations.
That is why catechists have been essential to Nakuru’s growth from its earliest days.
“Across the vast geographical expanse of the diocese, many parishes served dozens of outstations scattered over considerable distances,” Father Fredrick Mwangi wrote in a history prepared for MISSION. “In such circumstances, a single priest—sometimes assisted by only one other priest—could not maintain a regular pastoral presence in every Christian community.”
The diocese established its Catechetical Office in 1969, only one year after it was erected. Catechists were selected and formed to lead Sunday celebrations in the absence of a priest, instruct catechumens, prepare children and adults for the sacraments, visit the sick, accompany families, and maintain the connection between remote communities and their parish.
They were not substitutes for priests. They were indispensable collaborators who ensured that the Church remained present between a priest’s visits.
“Living among the people they serve, catechists provide a daily witness of Christian life and ensure that the Church remains present even when the priest cannot be physically available,” Father Fredrick wrote.
One of them was Joseph Mlingera. With no formal education, Mlingera taught himself to read and write. He used his first wages to buy a Bible, and his faith and dedication eventually led missionary priests to appoint him as a catechist. Bishop Raphael Ndingi Mwana’a Nzeki, Nakuru’s first bishop, later encouraged him to discern the priesthood.
Father Mlingera was ordained in 1983. Remembered for his humility and pastoral zeal, he never forgot the catechists with whom his vocation had begun. He helped provide bicycles so they could travel to distant Christian communities and later served for many years as a hospital chaplain. He died in 2014, leaving behind an example of how the formation of one local leader can serve the Church for generations.
The work of catechists continues wherever Nakuru establishes a new Christian community. Bishop Tuka said the diocese still serves areas where people are encountering the word of God for the first time. New parishes are created both to care for expanding Catholic populations and to advance the work of first evangelization.
In those communities, a church building is never merely another structure. It gives Catholics a place to gather for Mass, receive the sacraments, and be formed in the faith. It also gives priests, religious, and catechists a stable base from which to reach surrounding villages.
As Nakuru’s Catholic population grew, the diocese faced a decisive missionary question: Who would serve its expanding parishes and outstations?
The answer required sustained investment in local vocations.
In 1977, Bishop Ndingi began planning a junior seminary for boys discerning a vocation to the priesthood. After difficulties with the original site in Nakuru, the project was moved to Baraka, near the town of Molo. St. Joseph’s Junior Seminary opened in January 1980.
Its history reflects Nakuru’s gradual transition from a Church dependent upon foreign missionaries to one increasingly led by local clergy. Franciscan brothers and religious sisters helped staff the seminary in its early years. In 1992, responsibility for the institution passed to diocesan priests. Several former students later returned as rectors, forming new generations in the same place where their own vocations had been nurtured.
St. Joseph’s has produced priests for Nakuru and other Kenyan dioceses, as well as members of missionary congregations serving far beyond Kenya. Its alumni include Father Thomas Otieno, a missionary in Finland, and Father Samuel Mambo, a Spiritan ordained in 2025 and serving in Zambia.
The seminary’s influence also extends to the Catholic laymen educated there. Many students discerned that God was calling them to marriage or another form of service. They carried their formation into their families, professions and communities as teachers, public servants and civic leaders.
Another formation house soon rose beside it. St. Mary’s Major Seminary opened in Molo in 1985 as Kenya’s national propaedeutic seminary, providing candidates with a year devoted to prayer, human formation, spiritual direction and discernment before formal studies in philosophy and theology.
Thousands of seminarians from across Kenya have passed through St. Mary’s. Its alumni include parish priests, missionaries, seminary formators and several bishops— including Bishop Tuka himself.
The two seminaries make visible one of the most important developments in Nakuru’s history. A diocese that began with two local priests now has more than 120. A Church that once depended heavily on missionaries from abroad now forms clergy and missionaries for other parts of Kenya and the world.
“Their ministries demonstrate the Seminary’s contribution not only to diocesan priesthood but also to the Church’s missionary outreach throughout the world,” Father Fredrick wrote of the alumni now serving in missionary congregations.
Nakuru’s growth cannot be measured only by its number of Catholics, parishes or priests. Across the diocese, the Church also provides education, health care, clean water and assistance to people in situations of extreme vulnerability, regardless of their religion.
In some remote areas, Bishop Tuka said, no government health facility is available. Catholic sisters and other health workers provide care where patients would otherwise have few options.
“There’s no government facility, so it means that the Church has to put up almost everything to support the people there,” he said. He described health care as “a very critical component of what we are doing” because it improves people’s quality of life and protects mothers and children. The maternity unit he recently opened is one example of the Church responding to a need that became clear through her presence among the people.
Catholic schools likewise serve communities where children might otherwise walk long distances for an education—or not attend at all. In the poorest areas, the diocese and its partners raise funds not only to operate schools but also to provide meals, supplies, and uniforms. For some families facing hunger, the assurance of a meal first brings a child into the classroom. Education then begins to open possibilities for the child and the entire family.
In the arid parts of Baringo, the Church has drilled boreholes, distributed food and water during droughts and supported health facilities. It also works among communities affected by banditry, cattle raids, and conflict over scarce resources. Education and youth formation become part of peacebuilding: helping a new generation learn to resolve disputes without inheriting long-standing hostilities.
The diocese also advocates for girls threatened by early marriage and works with boys and young men, recognizing that lasting change requires the formation of the whole community.
These ministries are not separate from evangelization. They arise from it. The Church proclaims Christ in word and sacrament while serving the dignity of the people to whom she has been sent.
That missionary identity is being handed on to Nakuru’s youngest Catholics.
Parishes throughout the diocese have established groups of the Pontifical Society of the Missionary Childhood, whose founding principle is “children helping children.”
“All ourparishes have established Missionary Childhood groups,” Bishop Tuka said. “They teach them religion, and they also teach them generally about the Church and social life—how to live with each other.”
The children participate visibly in parish life, singing, processing and dancing during Mass in distinctive red, yellow and white uniforms.
They also encounter Catholics beyond their immediate communities through pilgrimages and visits to other parishes. In this way, missionary formation is not reserved for priests and religious. Children learn that they, too, belong to a universal Church and can pray and sacrifice for others.
The same lesson is shaping Nakuru’s preparations for the 100th World Mission Sunday. The diocese is encouraging stronger parishes to support poorer communities within its own territory. Catholics travel together to difficult regions to raise funds for schools, health ministries and pastoral work.
The movement of missionary cooperation has come full circle. Nakuru still receives assistance, and significant needs remain. At the same time, the local Church is teaching her own people to look beyond their parish boundaries and share what they have.
That reciprocity gives concrete expression to the theme chosen by Pope Leo XIV for World Mission Sunday 2026: “One in Christ, united in mission.” The Catholics who contributed to Nakuru’s first church grant in 1970 could not have known all that would follow. They could not have seen the catechists traveling by bicycle, the seminarians who would become bishops, the missionaries sent to other countries, the children entering school or the mothers waiting for care at a new maternity unit.
They were part of that story nonetheless.
Bishop Tuka knows both sides of this missionary cooperation. Before returning to Kenya, he spent several years ministering in the United States and traveled to American parishes to speak about the Church’s work and needs. Today, as bishop of his home diocese, he sees what those prayers and sacrifices make possible.
His message to American Catholics is first one of gratitude.
“I’d really like to thank the many people from the United States who have really helped us—not just the Diocese of Nakuru, but many dioceses around Africa that have benefited from the generosity of the people of the United States,” Bishop Tuka said. “Even if they have not physically seen what is happening, I want to assure them that their support, the contributions and sacrifices they make, are really making a big change in the lives of many people.”
Contributions that may appear modest when given become significant when joined to the offerings of Catholics elsewhere. Together, they help people receive medical care, allow children to attend school, sustain priests and religious in difficult regions and bring the word of God to communities that have yet to hear it.
More than 50 years after its first World Mission Sunday allocation, Nakuru’s story is written not only in the buildings that now stand across the diocese, but in what happens within and around them: Mass is celebrated, children are baptized, catechists are formed, priests are ordained, the sick receive care and new communities encounter Jesus Christ.
The Church in Nakuru has grown. Equipped by generations of missionary prayer and sacrifice, she is now helping others grow with her.
Subscribe to daily quotes from Pope Leo XIV
© All Rights Reserved The Pontifical Mission Societies. Donor Privacy Policy. Terms & Conditions.
