Jesus Christ and the Triple Threat in Kenya: Centering Women’s Everyday Christologies Among Luo-Nyamreche Community Health Promoters in Siaya County

Abstract

Christians believe and assert that Jesus’ question “Who do you say I am?” is addressed to every individual and generation in every context. Therefore, the quest for a relatable Christ figure in touch with the lived realities of the people has remained a prolific area for theological inquiry. As such, this research is a theological exploration of a public health concern in Kenya addressing the question: “How is Jesus’ promise of life in abundance appropriated in the context of Adolescents and Youth Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (AYSRHR) advocacy?” Through Narrative ethnography of stories from purposively sampled Luo-speaking women in church ministry and who are also community health volunteers known as Nyamrerwa (singular) or Nyamreche (plural), the study uses the African women Talitha cum hermeneutical framework to identify, theorize, highlight, and analyse women Christologies that are utilized in everyday life to promote Adolescents and Youth Sexual and reproductive health in the context of the triple threat challenge of Gender based violence, Teenage pregnancies, HIV infections. The study concludes that these women’s Christologies are oral, embodied, and performed; are based on a hermeneutic of life and flourishing; are undergirded in Jesus’ diakonia, and such Christologies bequeath the women with agency to curate and promote an everyday intersectional faith and health-based approach to the triple threat challenge. Such an approach enables adolescents and youths to contest, to rise, to live, and to thrive against religio-cultural structures and narratives that (re) produce and perpetuate all forms of exclusion and dehumanization based on gender, sexuality, and health status. The study contributes to African Christian theology and AYSRHR by illuminating African women's lived and oral Christologies at two interlinked levels: the ideological–discursive level, which engages questions of Jesus’ identity and significance, and the material–experiential level, which attends to the micro-politics of AYSRHR, gender, sexuality, and health in everyday life.