FAITH KANYUA MWITI

One of Meru's first women Methodist ministers, and a chaplain who sat with everyone

On the third Sunday of March in 1988 the congregation at Kaaga Methodist Church heard something none of them could remember hearing: a woman's voice pronouncing the blessing from the pulpit as an ordained minister. Faith Kanyua Mwiti, thirty-six, a former primary school teacher with a hymnbook held together by string, was among the first women in her synod to be ordained, and she met the silence that followed with the calm of a woman who had practised being unflappable on thirty-five Standard Four pupils.

She was born in 1951 at Maua, the eldest daughter of a miraa farmer and a seamstress. She taught for fourteen years before a call to ministry that she described as 'a polite but persistent knock'. She served as a circuit minister in Imenti and Tigania, and from 1998 to 2010 as chaplain at Meru Teaching and Referral Hospital, where she sat with the dying, the newborn and the frightened in equal measure. People remember her walking the wards at dawn with a flask of tea and no schedule.

Her sermons were short, funny and full of Kimeru proverbs. She grew bananas and arrowroots behind her house, kept a cow named Grace who refused to give milk to anyone else, and taught a whole town to sing Kimeru hymns in four-part harmony. She married Elijah Mwiti, a headmaster, in 1974; he died in 2011 and she wore his watch every day afterwards. She served on the Methodist Women's Fellowship and mentored at least thirty younger women into ministry.

Faith died peacefully at home in Meru in September 2026, aged seventy-five, with her family singing around her. She leaves two children, twelve grandchildren, and a pulpit that is a little too quiet.

“Preach short, listen long, and always carry tea.”