ABSTRACT
The Anglican Church was involved in the Kenyan economy in three main ways. (1) In the early years after independence it supported and took an active part in the government's land schemes. (2) Like other churches the world over, it had its own economic interests: assets which it was concerned to protect and resources which it was concerned to allocate effectively. (3) Through its varied and sundry projects, from vocational training through rural development programmes, it endeavoured both to alleviate the people's economic hardships and to help shape the country's economic development. These channels of involvement are both disparate and interconnected; each is also internally varied. It is difficult to find in them any clear or consistent economic approach. Rather they reflect the Church's tentative efforts to accommodate the differing demands of the government, the people and its own institutional needs. 1
As under British rule, the Anglican Church in the Kenyatta years, as the NCCK, did not take an independent economic position. It did not challenge Kenyatta's policy of state-controlled capitalism, characterized by tight state controls and large-scale state involvement in development projects in industry and commerce. Throughout the Kenyatta years, its documentation of its economic ventures mirrored the terminology found in the documents of the state, the NCCK and of international organizations, and was likewise bedevilled with meaningless dichotomies - between development and backwardness, a traditional economy and a market economy, the formal sector and the informal one. For the most part, the Church carried the banner of the government's harambee ideology and threw itself into harambee schemes. Aside from a few isolated voices, it neither joined the socialist detractors of the government's capitalist approach nor formulated any economic principles of its own. In this it acted similarly to the other churches in Kenya, but differently from the Catholic Church in Latin America during the same period. Among its considerations may have been the rapid economic growth and high level of foreign investment in the first few years after independence, which hid the many problems beneath the surface and seemed to promise a better future for all concerned.
