Pastor Causes Controversy Online After Saying Men Are Free To Marry More Than One Wife

A veteran pastor who has been preaching for decades, has caused controversy after saying men are free to marry more than one wife.

A report by Daily Nation has revealed that Rev Vincent Mulwa, a pastor who has been on the pulpit for the past 38 years has come out to challenge the widely-held Christian doctrine that men should only marry one wife.

The Kenyan pastor of Christ Pilgrim Restoration Centre says Africans bought the world views of European missionaries who brought Christianity into Africa and abandoned polygamy, a practice that was rife even among the people who lived during biblical times.

The cleric has even written a book, Christianity at a Crossroads: Between a Rock and a Hard Place, where he argues out his case for polygamy.

Rev Mulwa wants Christian leaders to review teachings on monogamous marriages, claiming there is no verse in the Bible supporting it.

He says this is necessary to “save a generation of women who are ageing in church without husbands”. “I have been in the ministry for 38 years, preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ but now I have realised that we ministers of the gospel have lost our believers,” he said during an interview.

Rev Mulwa argues that many women are ending up unmarried and others are single and widows after they fail to get husbands.

“I have never seen anywhere in the Bible where prophets and preachers prayed for single ladies to get married. The Bible people were polygamous and everyone had a husband,” he says, adding that widows were allowed to become concubines.

He says polygamy was commonly practised by many African traditional communities and the Jewish culture was also polygamous, adding that it only began to fade with the introduction of Christianity. “As far as the Bible is concerned, the number of wives or concubines that one has does not matter and is not a standard of holiness,” he says.

He adds:

“I have come out to tell Christians that we must preach the true gospel and allow our men in the church to marry as many wives as they want. Polygamy is not about men needing many wives but it’s about women needing husbands.”

According to the cleric, the Bible has only come out strongly to condemn adultery, which is taking another man’s wife.

However, not all clerics agree with him. According to Pastor George Mutua, a theologian who is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in theology at Daystar University, God’s original plan is that each man gets one wife.

“Any teaching that goes against God’s original plan is a false doctrine,” says Mr Mutua, who is also a psychologist and a family counsellor.

He says Christianity is about going back to God’s original plan. After the fall of man, he says, that is when polygamy and other sins began.

But in Rev Mulwa’s perspective, monogamy was a Roman culture.

The reverend argues that the fact that the missionaries, who mostly came from Rome, began to preach monogamy does not mean that this is what the Bible teaches.

“It is unfortunate for the Church that today, when our dear brothers and sisters attend theological schools, they are fed with so much gentile-tilted theology that upon graduation, they are well equipped to vigorously convince the world to buy into the Roman immigration of Christianity,” he says.