Can a church exist exclusively on the internet?

Standing behind a podium in a first-floor apartment in Nairobi’s Embakasi estate, Kenyan preacher Jeffter Wekesa speaks into a wireless microphone. His gaze alternates between a Samsung phone recording from a tripod to his left and a webcam on another stand before him. It’s past midnight, and the city’s near-constant pandemonium has given way to a mortal stillness.

Wekesa, 31, stands five-foot-four with a clean-shaven head and is dressed in a sleek, cream-and-maroon Ankara suit. He has the air of a man at ease before a congregation of thousands. But he’s alone in his living room, facing a coffee table and empty couch. The webcam is broadcasting his nightly sermon live on Facebook, the Samsung live on TikTok, and another phone live on a messaging app called Imo. In total, close to 500 people are following along. “Some of us, if it were not for God, we would have been defeated [a] long time ago,” he tells them.

Behind him, a 75-inch flatscreen TV displays a photo of a lion, while two speakers play soft gospel instrumentals that blend into the stentorian sound of his voice. The room is illuminated by a pair of LED tube lights, creating a sense of a tranquil, sunlit afternoon. “There was a day, child of God, I was a nobody,” he intones. “It is important to remember that — if it were not for God — at some point you would have fallen. At some point, child of God, you would’ve ended up to be a nobody.”

The comment sections of his livestreams buzz with activity as followers type “Amen!”

“God will open a door in your life. God will do something new in your life,” Wekesa continues. “Tag somebody and ask them: Do you believe?”

This is how Wekesa spends most nights, preaching in front of a congregation of people spread around the country, and as far as Saudi Arabia and the United States. He prays that they’ll find jobs, spouses, business success. He tells small prophecies: This one will soon buy a car, that one will travel abroad to find greener pastures. He heals the sick by asking them to touch the ailing body part as he prays. This is the work of many modern evangelical preachers — and like TV and radio before it, social media has become a tool to expand a ministry’s reach.

The difference with Wekesa’s church is that it exists only in the virtual realm. Its physical presence sits entirely within his apartment. He rarely meets a congregant in person. On this April night in Nairobi, after three hours of preaching, Wekesa culminates his session with a request for offerings. Audience members can send him funds through the mobile money platform M-Pesa , PayPal, or TikTok’s digital gifting option. In a given month, Wekesa makes between 100,000–300,000 Kenyan shillings ($786–$2,358) from donations, well above the average income in Kenya. “As I’ve spoken, so shall it be,” he concludes. “God bless you. I will see you again tomorrow, and your life will never be the same.” Then he clicks off the livestreams and the LED lights.

For many Kenyan TikTok and Facebook users scrolling through their feeds, virtual preachers like Wekesa have become a familiar presence. Anyone who spends enough time on social media in the internet-obsessed country is likely to come across somebody preaching, praying, or singing the gospel live. Many are independent preachers for whom livestreaming on social media has provided a chance to create their own ministries. Wekesa, who tried and failed to found three physical churches amid a life of upheaval and poverty, has seen his fortunes change since turning to livestreaming two years ago. He has over 14,000 followers on TikTok, more than 5,000 on Facebook, and around 3,000 across other social platforms. There are dozens of virtual-only preachers like him. For some, the ministries are backed by donations.

The preachers say these online ministries have brought religion and fellowship to people who might not have otherwise found them. But the field is unregulated and less standardized than in-person churches. Many virtual preachers have no formal training in theology. And critics question whether they can really bring the communion and bonds that brick-and-mortar churches have offered for centuries. While many churches in Kenya and beyond now put services on the internet, the idea of a congregation that never gathers in person is a jarring break from the traditional practice of Christianity — and comes amid growing global concern about how many of our interpersonal relationships are moving online. Are virtual churches helping to reinvigorate religion’s role in society, or derail it?

During the Covid-19 pandemic, churches around the world were forced into virtual-only sessions — and with this came consternation from faith leaders worried that the trend might persist. In an article titled “There’s No Such Thing As Virtual Church,” Jonathan Leeman, an author and church elder in the United States, recounted how months of exclusively online gatherings had left him struggling to keep a handle on his congregation despite his constant calls and texts. “The church,” he wrote, “felt like rainwater on a parking lot after a storm — spread thin, with puddles here and there.”

He cautioned against the temptation to invest more in virtual services. “What goes missing when your ‘church’ experience is nothing more than a weekly livestream?” he asked. “For starters, you think less about your fellow members. They don’t come to mind. You don’t bump into them and have the quick conversations that lead to longer conversations over dinner.” He described how gathering and praying together encourages members to share their problems, gives them reassurance during troubled times, and makes them accountable to each other. “ God made us physical and relational creatures,” Leeman wrote. “Christian life and church life cannot finally be downloaded. They must be observed, heard, stepped into, and followed.”

In an interview, Leeman pushed back against the idea that virtual-only churches are really churches at all, and argued that they would hurt Christianity in the long run. “They need to gather together, and gathering together is a good, beautiful, wonderful thing,” he told Rest of World . “Why would these online churches want to make Christianity even more individualistic?”

Many ministries continue to put services online, though virtual-only churches seem to remain relatively rare. But there’s particularly fertile ground for the trend in Kenya.

The country has a uniquely social media-centric society. According to San Francisco-based media monitoring firm Meltwater , Kenyan internet users spend an average of three hours and 55 minutes per day using social media — more than any other country in the world. Kenya’s internet access rate is also among the highest in Africa, with about 58% of the population, according to the country’s communications authority. Facebook and WhatsApp are the most popular social media platforms among Kenyans, used by 52% and 49% of people aged 15 and above, respectively, while Tiktok usage has grown by about 9% since last July. Most of the people spending more than three hours daily on social media are between 21 and 35, according to one recent study . Around 75% of the Kenyan population is under 35.

But what’s driving young Kenyans to spend so much time on social media — and to seek a spiritual home there? Notably, Wekesa began his virtual ministry in 2022, the year the current government won national elections after campaigning heavily on its perceived religious devoutness. While this seemingly made churches even more influential in the country, the unpopular policies that followed soon challenged the credibility of religious leaders who’d backed the government and allowed their pulpits to transform into political stages. The country is in the midst of a cost of living crisis and millions are living in poverty.

The sense of despair is especially pronounced for many young Kenyans. Youth unemployment has risen to 15% , up from 11% a decade ago. Some well-educated younger Kenyans who have found work are under-employed, working jobs such as construction, retail, and agriculture. Since June, young Kenyans in Nairobi — many of them coordinating with the walkie-talkie app Zello — have been taking to the streets in historic protests, calling for less taxes, more job opportunities, lower living costs, and the eradication of corruption.

“A lot of Kenyans are still looking for hope. A lot of Kenyans are still looking for something to cling on, and religion is offering a very easy way as something to hang onto in terms of the socioeconomic problems they’re facing,” Harrison Mumia, the president of the Atheists in Kenya Society and a regular commentator on religion, told Rest of World .

Young Kenyans list faith among the things they value most — even higher than work and family, according to one survey . Yet while more than 80% of Kenyan teens identify as Christian and pray at least once a week, only 35% attend religious services at least once a month. Kenya-based religious scholars have detected increasing disillusionment with churches among young people. “If the youth in increasing numbers withdraw from the church, it will become an institution of the middle-aged and old,” one Christian interest group in the country warned last year .

Religion can provide solace, but virtual preachers also offer quick fixes in which a person’s chances for improving their condition are tied in part to what they give electronically. The message of their sermons is often that prosperity awaits those who join their movements and support it through donations. Many tell stories of rising from a dire state thanks to the grace of God — and promise the same for their congregants. The so-called  “health and wealth gospel” is characteristic of many evangelical churches; one distinction with virtual preachers is that the message comes without the bonds of in-person gatherings. In interviews with Rest of World , virtual preachers said they were working to save souls and reaching people who wouldn’t otherwise come to church.

Their appeal stretches even to people living overseas.

Victoria Kelly, a 21-year-old Kenyan-American nursing student in Atlanta, came across one of Wekesa’s live sessions at random and was hooked. “I had no idea that TikTok had advanced to the point where now we have ministry online,” she told Rest of World . “He was prophesying, actually, and he was talking to somebody. I was like, this can’t be real.”

With classes on weekdays and work on weekends, Kelly said, she doesn’t have time to consistently attend a physical church. She now tunes in to at least four of Wekesa’s sessions a week. She described the sense he creates, even from afar, that he’s truly connecting with her. When Kelly joined his TikTok live sessions for the second time and started gifting, she recalled, Wekesa suddenly began to address her directly. “He’s telling me about some things that are so secretive I don’t discuss [them], but he’s telling it like he’s seeing my whole life story,” she said. “He told me things would be better, and that’s all I ever wanted to hear.”

Some Christian leaders in Kenya have welcomed the virtual preachers. The Rev. Canon Chris Kinyanjui, an Anglican priest in Nairobi who also serves as general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Kenya, a powerful nation-wide coalition, believes online churches will play an increasingly important role as physical ones lose members.

“Christianity is going through some changes,” he told Rest of World . “Most churches have registered lower church attendance.” After Covid-19, he added, “generally people felt that they can actually exist without the church. Then there’s the Gen Z and the Alpha, who are spiritual but not religious, so they don’t understand why they have to go to church to be spiritually connected with God.”

Kenya has a virtual university, Kinyanjui noted, adding that he himself is accustomed to joining virtual meetings. “The church will not be left behind.”

But Jude Karuhanga, a philosopher and Catholic chaplain at Strathmore University in Nairobi, warns that online ministries undermine an essential purpose of a church by removing the communion that comes with physical congregation. “No matter how good technology is, it cannot replace that,” he told Rest of World . “I think what we would want is to humanize society, not to lose our humanity in the process of advancing in technology. So, I would pray that we don’t lose the physical meetings. They do a lot of good to people.”

Before founding his virtual church, Wekesa considered himself an outcast of fate. He was born in Nairobi to a mother he says didn’t want him and raised from an early age by an uncle in the city’s slums. He describes himself as a stubborn youth, able to avoid a criminal path thanks only to God’s intervention. After receiving near-failing grades on his high-school exit exams, he seemed destined to a difficult life.

The low point came in June of 2022, while working as a hawker in central Nairobi. During the two-hour walk back to his small apartment, Wekesa was robbed by a group of around 30 men at gunpoint. They took the cheap jewelry he was selling, his phone, and all of his cash. “I was carrying even my rent in my pocket,” he told Rest of World . “It was the only money I had.”

Wekesa believed, though, that he’d been the subject of a prophecy — and was determined to see it fulfilled. Through a decade of seemingly endless menial jobs — from selling groceries to cleaning homes to hawking — he’d had the sense that something more was in store for him. “There’s that kind of hope I usually have, ever since I was a young boy, that I can be better,” he recalled. And the one place he’d always excelled was not work, but church. Attending a series of evangelical and Pentecostal churches around Nairobi as a young man, Wekesa had built a reputation for himself as a keyboardist and vocalist, leading teams of between 10 to 20 choir members onstage as he sang and played in front of dozens and sometimes hundreds of congregants. Often, preachers joined in with his singing session, and eventually, Wekesa found himself being asked to lead praise and worship sessions.

In 2014, when Wekesa was just 22, he was volunteering as an associate pastor in a Nairobi church when it decided to set up a branch not far from where he lived. The church’s bishop hand-picked Wekesa to lead it. But he buckled under his youth and inexperience, and was replaced after only a month. Later, Wekesa received second and third chances to run newly established churches, but neither appointment lasted more than six months. He feels, in retrospect, that he lacked the skills and maturity to run a church: “I had to take the key to him, and tell him, ‘Bishop, I can’t do this anymore.’”

After he withdrew from the last church, Wekesa eventually turned back to keyboarding, which brought him before an up-and-coming preacher in central Nairobi. There, on a whim , he took Wekesa onto the stage one Sunday and proclaimed that his life would soon see a major change. This was exactly what Wekesa had longed to hear, and as he picked up the pieces from his robbery almost a year later, the prophecy burned in his mind. When a friend introduced him to an app called Imo, Wekesa saw his chance.

Imo is a chat, voice, and video service popular in the Middle East. The Kenyans on it were mostly domestic workers and caregivers living in Gulf countries. At the time, Wekesa was only an occasional user of social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. He’d never heard of Imo, but was intrigued by the immediacy of the way the Kenyans on the app were interacting. Recognizing that they had little chance to attend physical churches where they were, Wekesa began to give small live sermons and prayer sessions on Imo, eventually moving them into his own chat room — the equivalent of starting a group on WhatsApp. “ I got to see how people were having rooms and how they could interact in those rooms,” Wekesa recalled. “So, I looked at that and I told my friend this can be a good idea for a ministry, to begin something like a church.”

Initially, Wekesa’s room had just 15 members, but he gave it a name to match his ambitions: Voice of the Globe International Movement.

Over a year, his subscribers on Imo grew to about 2,000. As these members began to make donations from many miles away, Wekesa was able to move into his two-bedroom apartment and purchase the TV, podium, microphone, speakers, and lights that would be essential to his virtual church. He eventually expanded his ministry to Facebook, bringing in Kenyans living in the country, while slowly increasing his profile on TikTok to reach the threshold of 1,000 followers that he needed to host a live event. When he was finally able to go live on TikTok, his audience began to grow exponentially. His excitement was intense. “I had never ministered to such a huge number,” he recalled.

Now his follower count is around 25,000. His ministry’s name has evolved to Spirit Light Ministries Online Church. It’s governed by a team of leaders and headed by two chairpersons charged with keeping in touch with members. There’s also an administrator who manages donation pledges, a secretary who keeps record of meetings, and a treasurer who manages projects such as equipment purchases and Wekesa’s occasional visits to orphanages. Then there are 10 pastors who, when needed, can take up Wekesa’s role as preacher for a night. All these officials work as unpaid volunteers.

Cornel Mwasi, another virtual preacher, takes a more relaxed approach. Though he has more than 41,000 followers on TikTok, he keeps no staff or membership records, and preaches while seated on a couch in his living room, using only his smartphone camera and the default microphone. Normally, he dresses casually in a T-shirt or short-sleeved button-down. “As I pray with you today, may God grant you the desires of your heart. May God end your fears, my brother and my sisters,” he told viewers during one recent session.

Mwasi, 35, started his online ministry just over a year ago, after losing his day job as a procurement officer. Until then, he’d never used TikTok. “I joined TikTok mainly and purely to spread the gospel,” he said when Rest of World met him in April in Nairobi. “I realized the only way to reach many people is through online,” Mwasi added. He wants to build a ministry for people across Kenya and internationally.  “I cannot go to America. I’m here in Kenya. So, the only way to reach that person in America is through that platform,” he said.

Now Mwasi has a new job and holds daily services around his work schedule — in the morning, around lunchtime, and in the evening. His ministry is funded by donations and his own salary; he insists he doesn’t preach for money. “Actually, the main thing is to reach out to various people,” he said. He believes his virtual ministry can better connect with people who’ve become disillusioned by institutional religion even as they continue to identify with Christianity.

He argued that virtual churches can even offer a more direct connection with spirituality. With physical churches, he said, a worshiper might feel compelled to attend due to social pressure: “They don’t want the pastor to realize that you didn’t come to church, [while with a virtual church] it is your inner push that has pushed you to attend that prayer. Nobody has asked you to come, and nobody is going to see you.”

Like Wekesa, Mwasi focuses much of his sermons and prayer sessions on achieving a more fulfilled life, while also becoming richer and more successful, a message no different from that of many modern evangelical preachers who promise prosperity through faith and tithing. But for these digital preachers, social media — where superficial images of success, glamor, and the good life so often dominate — seems a natural venue. If young people are looking for ways to attain the beautiful lives they see online, virtual preachers are offering one, right there on the same platforms.

These churches don’t always succeed. Cyrus Baraka, 34, a Rwandan immigrant living in Kenya, began a virtual church in 2019 on Facebook and Imo but closed it down six months later due to a lack of funding. He said he never asked for donations from his online followers. He’s since obtained certificates in theology and is now the head preacher at a physical church in the coastal city of Mombasa. It is part of the network of renowned televangelist Lucy Natasha, who herself shot to fame by appealing to the youth through social media. Although his physical church is progressing well, Baraka still dreams of reviving the virtual ministry. “My age-mates, many of them, especially right now, are not going to church,” he said. “But when you go live [on social media], many of them will come to watch.”

Rachel Asiko, a 26-year-old Kenyan who works as a caregiver in Saudi Arabia, came across Wekesa while randomly scrolling through TikTok one day. Encountering him, she said, changed her life.

A virtual church suits Asiko as a born-again Christian because, she said, there are no churches for her to attend in Saudi Arabia. She recalled: “The first time, I was doubting, but the second time I joined, I said this is a place where I must be.” She was moved by the testimonies she heard people make about how their lives had transformed after Wekesa prayed for them, and was eager to see her life change, too. She has learned to pray longer and more consistently, which she said has brought better results to her prayers. Asiko is now one of the 10 pastors in Wekesa’s online church, and often preaches as listeners wait for him to begin. “Let God shape us,” she told congregants in one recent sermon.

Wekesa said one of the merits of an online church is that it serves people like Asiko who can’t attend a physical church regularly. But he also attracts people who can attend a physical church, but have made his livestreams their primary form of worship. Jackie Orina, 40, an administrator at one of Kenya’s top universities, is an enthusiastic member of Wekesa’s ministry, regularly typing “Amen” and engaging with others in the audience during his live sessions. Although she had been attending a physical church, she said it wasn’t until coming across Wekesa that she truly saw “the hand of God.”

In October last year, Wekesa linked his online church with the physical one run by his mentor, Caleb Wekesa, the preacher who once called him onstage and delivered his life-changing prophecy. (Jeffter Wekesa’s real name is Joseph Eshiwani Mang’ong’o, but he now goes by his alias in honor of the man he considers his spiritual mentor.) In practice, linking the churches means Wekesa can also stream across his mentor’s social media profiles, but the virtual ministry remains otherwise independent. Orina has begun to attend Caleb’s physical service, but Wekesa’s virtual ministry, where she helps oversee connections with female members, remains her main form of engagement. She believes that virtual churches do more than physical ones to bring members “close to God” because they can tune in so easily, any day, from anywhere. “It has changed my life,” she said.

Samuel Mutinda, 28, a gospel singer and industrial laborer, is a strident believer in virtual churches. To him, they’re the most potent way to reach people who otherwise wouldn’t be interested in spiritual issues. “I think it’s a very powerful tool to be in online meetings,” he said. He’d felt disillusioned in the physical church he previously attended: “Where I was, I was treated just like a normal member, whereas deep inside me, I could feel, God would tell me, I am not a normal person.” After finding Wekesa’s virtual church, he said, he realized that he had simply been “in the wrong place.” Like Orina, Mutinda has gone on to attend Caleb’s in-person churches after becoming a virtual follower of Wekesa.

During Wekesa’s livestreams on TikTok and Facebook, Mutinda consistently attacks the like button, helping to make the sessions visible to more users. “The significance,” he said, “is that I may increase the room.” He sees potential in virtual preachers being able to transform the negative impulse that draws many people to social media into a force for good. Someone might be on TikTok searching for things like sexual imagery or “gambling ideas ,” Mutinda said, and instead come across a preacher’s livestream: “They’re prophesied to, they’re healed, and they realize there is God who can change their story.”

On a recent Sunday, the services in Caleb’s church began at 10 a.m., with Bible study for adults who sat in small circles of about 15 each, and Sunday school in a separate room for children. At 11 a.m., around 60 people gathered in the church’s main hall, warmly shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries. The stage before them was packed with musical instruments: a drum set, two guitars, a tambourine, and a keyboard. The singers — six women in long dresses and a man in a double-breasted suit — sang at the top of their voices as the musicians joined in harmony. The songs, such as “ Hakuna Mungu kama wewe Bwana ” (“There’s no God like you, Lord”), were intense with jubilation. A few of the congregants played vuvuzelas.

Then the choir ushered the preacher onstage to give his sermon. “It’s an amazing day that the Lord God has made for us to be here today,” Caleb proclaimed.

He spoke for about 90 minutes as people nodded together in agreement, some shouting things like “Prophesy, man of God!”, and others looking at one another for affirmation. Throughout, some walked freely to the altar to leave cash offerings. Then Caleb asked if anyone in the audience wanted to be prayed for or healed.

A dozen people lined up. One woman said, meekly, “Man of God, my business is struggling.” Another was sick, and another was tired of being lonely. Caleb anointed some of them with his right hand, rubbing holy oil onto their foreheads. He knelt with others and placed his palm on their heads and prayed for them. He went on to shake their hands, patting some on the back to reassure them that all would be well.

The scene recalled the moment that had changed Jeffter Wekesa’s life, when the man then still known as Joseph Eshiwani Mang’ong’o was called onto a stage by the same preacher. When asked by Rest of World to reflect on what he’d gained from all the physical services he’d attended over the years, Wekesa talked about how the mentorship and experience had shaped the person he is today and the path his preaching career has taken. “I believe my rising has been as a result of participation of many men who have helped me with knowledge, giving me chances to serve,” he said.

Yet he believes his virtual church can offer the same connections, communion, and growth he’d received. “It has to come from self-determination first. So, if you have it in you, it is possible,” he said. ▰

Vincent Owino is a journalist based in Nairobi.