Paul Kimani first encountered the Gospel in Sunday school, where a teacher gifted him a copy of the Bible that he vowed to read from cover to cover. Around that season, he experienced recurring dreams that made him acutely aware of his personal brokenness and stirred a deep fear of death within him.
Seven years later, in 1976, while in high school, he attended a Youth for Christ rally where the message of the Gospel became completely clear. He opened his heart to follow Jesus Christ, and the paralyzing fear of death instantly lifted, replaced by a profound assurance that his life was held safely in God’s hands.
Though he joined a Navigators Bible study two years later, he eventually drifted away from the fellowship. It was only after completing high school that he found his way back, reconnecting through the Core Group—a targeted fellowship designed for high school graduates transitioning into their next season.
Captivated by Community and a Shift in Calling
The vibrant community Paul encountered in Core Group was unlike anything he had ever known—a collective of young people radically devoted to Jesus and the Scriptures. They inspired him to anchor his life to things of eternal value: God, His Word, and people.
As his worldview transformed, Paul felt a distinct spiritual prompting to discontinue his Accounting studies at Strathmore College—a premier institution in East Africa—and instead accept admission to train as a high school teacher at the University of Nairobi’s College of Education. Guided by passages in the Gospel of Luke regarding true stewardship, he made the leap; while his father expressed deep concern, his mother fully supported his obedience.
At the university, Paul was intentionally discipled by Navigator staff, and God began expanding his vision toward the global stage. During his first year, a ministry leader handed him a world map and challenged him to pray systematically for nations with limited access to the Gospel. Every Wednesday morning, Paul could be found in the campus chapel, claiming the promises of Psalm 2:8 over those distant horizons.
Five Wednesday Prayers and a Sovereign Confirmation
Alongside his global intercession, Paul chose to fast through lunch every Wednesday, bringing five hyper-specific, personal requests before God:
- His personal, intimate walk with the Lord.
- His academic excellence, recognizing that if the Gospel didn’t bear fruit at home, it couldn’t be exported.
- The spiritual growth of the specific men he was discipling.
- Absolute clarity regarding his long-term vocational calling.
- A wife who would fully align with and share the unique kingdom purpose God was forging for his life.
Mutua Mahiaini served as his primary mentor. Every Wednesday evening, Paul met with Mutua to process the deep desires of his heart. Towards the tail-end of his undergraduate journey, Paul recorded a conviction in his journal that the Lord was directing him into full-time disciple-making. He asked God for a precise confirmation: that the Navigator leadership would independently invite him to serve as a National Trainee.
That very same evening, Mutua sat him down and said:
“The leadership has been praying for you. Bruce Van Wyk has sent me to ask if you would pray about becoming a National Trainee after graduation.”
Without speaking a word, Paul simply turned his journal around and showed Mutua the fresh entry he had written earlier that day.
Pioneering in Mombasa and Reaching the Coast
Paul entered full-time ministry as a National Trainee in 1986, immersed in intense scriptural study and deep community. Ciku was a member of that exact same trainee cohort. The two shared a profound burden for reaching people within complex, specialized cultural contexts—a passion ignited during their campus days when Mutua took them on a cross-cultural mission trip to Northern Kenya, where the local community openly rejected the Gospel message, breaking their hearts.
They were joined in marriage in December 1988.
In 1995, Paul and Ciku relocated to Mombasa to pioneer the fourth area ministry outside Nairobi. This marked the movement’s first deliberate, structural footprint aimed at engaging diverse cultural and religious communities along the Kenyan coast. They labored there for five fruitful years before Paul was called back to the capital to serve as the national Country Leader.
An Alongsider Ministry to the Nations
Following his tenure as Country Leader, Paul and Ciku transitioned into serving as strategic alongsiders within the focus ministry network across Africa, actively coaching and leading global workers embedded in delicate frontier regions.
“God answered the requests I prayed from Psalm 2:8 using that world map in the early 1980s, and fulfilled the burden He placed on my heart from Acts 11:23–25. The future is as bright as the promises of God.”