Paul first heard the Gospel in Sunday school. A teacher gave him a Bible and he vowed to read it from cover to cover. Around then, he often had dreams that made him aware of his own brokenness and stirred a fear of death within him.
Seven years later, in 1976, while in high school, he went to a Youth for Christ rally where he truly understood the Gospel and opened his heart to follow the Lord Jesus. The fear of death lifted, replaced by a deep assurance that his life was safely in God’s hands.
About two years later, he joined a Navigators Bible study but eventually left — a decision that caused him to drift from the Lord. After completing high school, he found his way back and reconnected through Core Group, a fellowship of high school graduates.
Captivated by a Community
The community Paul found in Core Group was unlike anything he had experienced. People devoted to Jesus and the Scriptures. Inspired to focus on things of eternal value — God, His Word, and people. His worldview began to change in a deeply meaningful way.
During this season, he felt led to end his Accounting studies at Strathmore College — a prestigious institution in East Africa — and instead accept admission to train as a high school teacher at the University of Nairobi’s College of Education. God spoke clearly through several passages in the Gospel of Luke about what truly matters. His father was concerned; his mother supported his obedience.
At university, Paul was discipled by the Navigators and God began placing in him a vision for the nations. In his first year, a Navigator leader gave him a world map and encouraged him to pray for every country. Every Wednesday morning, he prayed through the map in the campus chapel. God laid a burden on his heart for nations with limited access to the Gospel — praying through Psalm 2:8 that the Lord would give these nations to Christ as an inheritance.
Five Wednesday Prayers
Every Wednesday, Paul also skipped lunch to bring five specific prayer requests to the Lord: for his own walk with the Lord; for his studies (understanding that if the Gospel didn’t work at home, he couldn’t export it); for the people he was discipling; for clarity about his calling; and for a wife who would join him in the purpose God had designed for him.
Mutua Mahiaini was his mentor. Every Wednesday evening, Paul met Mutua to discuss the desires of his heart. In one of those meetings — towards the end of his undergraduate studies — Paul wrote down in his journal a strong sense that the Lord was leading him toward full-time disciple-making. He asked God to confirm it by having the Navigator leadership invite him to serve as a National Trainee.
That same day, Mutua told him: “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.” Paul showed Mutua what he had written in his journal that very day.
To Mombasa, and the Nations
In 1986, Paul joined full-time ministry as a National Trainee, immersed in Scripture and community. Ciku was part of the same trainee community. They shared a burden for reaching people from focused cultural contexts — a burden born during campus days when Mutua took a group including Paul and Ciku on a cross-cultural mission trip to a girls’ high school in Northern Kenya. The message of Jesus was not received as Good News. That experience broke their hearts.
They married in December 1988.
In 1995, Paul and Ciku moved to Mombasa to pioneer the fourth area ministry outside Nairobi — the first with a deliberate focus on reaching diverse cultural and religious communities at the coast. They served for five years before Paul returned to Nairobi to serve as Country Leader.
Since stepping down as Country Leader, they have served as alongsiders in the focus ministry network across Africa — leading global workers in focus cultural contexts. “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.”