Kenyan churches are stepping into the breach as a quiet crisis unfolds across the country: older men, abandoned by their families and stripped of their livelihoods, falling into despair and even suicide. For congregations in western Kenya, the response has been prayer, food, home visits — and the insistence that an elderly man is not a burden but a bearer of wisdom, according to a report by Christianity Today.

The report tells the story of Victor Wanjala, a father of eight from Trans-Nzoia County who worked nearly four decades as a customs officer. When Wanjala lost his job at 58 — two years short of Kenya's retirement age — he also lost his marriage and most of his savings. His wife, he told the magazine, left with money the family had set aside, and a dispute over his daughter's dowry left him humiliated. Sinking into depression, he attempted to take his own life by drinking rat poison. His brother found him and slapped the cup away.

Wanjala is not alone. According to the report, a yearslong trend shows elderly men across Africa facing increased abuse, neglect, and suicidal tendencies. The World Health Organization projects that Africa's over-60 population will more than double by 2050. A study of suicides in Africa showed a steep increase in risk among men over 50, peaking in men over 70, and Kenyan media outlets have attributed the rise to spousal abandonment, the loss of earning power, and the breakdown of traditional family support systems under the pressures of migration, economic stagnation, and rapid urbanization.

Joseph Ademba, a former civil servant in Kakamega County, told Christianity Today that his wife abandoned him when he retired in 2014, moving to another house near her workplace. In 2020, he became bedridden with COVID-19 while his children were locked down in distant cities and his wife refused to visit him. Church members took him to a hospital, then came to his home wearing masks to cook his meals. "If it were not [for] my church members, I would have died," Ademba said.

Pastors in the region see the pattern firsthand. Dismus Mutimba, who pastors the Kamukuywa branch of The Church of the Lord Jesus Christ Ministry, a Pentecostal church with more than 56 branches across Kenya, said many abandoned men are retired workers who cannot find new employment and have turned to alcohol under stress. He told the magazine he wants the elderly to be cared for because they carry blessings and wisdom, quoting Leviticus 19:32: "Stand up in the presence of the aged, show respect for the elderly and revere your God."

Mutimba's church involves abandoned older Christians in ministry, calling them "retired experts" and asking them to address the congregation on topics such as drug addiction, financial management, and relationships. The church donates food and money to the elderly each month, helps with chores — visiting homes, cleaning, cooking, and washing clothes — and arranges transportation to hospitals and enrollment in Kenya's government-run Social Health Assurance program. It also holds a quarterly seminar for elderly members across all its branches, covering food and lodging so they can give their testimonies.

For Wanjala, the church's rescue came two days after his suicide attempt, when Christians from the Friends Church in the Kwanza region arrived during a monthly home visit to pray with local families. An old friend, retired teacher David Wonyonyi, helped Wanjala have breakfast, prayed for him, offered some money, and invited him to church for counseling. Wanjala eventually joined the congregation, recovered, and regained the strength to cook, farm, read his Bible, and pray before bed. He now volunteers as a financial expert at his church, advising women and youth on saving for their futures.

"I thank God I found a church that changed my life," Wanjala said. "Many of my friends have long passed on after being abandoned by their families."

Here is a church acting like the church. When families walk away, when pensions run dry, when loneliness closes in, these Kenyan congregations do what the Lord commanded: they visit the sick, feed the hungry, and honor the gray head. It is the fifth commandment lived out — and a rebuke to a world that discards the old as useless. "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this," the Bible says, "to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction" (James 1:27) — and surely the abandoned father belongs in that number.