The Jesus Christians. 1. African, Quaker, and Other Connections

New series: an in-depth analysis of a little-known and often unjustly maligned movement.

By Massimo Introvigne and María Vardé

April 30, 2025

Article 1 of 10.

Massimo Introvigne with Dave McKay in 2023.

In April 2023, the Kenyan police started digging up the bodies of members of a Christian group called Good News International Church in the Shakahola forest, near Malindi. The investigation concluded that they had starved themselves to death following preaching that promoted extreme fasting by their pastor, Paul Mackenzie Nthenge, who was arrested. Eventually, the body count exceeded 400.

After a few days, the media in different countries started denouncing an Australian‑based new religious movement, the Jesus Christians, as having instigated the mass fasting. It seems that the campaign by one single woman, the mother of a Jesus Christian devotee, unhappy with her daughter’s life choices, caused these accusations to spread internationally.

Pastor Mackenzie had been arrested before. In 2019, Kenya adopted Huduma Namba, a new ID system. Mackenzie saw in the Huduma Namba the “Mark of the Beast” of the Book of Revelation in the Bible, echoing theories criticizing other chip-based ID systems common among fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. and elsewhere. This led Mackenzie to be arrested and accused of operating a “cult” and “brainwashing” his followers. He was released and decided to retreat several months later to the remote Shakahola forest area with his followers.

At that time, Mackenzie’s opposition to Huduma Namba was supported by other Kenyan churches and pastors, most of whom did not agree with his theology and theories but saw a violation of religious liberty in his arrest. Among them were the Jesus Christians, who had been in Kenya for many years. They also suspected that ID systems using RFID technology for financial transactions might be precursors of the “Mark of the Beast” (while for Mackenzie, the Huduma Namba was the Mark itself). However, they clarified that the Kenyan pastor’s religious ideas differed from theirs.

The Jesus Christians are also well-known critics of China. They listened with sympathy to arguments that Chinese technology was used for the chip-based ID documents in Kenya, within the framework of relationships between China and Kenya and other African countries. They were not alone in seeing these as too strict and dangerous.

Appreciating their support, Mackenzie invited a lay member of the Jesus Christians to speak at one of his meetings. Thus, the Jesus Christians visited Good News International Church at one of their churches in Nairobi in May 2019. They told us they had not heard any theories about radical fasting. Indeed, fasting to death is foreign to their beliefs and theology. Yet, their enemies used the Shakahola tragedy to taint the image of the Jesus Christians through guilt by association.

Unfortunately, these accusations were also echoed by a report on the Shakahola incident by a committee of the Senate of Kenya, some months after the first bodies were dug up: “Information availed to the Committee established that Paul Mackenzie was influenced by Dave Mackay [sic] and Sherry [sic] Mackay from Australia who are founders of a cult movement known as the Voice in the Desert. The teachings of this cult include forsaking all private ownership, surrendering earthly possessions, and relocating to an isolated communal place where members serve one master. The foreign links were largely established through virtual links and social media. However, in 2019, Paul Mackenzie hosted an associate of Dave Mackay, who gave a sermon in his church at Makongeni within Nairobi City County. The guest speaker delivered sermons echoing anti-government sentiments, specifically Huduma Number [sic] being the mark of the beast.”

While the report did not find any evidence connecting the Jesus Christians to the fasting, and no source was given for the “information availed,” which was almost a word-for-word quote from the blog of an opponent, Simon Muthiora, it recommended that immigration authorities “expel from the Republic of Kenya any foreign person or entity advancing the doctrines or activities of the entity/group/religious outfit known as ‘A Voice in the Desert’ also known as ‘Jesus Christians’ connected to one Dave and Sherry Mackay and their associates and bar their future entry into the Republic of Kenya.” In fact, at the time of the report, all foreign movement members had already left Kenya.

Media coverage of the Shakahola tragedy.

The Kenyan Senate Report was covered by international media, including “The Guardian.” The Jesus Christians answered both the Senate Report and The Guardian’s text with a video and an article on their website, noting their inaccuracies. They correctly pointed out that Mackenzie’s promotion of an extreme form of fasting was connected to a “pre-tribulationist” theology of the Rapture (discussed below in this article) that the Jesus Christians have spent years criticizing. Media such as “The Guardian” were poorly equipped to grasp these theological subtleties—but they have a much larger audience than the Jesus Christians’ own website.

In this series, we try to reconstruct the history, theology, and controversies about the Jesus Christians. Scholars have not studied the movement in depth. The most comprehensive study is a B.A. dissertation by Geraldine Smith at the University of Sydney in 2018, which was summarized in her entry for the academic online encyclopedia “World Religions and Spirituality Project.” Her works are an essential source for this article. We also rely on the literature published by the group, other documents (journalistic notes, legal files, written records, and website logs), and interviews conducted by Introvigne with members of the Jesus Christians, including the founder, Dave McKay, in Australia in 2023, and by Vardé with leaders and members of the Argentinian branch of the movement in 2024 and 2025. These interviews were qualitative and semi-structured, allowing the conversation to flow spontaneously if topics arose from the interviewee. Except for Dave McKay, the religious names of the interviewees or pseudonyms were used to identify them.

Dave McKay was born in 1944 in Rochester, New York. His parents belonged to the Church of the Nazarene, founded in 1895 by Phineas Bresee (1838–1915). It is part of the Holiness Movement, which should not be confused with the later Pentecostal and charismatic currents. Although some in the Holiness Movement embraced Pentecostalism, many rejected and vigorously denounced it. Holiness and Pentecostal Christians believe in a “baptism with the Holy Spirit” as the starting point of a “higher life” and a strong commitment to the Gospel. However, unlike Pentecostals and charismatics, those in the Holiness Movement do not regard speaking in tongues as the primary evidence that a believer has received the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Despite openly admitting to praying in tongues himself, Dave McKay would remain critical of the charismatics, which he has referred to at times as “charismaniacs,” writing that “the charismatic movement will be remembered in God’s history book as one of the most destructive spiritual events in the life of the Church.”

Dave’s family moved to California, where he met his future wife, Cherry, in high school in Clarksburg. Her mother was a member of the metaphysical-New Thought movement Unity School of Christianity. However, Smith reports that Cherry was mostly influenced by her maternal grandmother, who was a Baptist. They married young and had four children: Kevin, Sheri, Gary, and Christine.

In 1968, the couple moved to Australia. There, Dave (but not Cherry) joined for a short time in 1975 the Children of God, later called The Family. Due to controversies about the sexual experiments typical of the Children of God at that time, abandoned only in the last decade of the 20th century, opponents often insist on McKay’s early relations with the group— “guilt by association,” again. Scholars also occasionally over-emphasized the relationship, including the Italian Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), of which Introvigne is the director, in early editions of its encyclopedia of Italian religions, which were, however, corrected later.

In fact, McKay remained with the Children of God for less than one year. The reason he left was precisely that he disagreed with the movement’s teachings about sexuality, of which there is no sign in the subsequent doctrines and practices of the Jesus Christians. The latter’s theology is also different from the Children of God. The only area where it appears that McKay was influenced by his short encounter with the Children of God is the comic-like style of some of his publications. Such comics were even used later in the history of the Jesus Christians to approach the Children of God and present McKay’s different theological ideas to them. In 1996, the Jesus Christians reported that “we spent a lot of effort trying to relate to The Family (formerly known as The Children of God), mainly because they had shown some willingness to relate to us. In March, we started printing a series of five ‘Baby Books,’ which each featured a collection of articles on a different subject, many of them based on early writings of the Children of God. All five books (each 40 pages long) were written and published in the space of six months.” 

The first “Baby Books.”

Smith believes that the Children of God’s influence on the Jesus Christians is visible in “their radicalism, nomadic lifestyles, practises of producing and distributing tracts, millennialist emphasis and the rejection of institutional Christianity.” However, these are common features of many Christian religious movements with quite different theologies and practices.

Dave and Cherry’s connection with the Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers, lasted longer than Dave’s short-lived association with the Children of God. The McKays were never exclusive, as members of their group attended several churches if they were allowed to, including the Roman Catholic Church.

Cherry and Dave had an early interest in the Quakers, although they knew little of their beliefs apart from them being pacifists. Dave and Cherry formally joined the Society in 1999.

In 2002, they explained their choice as follows: “Whenever we are asked why we chose to become Quakers, both Cherry and I reply that we have been attracted most by our similarities in beliefs, but also by the tolerance we have experienced with regard to areas where we are dissimilar. That tolerance has, by consequence, challenged us in a way that we have never been challenged by any other religious organisation. Much of the tolerance that we have experienced can be linked to the discipline of silence; and much of the challenge that we have found from Friends is linked to that as well. Because they (and we) generally refrain from expressing our disagreements (largely as a result of the rationing of words in Quaker meetings), we are left with more time to dwell on and appreciate our similarities. The result has been that, over time, many differences have ceased to be as important as we had first imagined.”

In 2003, McKay edited the book “The Quaker Connection,” collecting articles on his group’s relationship with the Quakers.

They believed that having their own group was compatible with attending Quaker meetings, since the latter “do not subscribe to a theological creed which would necessarily exclude those who could not support it.” They also found the silent meetings of the Society of Friends similar to their own practice of “listening”: “The silence in Quaker meetings is akin to our own practice of ‘listening times.’ There seems to be greater unity within the Jesus Christians with regard to what is happening during a listening time, and we actively work at piecing together interpretations and applications of what has been revealed through such sessions. Nevertheless, the idea of each believer being able to hear from God personally is an important area of similarity, especially considering that the ‘meeting’ appears to rank along with the peace testimony as one of the most significant traits of Quakerism.”

Quaker pacifism, simplicity, and cherishing sincerity also appealed to the McKays. They also appreciated both the works of Russian novelist Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910) and his admiration for the Quakers. Tolstoy and the Quakers both shared teachings on pacifism, non-violence, and a simple life not dominated by greed and materialism. In 1996, the McKays announced: “We have discovered a fellow Jesus Christian who lived a hundred years ago. His name is Leo Tolstoy.”

Dave McKay believes that Tolstoy was basically a Christian writer, whose references to Christianity have been somewhat obfuscated by historians of literature. His Christianity was misunderstood, just as it would happen for the McKays themselves: “Tolstoy said that it astounded him that he should be merely restating what Jesus said and yet be regarded as something of a novelty in his own country [Russia] despite its claims (at that time) to being a Christian country. He said that this was so because there had been some very deliberate efforts to hide and distort the teachings of Jesus. And those efforts continue to this day.

What Tolstoy discovered is not widely read, and is hardly taught today, least of all by those professing to be followers of Jesus. What he says is so powerful that the Church has no answers for it. Because it has no answers, and because it is unwilling to accept it, there is no other choice but to bury it in the dustiest corners of their libraries. We find that they do the same thing with what we have written. It is only the fact that he had achieved international recognition as a writer before he discovered Jesus that his Christian writings have been preserved at all. We can only guess how many other fellow Jesus Christians there have been throughout the centuries who have, like ourselves, been totally snubbed by the churches in an effort to silence them or to minimize their influence.”

Eventually, McKay published an “Easy English” edition of Tolstoy’s books “A Confession” and “What I Believe.” McKay explained that, “Between 1877 and 1885, Tolstoy studied the story of Jesus and the teachings of the Christian church. The two works in this book, and the story of Jesus in Tolstoy’s own words, are the only important things that he wrote in those years, between the time when he was forty-nine years old and when he was fifty-seven.

Some powerful people in Russia tried to stop people from reading what Tolstoy had to say in these works, but more books were secretly printed by hand in Russia, and others were printed outside of Russia and carried secretly across the borders. These were handed from person to person without Tolstoy’s enemies knowing about it. The Church and the Government had no answer to the arguments that Tolstoy was making against them; and a few years later both the Russian Church and the Russian government were destroyed.”

McKay’s “Easy English” edition of Tolstoy’s “Christian” books.

Ultimately, both the Quakers and Tolstoy were seen by the McKays and their followers as part of an ignored and persecuted tradition of genuine Christianity: “We Jesus Christians are part of a movement which has persisted throughout the history of the church. That movement has been the true church inasmuch as it has sought to find and disseminate the truth of the teachings of Jesus, and it has consistently found its message fought and covered up by the institutional Church.”

On the other hand, they found that many Quakers did not regard the teachings of Jesus as normative today, in the way that they did in their early years: “The Quaker saying that “Jesus said it because it is true; it is not true because Jesus said it,” begs the question: If it’s not true because Jesus said it, what criteria can we use for saying that it is true? Do we replace the authority of Jesus with our own limited experience? Our conviction is that many of these Quaker beliefs actually sprang from the early years of the movement’s history when the authority of the teachings of Jesus appeared to play a much more significant role in decision-making (as they still do in the Jesus Christians community today). To set aside the authority of Jesus, and assume that a teaching or practice has authority only because it has worked so well for Quakers for some three hundred years is to miss the real source of its authority.”

The McKays appreciated the Quakers’ “refreshingly non-religious form of communication, which avoids just about every type of religious jargon” (which they also reject). However, they found that some Quakers had a notion of God incompatible with the Bible, or no notion of God at all. Their “disrespectful talk about God” sounded offensive to them. Indeed, the McKays concluded that, “Many of their teachings have been abused. It is our own opinion that factions have used teachings about tolerance to promote doctrines which are inconsistent with the will of God.”

Dave McKay also noted the paradox that Quakers, with all their teachings on tolerance, have nurtured anti-cultists such as Australian private detective David Lowe and others, who are not alone in the international Quaker community. When the anti-cult campaign against him became particularly intense, Dave McKay was disfellowshipped by the Sydney Quakers.

Source: bitterwinter.org