Hot topic · Faith and the news
Does the Bible teach fasting to death? Shakahola, Paul Mackenzie’s 200-year sentence, and what Scripture really says about fasting
No. The Bible never tells anyone to fast until they die, never tells parents to starve their children, and never makes going without food a ticket to heaven. Every fast it describes has an end, and the prophets say the fast God wants is feeding the hungry, not becoming one of them. That is the question behind the news from Kenya: on November 6, 2026, the High Court in Mombasa sentenced the preacher Paul Mackenzie to an aggregate 200 years in prison after convicting him and 28 others of murdering 191 people, 190 of them children, who died in the Shakahola forest after he told his followers to fast. Below: what happened, what he taught as reported in court, what Scripture says about fasting and what it does not, how different churches fast, how to recognise a false prophet, and our view.
What happened at Shakahola
In March 2023, Kenyan police went into the Shakahola forest in Kilifi County, inland from the coastal town of Malindi, after a man reported that his wife and daughter had gone there with a church and not come back. They found starving people and shallow graves. Over the following months investigators exhumed more than 400 bodies, many of them children, and the Kenya Red Cross at one point listed over 400 people as missing. The site was a farm that Paul Mackenzie (also spelled Makenzi), the preacher who led Good News International Ministries, had offered his followers as a place to fast.
The murder trial in Mombasa dealt with 191 of those deaths: 190 children and one adult. On October 19, 2026, Justice Diana Kavedza Mochache convicted Mackenzie and 28 co-accused on all 191 counts. On November 6 she sentenced him, Kenyans.co.ke reported, to 100 years for the starvation murders and 100 years on eight further counts of killing children by direct violence, to run one after the other: 200 years in all. His co-accused received between 10 and 160 years according to their roles. The prosecution had asked for the death penalty. The judge declined, saying, as Kenyans.co.ke reported, that a death sentence would “extinguish the possibility that a living convict may disclose the location of the remains”: Eastleigh Voice reported that 61 bodies were still unidentified at Malindi Hospital. The BBC, Reuters, The New York Times, NPR and CBC all reported the sentence the same day.
Postmortems established starvation as the main cause of death, Eastleigh Voice reported, but some victims had been suffocated, strangled or struck on the head, and the court heard that children who resisted the fast or tried to escape were beaten. Followers reportedly called the forest burials “weddings.”
What Mackenzie taught
Mackenzie founded his ministry in 2003 and spread his sermons through his own television station. According to the reports of the trial, he preached against schools, hospitals and national identity documents, closed his church in 2019, and moved to the forest, urging followers to join him there. The court heard that his followers saw him as the “mouthpiece of Jesus” and that they were directed to fast to death, with children the first to die; Capital FM reported that some of the convicts saw death as a path to heaven. International outlets, NPR among them, describe the group as a doomsday cult, waiting for the end of the world.
That is a very old pattern dressed in Christian words: a leader who claims to speak for God, a near date for the end of the world, a call to cut ties with family and the state, and a test of loyalty that costs everything. We looked at the date-setting part on another page, Did the rapture happen? This page asks the question Shakahola leaves for every Christian: does the Bible teach anything like it?
What the Bible says about fasting
Fasting is real and honoured in Scripture. Jesus assumes his followers will do it: “When you fast, do not be somber like the hypocrites,” he says, but fast in secret, for “your Father, who sees what is done in secret” (Matthew 6:16–18). The church in Antioch fasted and prayed before sending Paul and Barnabas out (Acts 13:2–3). Queen Esther asked her people to fast for three days before she risked her life before the king (Esther 4:16).
Notice the shape of those fasts. Each has a purpose, prayer or repentance or a decision, and each has an end. Jesus fasted forty days in the wilderness, and Matthew says simply that afterwards “He was hungry” (Matthew 4:2–4); his reply to the devil, “Man shall not live on bread alone,” is about trusting God’s word, not about refusing bread for ever. When the prophet Elijah lay down in the desert wanting to die, an angel woke him twice and said, “Get up and eat, or the journey will be too much for you” (1 Kings 19:4–8). When the crowds had been with Jesus for three days with nothing to eat, he said, “I do not want to send them away hungry, or they may faint along the way,” and fed them (Matthew 15:32).
Above all, the prophets say what kind of fast God actually wants:
6 Isn’t this the fast that I have chosen: to break the chains of wickedness, to untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and tear off every yoke? 7 Isn’t it to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the poor and homeless into your home, to clothe the naked when you see him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?Read Isaiah 58 in context · Berean Standard Bible →
In Isaiah 58 the people complain that God ignores their fasting; God answers that their fasts sit alongside oppression and quarrels. The true fast breaks chains and shares bread with the hungry. It is turned outward, toward the weak. A fast that leaves children starving in a forest is the exact opposite of the one God says he has chosen.
What the Bible never says
There is no verse anywhere in the Bible that tells a believer to fast until death, that promises heaven to those who starve, or that tells parents to make their children fast. The law of Moses sets one yearly day to “humble yourselves,” the Day of Atonement, which Jews have traditionally kept as a fast, and it lasts one day (Leviticus 16:29). In fact the New Testament warns specifically against teachers who forbid food in the name of holiness:
1 Now the Spirit expressly states that in later times some will abandon the faith to follow deceitful spirits and the teachings of demons, 2 influenced by the hypocrisy of liars, whose consciences are seared with a hot iron. 3 They will prohibit marriage and require abstinence from certain foods that God has created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. 4 For every creation of God is good, and nothing that is received with thanksgiving should be rejected,Read 1 Timothy 4 in context · Berean Standard Bible →
Paul calls such rules “the teachings of demons” and says food is a good gift to be “received with thanksgiving.” In Colossians he says that rules like “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!” have “an appearance of wisdom” and “harsh treatment of the body” but are “of no value” against sin (Colossians 2:20–23). Paul himself longed “to depart and be with Christ,” yet concluded that staying alive to serve others was “more necessary” (Philippians 1:23–24): wanting heaven is never a reason to hurry death. And the Bible flatly denies that anyone can know when the world will end: “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matthew 24:36).
Most of all, Scripture is fierce about children. When the disciples tried to keep children away, Jesus “was indignant” and said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them!” (Mark 10:14). And he said this about anyone who leads them astray:
6 But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.Read Matthew 18 in context · Berean Standard Bible →
When the people of Judah burned their own children at Topheth, God said through Jeremiah that it was “something I never commanded, nor did it even enter My mind” (Jeremiah 7:31). The commandment is short: “You shall not murder” (Exodus 20:13).
How to spot a false prophet
Jesus expected false prophets. “False Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive even the elect, if that were possible” (Matthew 24:24). The Bible gives ordinary believers several tests, and the Shakahola story fails every one of them:
- Look at the fruit. “Beware of false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them” (Matthew 7:15–16). A teaching whose fruit is dead children is judged by that fruit.
- Test what is said. “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). No Christian is asked to believe a man simply because he says he speaks for Jesus.
- Check the predictions. A prophet whose message “does not come to pass” has “spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him” (Deuteronomy 18:22). Every date for the end of the world has failed.
- Watch for control and exploitation. Peter warns of false teachers who “will exploit you with deceptive words” (2 Peter 2:1–3). Cutting people off from family, schools, doctors and the law is a mark of control, not of holiness.
How churches fast, and how Kenya’s churches responded
Catholic. Catholic fasting is moderate and has limits written into it. The US bishops’ guidance says the fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday binds Catholics aged 18 to 59 and means one full meal and two smaller ones that together are not a full meal; those outside that age range, the physically or mentally ill, and pregnant or nursing women are not bound by it.
Orthodox. The Orthodox churches fast more often and more strictly, mainly by giving up meat, dairy and other foods for long seasons, with pastoral exceptions: the sources on our Nativity Fast page say they cover the seriously ill and pregnant or nursing mothers, and some the very young, with fasting done under a priest’s guidance.
Protestant, evangelical and Pentecostal. Most Protestant churches have no fixed fasting rules and leave fasting to personal conviction, usually joined to prayer; some evangelical and Pentecostal churches call members to longer seasons of prayer and fasting. Whatever the tradition, a fast is meant to be freely chosen, and none of the church rules described here asks children to go without food.
Kenya’s churches after Shakahola. On April 25, 2023, as reported by Crux, the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops said a strong mechanism for regulating religions might have stopped the deaths, and Archbishop Anthony Muheria of Nyeri said, “Religion cannot be and should not be the cause of people losing life.” When the state began drafting rules, many church bodies pushed back: in June 2023 The Star reported Catholic bishops warning senators that state regulation of churches would be disastrous. A presidential task force later proposed that new churches affiliate with an umbrella body and that clergy have minimum theological training. In August 2024 Christianity Today reported that the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, which had opposed similar rules in 2016, now backed them; its secretary general, Kepha Nyandega, said, “Being accountable is biblical.” The argument over how far the state should go continues.
Our take
This is our opinion, not a report. Starving a child is not a fast. It is the opposite of one.
The biblical fast is chosen, limited, hidden and turned toward the hungry. What happened at Shakahola was imposed, unlimited, enforced with beatings and aimed at the weakest people present. Calling it a fast does not make it Christian, any more than calling the graves “weddings” made them so. A Kenyan court has now called it murder, and on the Bible’s own terms that is the right word.
We would go further than many church statements. The lesson of Shakahola is not that fasting is dangerous; it is that a preacher who answers to no one is dangerous. Mackenzie ran his own church, his own television station and finally a fasting camp in the forest, and nobody above him could tell him no. Scripture never gives a leader that kind of freedom: elders are accountable, prophets are tested, and even Paul took his gospel to Jerusalem to be checked (Galatians 2:2). So we side with the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya: being accountable is biblical. Whatever Kenya’s lawmakers decide about the state’s part, every church that wants to be trusted should answer to a wider body of believers, and Christians should be wary of any pastor who will not.
Two last words. First, the families: many still have no remains to bury, and they deserve the prayers of every church that shares the name Christian. Second, the judge’s reason for refusing the death penalty, so that a living man might still reveal where the missing are buried, is a merciful reason, whatever one thinks of the wider debate we looked at in What does the Bible say about the death penalty?
If you need help
If you or someone you know is in a group that is pressing people to stop eating, refuse medical care, cut off family or think about death, please talk to someone outside it now. In Kenya, Befrienders Kenya can be reached on +254 722 178 177 and the Kenya Red Cross on 1199. In the United States call or text 988; in the UK and Ireland call Samaritans on 116 123. Elsewhere, findahelpline.com lists free, confidential lines by country. If a life is in immediate danger, call your local emergency number. This page is not medical or legal advice.
Over to you
What would a pastor have to do, or refuse to do, before you would trust them with your family? Tell us below.
Comments
No comments yet. Start the conversation; comments are public and checked for spam. How comments are handled