I was in the middle of a Master's in Pastoral Studies when I first read No Perfect People Allowed. John Burke had written it out of Gateway Church in Austin, and I met him around that time. I remember being mildly annoyed by the book, which is usually a sign that something has got through.

His argument was plain: churches had built rooms in which only the already-sorted could breathe. Not by policy — nobody votes for that — but by atmosphere, by the hundred small signals a room gives off about who belongs and who is still being assessed. Twenty years on I think he was right, and I think it has got worse.

What changed is the air outside the building. We have industrialised the performance of being fine: everybody has a feed to keep up and an edited version to present. Into that, much of the church has offered a better-lit version of the same performance — as though the cure for a culture exhausted by looking sorted were a room full of people looking sorted on a Saturday. Nobody wins that contest. It only empties the room of the people it was built for.

There is a second congregation in this city that nobody counts. They were dis-fellowshipped, or shown enough of the door to find their own way out. Most did not lose their faith on the way — they took it with them and have been carrying it alone since, which is heavier than anyone inside tends to imagine. They still pray. They just do it in the car.

So why Sinners Only, when John's sign already exists and is kinder?

Grammar, of all things. Allowed has a doorkeeper in it, somebody standing a step above the person at the door. Invited has a host, and a host is not a fellow guest. Only leaves nobody above anybody: it takes in the whole room, including the man holding the microphone. It does not say who may come in. It says who is already here.

It also steals its format. MEMBERS ONLY is the most exclusionary notice in the language, and hanging it upside down takes a second to read and rather longer to recover from. The joke lands on the religious observer, not on the person we are inviting — which is the point.

None of which is original.

That sentence follows Jesus through the gospels, and it was written down as an accusation. The church has spent two thousand years quoting it approvingly while building rooms in which it would not have been true.

In Nairobi this is not theoretical. Church attendance here is public information, and walking back into a room where you were once disciplined is not embarrassing so much as exposing. So nobody at Pumziko is asked to stand or to introduce themselves. We take no names at the door and keep no register. You can sit at the back, say nothing, eat afterwards and go home, for as many months as you need.

Sinners Only is the sign on the door. Pumziko — rest — is meant to be what is inside it.

Njoni kwangu… nami nitawapumzishа. Not once you have tidied yourself up, and not when the situation is finally resolved. Now, as you are, tired.

John made that case twenty years ago. I would say it is stronger now than when he made it. We have simply put it on the door.