NAIROBI, KENYA – The title question is not one that needs to be asked in Kenya. Everyone there knows who Mully is.

I had never heard about Mully until I watched the Mully Movie last evening. I immediately knew that I had to introduce our readers to Mr. Charles Mully. He is a man whose life was not only completely transformed by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ but also was radically changed by God’s calling upon his heart.

In the Beginning

Mully was born in 1949, the youngest of 10 children of an alcoholic father and an abused mother in a remote area of Kenya. They lived in a mud hut with a thatched roof. His father was a beggar who would become enraged when Mully’s mother could not provide better meals than they could afford on his meager income. At the age of six, Mully awoke one morning to discover that the rest of his family had deserted him in the middle of the night. He was alone and without any resources.

There were no opportunities for such a young boy except to become a beggar like his father. It was not something he wanted to do. It was what he had to do.

I regularly begged for food from neighbors and wandered a lot in the village, to the point that I became a nuisance. . . . I chose to be ashamed and embarrassed rather than to die of hunger.

Changes

While a teenager, he determined to find a way to improve his life. He walked the 44 miles to Nairobi, where he continued to knock on doors, begging for food and an opportunity to earn some money by working for it. He was smart enough to know that the best places to beg were where the wealthy people lived. He eventually found a family that was willing to take him in and feed him in return for washing dishes, scrubbing floors, doing the laundry, and other chores. He managed to save most of the wages he was paid.

His diligent work began to pay off when the master of the house offered Mully a job at his agricultural company. At about the same time, a friend invited him to an evangelistic service, following which he accepted the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. The Lord began to give him a direction to accompany his diligence.

He continued to be frugal with his wages as he rose through the ranks into various management positions in the agricultural company. Eventually, he purchased a vehicle and established his own venture, Mullyways. He bused Kenyans between the capital and outlying villages. As his business grew, he added more vehicles until he had an entire fleet.

Mully continued to diversify his entrepreneurial endeavors into areas that included oil and gas distribution, insurance, and real estate. He woke up one morning to realize that he had become a millionaire.

The Big Change

During a business trip, some street kids who were high on drugs and alcohol tried to scam him to pay for them to protect his Mercedes. He refused. He returned from his appointment to discover that his car had been stolen. He had to take public transportation back to Nairobi.

Mully wrestled with what had befallen him. It wasn’t about the loss of his car. It was about why he had refused to give the street kids any money. Weren’t they just like he had been? He felt the Lord telling him,

You will never let my children suffer. You have to rescue them and become the father to the fatherless.

That’s when Charles Mully told his family that he would be selling everything they had and that he would be going out into the streets and bringing abandoned children home to live with them. Little did they realize that within a month in 1989, they would have three more kids in the house – or that they would have 300 more within six years.

The Short Version of the Long Story

Eventually, Mully ran out of money, but he stayed true to God’s call. Fervent prayer yielded miraculous results. Ingenuity and more hard work have resulted in six campuses of Mully’s Children’s Family, which are currently caring for about 3,500 children.

The Mully Children’s Family does far more than feed, educate, and house abandoned street children. All of Mully’s children are trained to have a strong work ethic and are taught agricultural, industrial, and farming skills that greatly increase their value in the Kenyan workforce.

Christianity Today observed that “What makes Mully’s endeavor unique is its scale and its pursuit of self-sustainability . . . [while helping] to solve the systemic problem of child homelessness.”

Mully has had to be innovative because he will not stop bringing street children home where they become members of the “World’s Largest Family.”

Watch the Entire Story

There is not enough space to share the whole story and how it has continued to unfold. Missions Box News strongly recommends watching the “Mully” movie, available free of charge at this link on YouTube. Experience the ups and downs, the trials and the triumphs, and the miracles God has wrought through Mully’s Children’s Family.

Read more news on Local Missionaries and Abandoned Children.