My perception of mission work was drastically altered the
first time I set foot in Kenya.
Somehow, I had the skewed vision of being the enlightened crusader on
foreign soil out to share the gospel in a dark land where there was no
Light.
However, I quickly
learned that this was not the case.
When I first went to Kenya I saw evidence of His work everywhere,
ranging from a local entrepreneur giving up the corrugated tin to fix his own
leaky roof, to the love and kindness of Maasai women inviting us into their
homes to share a cup of chai. God was already there! I was left with my shaken
view of missions and the question “Lord, what am I here for?” There are 60% of
the Maasai that have not been reached with the gospel, but I was struggling to
share with them. Was there a way I could be more effective in this diverse
culture and language?
In college I
had been studying sustainable growth and development, focused primarily on
agriculture.
It was during this
time, with sustainability on my mind, and my feet in Africa, I began to think
about how I could most effectively be used to further the gospel.
The main issue I encountered while in
Kenya, besides reaching the unreached, was that of a distorted gospel. Most people were not able to study the
Bible for themselves, whether that was an issue of language, reading ability,
or knowledge of how to study something inductively. Therefore, many of these people were easily lead astray by
false teachers or those in search of making a quick shilling (dollar). If we
could train leaders in the community to combat this plague of false teaching,
that were already more fluent in the language and culture than I could ever
hope to become, we could reach people and places that I could never reach in
quite the same way. In this way it
seemed to me that discipleship was a more effective path than evangelism, that
as in 1 Corinthians 3:6, “I planted, and Apollos watered, but God caused the
growth.” I was only a part of God’s work, and once these methods were taught
and absorbed, for it to be truly sustainable, I would someday be working myself
out of a job, for success without a successor is no success at all.
This
is our vision in Kimana, Kenya. To
establish a pastoral training and community development center that will be
focused on meeting the needs of the whole person while teaching them to study
the Word in a culturally contextualized way. So that,
in this way, they, as James says, “may be perfect and complete, lacking in
nothing.” We hope to be able to
establish a place where local community members may come for any need they may
have and that it will sustain itself within that community, long after we are
gone. By doing this, we are not creating
a dependency that will cause this mission to fall when we leave. We have faith that God will accomplish this work through local pastors and leaders. They will pick up
the torch and continue to let God do the growing.
