Tag Archives: evangelism

January 12, 2023 · 11:47

Happy New Year!

Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment

We had planned to be in Tanzania for Christmas. That plan died when my urologist announced that I have prostate cancer. The Cyberknife (focused radiation) treatment was scheduled to be completed before Christmas, but because of a mechanical failure, it was completed on Dec. 27. The treatment was easy; the side effects were devastating.

The two weeks following my treatment, I became very ill. Twyla and I spent New Year’s Eve in the ER. I’ll spare you the details, but I’ve never felt so bad. I was unable to eat solid food for a week, and had to have a Foley catheter. The oncologist was shocked to hear all the difficulties I had. He thinks that my symptoms cascaded, each symptom creating more difficulties. We are thankful that I am now feeling well. I am weak from being sick, but I’m exercising every day to regain my strength. Please pray for continued improvement and good health!

Returning to Tanzania on February 22!

Once the oncologist announced that he doesn’t want to see me for 6 months, we bought tickets for our return flight! I still need to be cleared by the urologist, but since I am feeling better, we felt confident that by mid-February, we would be ready to go. Ticket pricing helped us narrow down the date. Unless the doctor has more concerns, we plan to be in Tanzania on February 24 (it’s a 2-day trip).

We expect to fly from Memphis to Chicago by Southwest on the 21st, then onward from ORD on the 22nd! Again, we ask for your prayers as we plan this trip.

We are so proud of these guys!
This is the church planting team at Lorkisale. These men have committed to be in this village for 4weeks trying to plant a new Church! This mission is entirely planned by the Monduli Juu Church of Christ!
They are doing door-to-door evangelism from Monday to Friday, and worship on Sunday! After 4 weeks, 3 men will stay to work with the new Church here until next year. The young man in the green shirt (Isaiah) is originally from Lorkisale.
Sadly, Lomayani (2nd from left) was killed in a motorcycle accident on his way home after the Sunday service in Lorkisali. He leaves behind a widowed mother, who had no other support. The church is requesting assistance to care for Lomayani’s mother. 

Each year, the Monduli Juu church hosts a Bible seminar for the young people who are home from school (and everyone else comes too!). There’s lots of preaching and teaching. This year, they extended it to two days. Several people were baptised, and there was great fellowship!
The church has started an “English Medium” school. That means the classes are held in English instead of in Swahili, and the children who attend are better qualified for advanced schooling when they are older. It’s a way for the church to educate their own youngsters as well as an evangelism opportunity, as this paves the way for relationships with the children’s families.

These notes are from Koimere, our preacher in Monduli Juu:

“The MJ church’s four major goals for 2023

  1. Rain Water projects
  2. New English medium school (They have already started with the pre-school)
  3. Start Monduli Juu Bible College
  4. Plant two new congregations (one church plant already begun in Lorkisali)

“The year is starting so we are going to have some discussions about all Church projects! Will be running for raining water project, English medium school project, Bible School project and planting new Churches project! “We started the Pre-Primary school at the Church already this year! We have some small things we need right now! We need to feed them before they go home. Before we can feed them, we need to build a temporary kitchen, and we need 100 cups! So please try to share this with the brothers and sisters for any help! Already we have 50 children who report to school!”

Two more Rainwater Harvesting Projects! We are ready to begin the 2nd (larger) phase of the rainwater harvesting project at the Irmorijo Primary School, with funding from a Rotary Global Grant. The church leaders are gathering the documents required for the finalization of that grant, and we hope to build this before we return to the States for my oncology follow-up in July.

This is the Eluwai Primary School, which the leaders of the Monduli Juu church have chosen as the site for our next rainwater harvesting system. As you can see, there is one tank and some gutter in place, but there is no first flush (which means that the water is dirty) and the quantity is insufficient for the school. The money given by the Church of Christ at White Station will help us provide water for this school, and build our relationships in this community, so we can be more effective evangelists.

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September 27, 2015 · 19:29

Purification: Changing lives with water filters

After we received such positive feedback to our last post, Saving Souls… One Bottle at a Time. I thought it might be valuable to show you another piece of our evangelism strategy: building bio-sand water filters. Like building cisterns using bottle-brick construction, this method has the same clear advantages:

  • It meets a felt need: for clean water & good health.
  • It’s sustainable: anyone can do it with local materials.
  • And it provides a lot of relationship-building time between the local church and the non-believers who want to learn.

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In July, we attended a workshop in Anacortes, WA, on bio-sand water filters. One of the big lessons we learned is that this is a community effort! You can see how everyone was working together in each of these pictures.

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All the time we spent shovelling and sifting sand, mixing concrete, pounding the mold, we were building relationships with the people we were working with. We started our total strangers. After a week of sweating together and eating together, we had become close friends.

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As we worked on this, it became clear to us that this could be a great tool for evangelism. The Maasai understand that dirty water can make them sick; they are constantly looking for maji saafa–clean, safe water. When they come to help build their own water filter, or a filter for their child’s school, they will be building relationships with Christian men and women.

So how well do the filters work?

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As you can see from our graphic, they work very well. They work as well as most commercially available filters, but they can be built by local people, using locally available materials. With a simple modification, they will remove arsenic from water!

Consider the effectiveness of the filters in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since January 2015, there have been more than 100,000 documented cases of cholera, with over 2,000 deaths. Our friends at Friendly Water for the World (who trained us) trained two teams of BioSand Filter fabricators (one made up entirely of women rape survivors from the war.)  They installed BioSand Water Filters in 26 orphanages, and taught basic hygiene and community sanitation. Since installing these filters, they have completely eliminated cholera: As of September 2nd, there is not a single case of cholera in any orphanage in Goma.

This gives us an opportunity to be a blessing to the community, and a method to spread the gospel. Matthew repeatedly tells us that Christ went about healing people, teaching and proclaiming the news about the kingdom. We emulate His model in our work in Tanzania.

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