“The LORD will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore” Psalm 121:8

This story is both late and early.

It is late because it is partly about the retirement service for Pastor Mutebele Chijoka (pronounced “moo-tay-BAY-lay chi-JOE-ka”) of the Lutheran Church of Central Africa – Zambia Synod on Sunday 27 November 2021 at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Kabwata, a neighborhood in Lusaka, Zambia.

This story is early because the installation service for Pastor Chijoka’s replacement at Saint Matthew, Pastor Foster Soko, has just been announced for 27 March 2022.

Both men have been faithful servants of the Lord for many years. Pastor Chijoka was in church work for 47 years before his retirement. From 1995, when he was ordained, to 2021, his retirement, he shepherded the flock at St. Matthew.

Pastor Soko is younger. Born in 1975, he was ordained in 2006 and most recently was serving God’s flock in Nyimba, in Zambia’s Eastern Province. Now he and his family have moved to the Kabwata area of Lusaka.

So far details like these might fit many pastors in the States. What makes these Zambian pastors unique?

Both men are bilingual, for one. Pastor Chijoka is fluent in both his native Tonga and in English. Pastor Soko is fluent in both Chewa and English. (Both men are also somewhat familiar with other Bantu languages, such as Bemba. That’s how it works in Lusaka, Zambia.)

Both men are scholarly. For instance, in April 2002 Pastor Chijoka delivered an essay to the distinguished participants of the fourth triennial convention of the Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden: “The Work of Christ as Prophet.” He helped translated many LCCA-Z Tonga publications.

In December 2020, Pastor Soko graduated from Chalimbana University in Chongwe, Zambia. He received a bachelor’s degree in both education and English language, including English in literature, along with religious studies.

Pastor Soko is aiming at another both: He also is pursuing a bachelor of divinity degree through the One Africa Team’s Confessional Lutheran Institute, in conjunction with the Pastoral Studies Institute of Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary.

St. Matthew, the congregation both men now have in common, is unique too. Take its choirs.

PHOTO 6 https://www.facebook.com/LutheranChurchofCentralAfrica/photos/pcb.451139769774577/451133773108510

Here is a video in which St. Matthew’s youth choir joins with a choir from the LCCA-Z congregation in Kanyama.

But St. Matthew has more musical talents than just those, and their choirs can sing in both African and western ways:

Soon we hope to post joyful music and more from the celebration of Pastor Soko’s installation at St. Matthew.

In the meantime, it is fitting to conclude with words of appreciation both for Pastor Chijoka and for you.

So here is LCCA-Z chairman Pastor Davison Mutentami speaking at Pastor Chijoka’s retirement about the many ways Pastor Chijoka had served the Lord.

And truly, dear reader, thank you for your love, prayers, and financial support for pastors and congregations like these in the Lutheran Church of Central Africa – Zambia Synod.

I will say it both in Tonga and Chewa: Twalumba kapati. Zikomo kwambiri. (Thank you very much!)

Pastor Daniel Witte serves as a member of the One Africa Team in Lusaka, Zambia

Please pray for those working in fields that are ripe for harvest. Share their story, engage with future news and receive updates. Learn more about our mission fields in Africa and how the Holy Spirit is working faith in people’s hearts at https://wels.net/serving-others/missions/africa

This week’s post is written by Missionary Dan Kroll, the One Africa Team liaison to Nigeria and Cameroon. He recently went back to Cameroon for a regional meeting with pastors from the Lutheran Church of Cameroon, Christ the King Lutheran Church of Nigeria, and All Saints Lutheran Church of Nigeria.

We’ve been pretty busy in Cameroon the past few months.  We were there in October to discuss the Lutheran Church of Cameroon’s ministry plan and consider some of the changes they might want to make in the near future.  There’s a lot of ministry happening there!

Missionary John Holtz also led a workshop on the topic of Dialogue Education, as a part of ongoing professional development courses that One Africa Team offers our mission partners in Africa through the Confessional Lutheran Institute (CLI). The course on Dialogue Education was eye-opening for the local pastors, many of whom had only rarely experienced anything other than learning by rote. In the midst of this workshop, somebody commented, “this changes everything!” 

Last month we went back to Cameroon to walk our partners through a Seminary Consultation, another branch of the CLI. The last few years have changed our partners’ worker training programs drastically. Because of security concerns, WELS professors are currently unable to visit Nigeria and Western Cameroon. Our Nigerian and Cameroonian brothers are the only feet on the ground. They receive support from OAT remotely.

The lack of face-to-face meeting time makes it more urgent than ever that their worker training programs are suitable to meet the needs of their church bodies.  All six Seminary teachers – Edward Obi and Michael Egar from All Saints in Nigeria, Aniedi Udo and Idorenyin Udo from Christ the King in Nigeria as well as Israel Mesue and Gervase Ngalame from Cameroon – were trained in a WELS designed and operated worker training program.  Our mission partners’ worker training programs now reflect a West African designed curriculum, tailor-made to serve people who are uniquely Cameroonians and Nigerian.  We have been talking about handing things over to our brothers for over half a century. Now we are giving them some space to take responsibility.

Starting in September of 2022 our mission partners in Nigeria and Cameroon will be teaching classes they have chosen for themselves, based on their experience and their own needs.  They will be following their own schedule, and they themselves will have determined how to use the funds available to train their men well.  It’s an exciting time for us here.

As we say in West Africa, “God is good…all the time.”  We pray for God’s blessings on these men and those they will train. Until we come back to Cameroon, they will carry the gospel forward.

Missionary Dan Kroll lives in Malawi.

Please pray for those working in fields that are ripe for harvest. Share their story, engage with future news and receive updates. Learn more about our mission fields in Africa and how the Holy Spirit is working faith in people’s hearts at https://wels.net/serving-others/missions/africa

Do you like looking at old photographs? Probably you do. And probably you don’t. On the one hand, how heartwarming it can be to see those happy photos of your children when they were five years old.  And imagine… now those kids of yours have children of their own! But on the other hand, oh my! That hairstyle! That cheesy mustache! Those silly bell-bottom jeans! Did I really look like that? Is it possible that the ‘me’ of yesterday was not as groovy as I thought I was?

A few days ago, I stumbled upon some old photographs.  I thought they were fascinating.  The year of the photos was 1981, and the place was Lilongwe, Malawi.  One picture showed workers laying the foundation for the classroom of the Lutheran Bible Institute (LBI).  Another picture showed the construction of LBI student houses. The plan was to build a brand-new boarding school for the training of national pastors.  All those buildings are still here, but things look very different today. 

It got me thinking about our mission work in Africa.  More specifically, it made me think about how times have changed.  Years ago, the measure of a missionary in Africa was how quickly he could change a tire. In the early days, almost all Africa missionaries drove out to the isolated village churches.  They preached the gospel to the people, sometimes in a grass-roofed church, sometimes underneath the mango tree.  You would get a lot of flat tires driving those dirt roads, but an experienced missionary could pull off the old tire and pop on a new one faster than a pit crew at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.  In 1981, the very idea of building a fancy brick and mortar classroom for the training of national pastors – wow, that was groundbreaking stuff!

I still teach young Zambian and Malawian pre-seminary students in the very same classroom that you see in the picture.  And if you want my honest opinion, I still think it’s pretty ‘groovy.’  But things look different today.  More and more, the missionaries of today are teaching in a Google Classroom, not a brick-and-mortar classroom.  More and more, the measure of a missionary is not how quickly he can change a tire, but how quickly he can reboot his laptop to get the Zoom meeting up and running. Boarding schools? Today it’s ‘keyboarding’ schools. Today, missionaries are not just driving cars to the isolated villages of Zambia and Malawi.  They’re flying on commercial airlines to train pastoral students in places like Cameroon and Uganda, Ethiopia, and Kenya. 

So what should we say? Are old ways bad? Certainly not. You carefully groomed that cheesy mustache because that was the best thing for the time and place. That mustache and that hairstyle and the bell-bottom jeans are the things that got you noticed.  Maybe they even caught the eye of that pretty, young lady who later became your wife. Certainly, it’s true that styles of ministry in Africa are constantly evolving, but our sister churches in Africa number more than 60,000 baptized souls. God has blessed our efforts.

The old pictures remind us how quickly this world changes.  But one thing never changes: Whoever believes in the Lord Jesus will be saved.  As we enter into the year 2022, let’s double our efforts to preach the unchanging word of God, by whatever methods possible, because time is marching on, and “our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed” (Romans 13:11).

Missionary Mark Panning lives in Malawi

Please pray for those working in fields that are ripe for harvest. Share their story, engage with future news and receive updates. Learn more about our mission fields in Africa and how the Holy Spirit is working faith in people’s hearts at https://wels.net/serving-others/missions/africa