While Americans look at bicycles as a children’s toy or a piece of exercise equipment, in Africa bicycles are the main means of transporting people and goods for a large segment of the country. Malawians use bicycles to move wood, sacks of grain, furniture, chickens and goats from home to market. Bicycle taxi drivers move customers quickly and efficiently around town.
Some people use bicycles for longer trips from one village to another, travelling on both busy tarmacked highways and deeply rutted dirt roads. Until recently, about a third of the pastors in the LCCA Malawi were using bicycles for transportation in remote rural areas. Some pastors serve as many as six different congregations, getting to some of them only once a month for worship. It takes Pastor George Chumba over two hours one way to reach his congregation in Migowi, and that’s when the weather is fair. During the rainy season, you can add an hour to his travel time each way. He is glad to be able to reach his front door before sundown.
The pastors of the LCCA Malawi must be both spiritually and physically strong to fulfill their calling, but even so the time they spend pedaling could be used more productively. One of the ways that WELS One Africa Team has helped its partners in the LCCA is by securing the funding of motorcycles for the pastors to use in their ministry. Recently, funds became available to provide eleven motorcycles to pastors, a significant investment in both terms of money and time!
The logistics of providing eleven new motorcycles are incredibly complex, from importing the motorcycles to registering them with the department of Road Traffic, insuring them, delivering them to remote locations around the country and then training the local pastors how to operate and maintain them. Thankfully, the leaders of the LCCA took on this enormous task. The members of the Board of Stewardship filled out the necessary paperwork and arranged transportation at a fraction of the cost that their US counterparts would have been able to secure.
The LCCA has assumed the cost of operating, maintaining and insuring these vehicles, as well as assuring that the pastors’ licenses are all up to date. It is the sincere hope of WELS One Africa Team that these motorcycles will be of great benefit to both the pastors and the members of the LCCA in Malawi, providing them with more time to connect with each other and with God’s Word.
How beautiful on the mountains
are the feet of those who bring good news,
who proclaim peace,
who bring good tidings,
who proclaim salvation,
who say to Zion,
“Your God reigns!” (Isa. 52:7)
Missionary John Roebke lives in Malawi and manages Communications and Publications for One Africa Team
Please pray for those working in fields that are ripe for harvest. Share their story, engage with future news and receive updates. Go to this link to learn more about our mission fields in Africa and how the Holy Spirit is working faith in people’s hearts https://wels.net/serving-others/missions/africa
