Motorbike Ministry

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