You can double the pastors serving your church body in one day! Considering the current number of vacancies in the Wisconsin Synod, that claim sounds like an internet scam. But that’s what has happened to our mission partners in Nigeria.

Tried and True Teaching

Christ the King Lutheran Church of Nigeria is based in the town of Uruk Uso, and All Saints Lutheran Church of Nigeria is headquartered in Ogoja.  Until now, each of those synods has had nine men serving in the public ministry of the Gospel. After five years of study during some unique circumstances, our mission partners each received nine new pastors on 11^th June 2022.  We praise the Lord for doubling the number of pastors who will shepherd God’s people with the truth of his Word.

You may ask, “What were  the unique circumstances under which these men studied?”  For many years, the WELS has sent missionaries trained at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary to Nigeria four or five times per year.  Those missionaries reviewed what the students had learned with their previous teachers. They taught new material at the seminary in Uruk Uso. In addition, they provided direction and study materials for the coming months until the next teacher came.  In the meantime, Nigerian Pastor Aniedi Paul Udo directed their studies.

That’s how Lutheran pastors serving in Nigeria have received their training until now. But that’s not how we trained the current class of graduates.

Flexible and Faithful

WELS provided the students with food and materials to study. However, WELS was unable to send visiting missionaries due to concerns about their safety. Director Udo and I tried to communicate from time to time, but the internet was not always reliable. The two of us often felt that we were going in different directions.  It has been a crazy five years and we have all learned much.  I’d like to believe through this time of transition, our students learned about the need to be flexible and open to change. These are invaluable qualities for Gospel ministers.

Pastor Udo and I fulfilled our duties as well as we could under the circumstances. But at the end of the day, we are trusting the Holy Spirit to transform these Nigerian students into faithful servants of God.  And that isn’t unique. In all of our ministry partners’ worker training programs around the world, the success of building God’s kingdom depends on the Holy Spirit. We plant the seeds and wait for the crop – a hundred, sixty, or thirty times what was sown (Mt. 13:8). Or even double the pastors.

Missionary Dan Kroll lives in Malawi and serves as One Africa Team’s liaison to West Africa

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

Oh, the hills. How striking they were as Howie Mohlke, his wife Leslie, and I drove east from Lilongwe, Malawi down toward Lake Malawi.

So were the sloping tea fields and the hills and valleys in the Sondu area of western Kenya when I saw them a few weeks later with Anariko Onunda: stunning.

Why tell you about hills?

From Flatlander to Hill Runner

For years I was a flatlander. I had not lived among hills since I was a vicar in Marrietta, Georgia (1990–1991), whether our family was in Illinois (1992–2001), Florida (2001–2015), or Minnesota (2015–2019).

Since December 2019, though, my wife and I have lived in Lusaka, Zambia, 4,200 feet above sea level. For exercise, I run hills.

I recently picked up my new U.S. passport from the U.S. embassy here in Lusaka. The complex sits atop one of Lusaka’s tallest hills. On many runs I look for it, gleaming in the morning sun.

Lusaka’s hilltop embassy makes me think of friends and family I miss in the States, as much as I enjoy serving the Lord and you here in Africa.

True Stories, Well Told

September 20–29 I had the privilege of traveling from Lusaka to Malawi. There I met with six pastors of the Lutheran Church of Central Africa – Malawi Synod. Pastors Chumba, Macharenga, Mandevu, Mitengo, Mukhweya, Mulinga, and I studied African church history biography together as part of their formal continuing education.

Since that week, each Malawian pastor in the course has sent me a story suitable for a 7–12-year-old, a story about a figure in Malawian church history.

In part, those projects are to help that pastor’s own family and congregation. In part, they are to help pastors in other countries in our Bachelor of Divinity (BDiv) cohort—pastors in Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, and Zambia. And in part, all the pastors’ efforts to research and communicate “true stories, well told” (our motto for the week) about fascinating figures in their country’s church history are to help me.

Receiving the Crown of Life

It is not just that I am new to African, as well as African church history. More importantly, stories about important believers from different parts of Africa, once we collect and distribute them all to all our BDiv brothers, will allow them to teach each other about real-life faith and love. 

Due to Covid-19 related issues, the twenty pastors in our cohort have not been able to meet yet face to face, though we began classes over a year ago. Pray with me that face-to-face classes for us all begin in 2022.

Back then to true stories, well told. Such stories not only have the potential to build up brotherhood, by God the Spirit’s power. They can break down super-tall hills, hills which so easily divide those whom God wants united: hills like time, distance, and cultural misunderstandings. These are stories where brothers can see trials our Father has sent in the past. These stories can connect us to believers in distant places and times.

 Be faithful, even to the point of death,” good stories remind us—stories like those of some of Africa’s first martyrs for Christ, Perpetua, and Felicity, remind us. In our classes, we watched a video about them. “Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life” (Revelation 2:10). Jesus promises this to persecuted believers in ancient Smyrna and to us too.

Across the Rift

October 8-18 I traveled to Kenya to teach my BDiv level course. In both Malawi and Kenya, the pastors and I did not just talk history. We also discussed being faithful today, even to the point of death. We conferred about the confirmation classes which the pastors supervise and teach, and the steep hills young people climb as they learn to follow Christ.

One difference between the church history biography course in Malawi and the one in Kenya was that on October 10, before the class in Kenya started, I had the honor of preaching in Kenya for the consecration of the new building of St. Peter Lutheran Church in Ramba parish, served by Pastor Samwel Omondi. He translated my sermon from English into Luo. It was a joyful Christ-centered service, complete with the Lord’s Supper.

It was my first trip to Kenya, so I had much to learn. The pastors and I met in the shade of the center brick-and-grass open-air hut.

After the week’s class, Pastor Onunda drove me back up to Nairobi, a city even higher in elevation than Lusaka, and three times bigger.           

On October 17 Pastor Onunda introduced me to part of his city congregation, a much smaller group than the rural congregation the previous Sunday. In Nairobi some Christians Pastor Onunda serves are starting to meet separately as a daughter congregation. Elders were leading the service of that new congregation the morning I visited.

The King of the Hill

Such outreach efforts, even for an experienced pastor, get bumpy. Make that hilly. Sometimes we all feel as if we are barely able to put one foot in front of another, trudging uphill. Demons, this dying world, even our own deadly flesh whisper “give up” when hilly slopes get steeper.

But our Lord said, “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14). That’s true of both Nairobi and wherever you gather with other believers for word and sacrament.  Someday even the mightiest mountains will fall. But not God’s promises of mercy to us in Christ crucified.

 Jesus lives. We have been baptized into him.

 “Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,” says the Lord, who has compassion on you (Isaiah 54:10).

Missionary Dan Witte lives in Lusaka

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