Kisii Collaboration

Let me share an incredible story from Kisii, Kenya—a story of transformation, faith, and collaboration.

It Begins with a Boy

It begins with a boy who grew up never hearing about Jesus in his church. Everything changed when he attended a Christian school. There, his teacher spoke about the good things Jesus had done, and curiosity sparked in his heart. Over time, that boy learned more about Jesus and eventually felt a deep desire to share the gospel with others.

That boy is now Pastor Kenedy, a faithful leader who gathers and shepherds two congregations in Kisii. What’s remarkable? Over 80% of the people in these congregations are former Mormons—just like Pastor Kenedy himself.

His title doesn’t come from a seminary degree but from years of dedicated service, guiding people with God’s Word. But Pastor Kenedy and his group wanted more. They longed to understand Scripture better so they could clearly share the truth with others—especially those questioning or leaving Mormonism.

Collaboration with TILM and OAT

Thanks to the blessing of the internet, they connected with Truth in Love Ministry (TILM). TLIM is an organization committed to communicating the gospel to people with a Mormon background. For the past couple of years, Pastor Mark Parsons from TILM has been meeting regularly with Pastor Kenedy and other leaders online, offering instruction and encouragement.

While these virtual meetings were fruitful, it became clear that a deeper connection was needed. That’s where the WELS One Africa Team (OAT) stepped in. In November, my wife Leslie and I traveled to Kenya to meet Pastor Kenedy and his congregations in person. Over several days, we gathered with more than 200 men and women to review the basics of Christian faith and to discuss what collaboration OAT can offer to local ministries in sharing the gospel.

Looking Ahead

The result? A renewed sense of mission and plans for ongoing collaboration between TILM, OAT, and our partner churches in Kenya. Together, we aim to strengthen outreach to Mormons and equip local leaders for this important work.

Please keep Pastor Kenedy, his congregations, and all these ministries in your prayers. Your continued financial support makes this possible—and we are deeply grateful.

Pastor Howard Mohlke and his wife Leslie live in Zambia, where he serves as the One Africa Team leader .

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

Blessed be the Tongue that Ties

On Pentecost, the Holy Spirit gave each of Jesus’ disciples the ability to speak in a foreign tongue instantly. God tied three thousand people to Himself in one day through the message they proclaimed in their listeners’ mother tongues. Would the results have been similar if the disciples had preached in Greek or Latin? On Pentecost, God did more than perform a miracle. He displayed his love for people of every tongue and tribe.

Speaking to someone in their heart language does more than convey information. If you speak three sentences to someone in his native tongue you will instantly establish trustworthiness. You show that you are committed to your listener’s culture and language. Your tongue ties you to his community.

Time to Teach the Tongue

Over three thousand languages are spoken in Africa. People speak some of them within their ethnic group. Other languages like English, French, Arabic, and Swahili cross tribal boundaries. Most people speak at least two or three languages. There are some similarities between languages of the same family (like Bantu, Nilotic, or Khosaian) but it still takes time to learn any language.

God has given me an aptitude for picking up foreign tongues. My experience speaking Chichewa for seven years in Malawi has helped me speak Swahili at a basic level. Swahili is spoken primarily in Tanzania and Kenya, and some parts of the DRC and Uganda.

Before my last trip to Kenya and Tanzania, I found a Swahili-speaking Malawian who teaches at a local language school. My wife and I met with him in January. We have both studied some Swahili independently but made significant progress with our teacher’s instruction. And this helped us immensely the next month when we traveled to Kenya.

Home Advantage

WELS Central Africa Medical Mission sponsored a rural health clinic near the town of Sagana in central Kenya. My wife’s job was to weigh patients and calculate their Body Mass Index. I sat with the local pastors who shared Jesus with visitors in both Swahili and Kikuyu, a Bantu language spoken by people in central Kenya.

I am thankful for my brothers in Christ who shared the Gospel in their native tongue. At one point I was left alone, and I struggled to communicate with our camp visitors. Local Kenyans will always be able to connect with their fellow Africans more easily than I can. I am glad that God gave them the desire to share Jesus’ love with others.

The week after the medical camp my wife and I traveled to western Kenya. We offered a preaching workshop near the town of Kisii. The participants were laymen who lead worship services and laywomen who are leaders of small group Bible studies. Few of them had received formal ministry training in an academic setting. These people serve congregations of the LCMC-Kenya. Due to a shortage of ordained pastors, the church relies on laymen to lead worship services in many of its congregations.

My class led members through the process of preparing a sermon from beginning to end. I presented my material in English, and they worked through various learning tasks in their local tongues. My prayer for these men and women is that they proclaim Christ’s love to their fellow Kenyans no matter what tongue they are speaking.

Tongue Twisters

At the end of our two weeks in Kenya, my wife flew back to Malawi. I continued to Tanzania to meet with pastors from the Africa Mission Evangelism Church (AMEC). The WELS and AMEC intend to tie themselves together in fellowship at this summer’s WELS Synod convention. Along with my fellow Missionary Ben Foxen, we presented topics of special interest to AMEC pastors. As English is not used as widely in Tanzania as it is in Kenya, Ben and I did our best to teach our lessons in Swahili.

Ben held up his end of the communication well, partially a result of the two months he spent studying Swahili in northern Tanzania. For my part, I communicated at a Kindergarten level. It wasn’t pretty, but you do whatever you can and leave the rest to God.

On Sunday morning our hosts asked both Ben and I to preach in their churches. It is an expression of the ties that bind our two church bodies together. We eagerly embraced the opportunity, even though I relied on Google to translate my sermon from English into Swahili. I know enough Swahili to recognize and change the mechanically translated parts. I twisted my tongue around familiar and unfamiliar words as I read the sermon to my listeners. An occasionally shouted “Amen!” indicated when they got my point.

Now back in Malawi, I have a plan to meet with my Swahili teacher. I hope to visit our friends in Kenya and Tanzania in the upcoming months. I want to move from being tongue-tied to having a tongue that ties others to Christ.

Missionary John Roebke lives in Malawi.

You Can’t Quit

She is hurrying. Who wouldn’t? Her daughter’s struggle is awful.

Her daughter’s struggle with what? School? Medical issues?

Demonic torment.

“Have mercy on me, Lord,” the mother cries. “Oh, Son of David!” (What a name for a Canaanite woman to give a Jewish man.)

“My daughter … the demon is hurting her so badly.”

Jesus does not answer her.

That story is for us, dear reader. In it Jesus and his disciples are far from home. They are abroad, up north by Tyre and Sidon—modern Syria.

In February Pastor Howie Mohlke and I left our Zambian homes. We too went to a country north of us.

I was in Sondu, Kenya for two weeks. Three pastors in the Lutheran Churches in Mission for Christ (LCMC) and I learned and practiced adult education.

*Sondu is located in Southwestern Kenya*

Pastor Mohlke flew up for the second week. Near Sondu in Chabera he led a workshop for LCMC lay preachers—over 50 of them.

At the end of our time with our brothers, one of them, LCMC Bishop Richard Ogosi Amayo, led us all in a service of holy communion.

In that closing service Howie preached from Matthew 15:21–28, the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman with the demonized daughter.

Does demonic torment seem as distant to you as East Africa? Something far away, something mostly just in Jesus’ day?

Millions of Americans figure that Satan is not just far away, he is fake. Your African brothers and sisters in Christ know better. Many have fears you may not.

Demonic Pentecostal preaching is spreading in Sub-Saharan Africa. Witch doctors advertise even in upscale urban neighborhoods.

Why would Christians be tempted to run, not to Jesus, like the Canaanite woman? Why try charms or traditional healers?

What a liar, our old evil foe. He means deadly woe. God seems distant. Other help seems closer.

God seems slow. Other options seem faster.

The Swahili proverb I learned from my Kenyan brothers in our course on dialogue education was Haraka, haraka, haina baraka. (“Ha-RA-ka, ha-RA-ka, high-EE-na ba-RA-ka.”)

That is, “haste, haste, there is no blessing.”

The Bible says similarly: “Enthusiasm without knowledge is no good; haste makes mistakes” (Proverbs 19:2 NLT).

It’s not just true in education. All those sayings remind me of another African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

That sums up a key aspect of what Howie Mohlke and I were doing in Sondu and Chabera, Kenya. Our LCMC partners asked your One Africa Team for help. “Let’s work together,” they said, “in training for practical action in Christ.”

The result may mean this time, classes for veteran pastors on a master’s degree level. Those brothers teach future pastors in online evening classes.

Or the request may lead to a workshop for men learning for the first time how to study a short section of the Bible and preach specific good news about Jesus from it.

No matter what, we go together.

Jesus’ disciples didn’t want to go together with the Canaanite woman, did they? “Send her away,” they tell Jesus. “She keeps bothering us.”

How that must sting. Can you imagine how afraid and ashamed she must already feel, with all the battering her daughter is getting from the demon?

(Did the mother feel responsible somehow? And where is the father? What about any other relative or friend? Why does she come to Jesus all alone?)

You can’t know fully the demon’s agenda in abusing her daughter.

Nor can you know the depth of why Jesus at first answers her pleas with nothing. He tells her he is only sent to the lost sheep of Israel.

But that’s not the whole story. Jesus wants so much to help her and her daughter.

Today too prayers for help to Jesus can seem so futile. Nothing is happening, we conclude. After we pray, all we hear is heaven’s door being slammed. Bolts click. Lock after lock closes, almost audibly.

But do you know how it went with the Canaanite woman? A door opens.

How? The woman doesn’t quit. She kneels before Jesus.

Jesus tells her, “It isn’t right. You don’t take the children’s bread and throw it to dogs.”

Nevertheless, she doesn’t quit.

“Yes, Lord,” she admits. “Yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.”

“Woman,” Jesus beams, “your faith is great. Let it be done for you as you want.”

Just as when God said, “Let there be light,” as soon as he says it … You can’t imagine her joy. Her daughter is whole again.

Ever notice that the only times Jesus in the Gospels heals someone from a distance—the centurion’s servant in Matthew 8, the Canaanite woman’s daughter here, and possibly the royal official’s son in John 4—it involves a foreigner?

So two biggies, friend. I’m on my knees before you, almost like the Canaanite woman before Jesus. Please.

1. The man who writes down the story that Howie Mohlke was preaching in Kenya—Matthew? He is Jewish, right? So are all the apostles.

But Jesus keeps hinting to his fellow Jews that his church will be multinational. Worldwide. Gentiles will fill it.

Matthew, we think, writes mainly to Jewish believers. They struggle so with God’s paradigm shift.

Demonic terrors, crazy situations, cross-cultural barriers. Such will not be the exception. They are all part of God’s plan.

2. Delays too. I mean, Jesus prayed the most desperate prayer, didn’t he? And it didn’t look like God was answering at all, did it?

Jesus died all alone in place of us all. Jews. Gentiles. Kenyans. Americans. Everybody.

So don’t quit praying. For Everybody.

Pray for missionaries far away. Pray for gospel victories close to home.

Whatever Jesus says happens. What does he tell the desperate woman? “Let it be done for you as you want.” Boom. Whatever Jesus says happens.

Then why pray for others? Why pray much for others? Maybe with people who look different from us, people with lives that seem in shambles, it feels easiest to shoo them away. We are like the Twelve.

We are like the woman too. God may seem slow. Prayer to God seems slow. Other options seem faster.

What if in Christ you don’t quit? What if right now you pray for someone who is lost? (Your daughter? A friend’s child?)

You can’t quit! What if you keep praying for the Spirit of God to lead many more people to trust in the Son of God for the glory of God?

You can’t quit! What if you pray every day, even when so much bad stuff doesn’t go away, or God seems to impose yet another delay? “Have mercy, Lord.”

What if Jesus really is David’s direct descendant, a man just like us, and King over everything? “Oh, Son of David.”

Darkest powers, you can’t be too close to their web. Jesus is stronger.

You can’t have done anything too bad. It’s already paid for.

You can’t have failed to do enough good. He was perfect in your place.

You can’t be too distant. The Canaanite woman’s daughter proves it.

You. Can’t. Quit. Keep praying. Pray to Jesus for that other person. Today.

Missionary Dan Witte and his wife Debbie live in Lusaka, Zambia.