“Neno la Mungu linachoma kweli!”

Sometimes, when teaching in a foreign language in a culture with different ways of  communicating, it can be a great challenge to make the point, drive the lesson home, and impact your audience.  Sometimes, you have to gauge the listeners, and sometimes silent bewilderment can be deafening.  And in November of last year, while teaching church leaders in the Mbalika cluster, I paused my instruction and found everyone silent, speechless, bewildered.

This was not a typical ministry lesson. I was not evangelizing, maturing a new church, nor was I equipping local church leadership.  Instead, I was preparing our church leaders to partner with us and a donor church from the states to provide food relief.

It has been a tough year for the communities in which we work, as two consecutive harvests were poor (barely existent in some places), forcing many people to sell off livestock at low prices to buy grain at high prices (two times higher than a typical year).  Others left their farms to search for casual labor opportunities, or to travel to visit relatives who had better harvests.  And while this shortage of food is incomparable to the famine afflicting Somalia, it is a real hardship to everyone here, and an ordeal of faith for the many new Christians in our church movement.

I volunteered to spearhead the food relief, which involves meeting with leaders of each church cluster, and arranging the logistics of food relief to each of our churches--over 100 different villages!  But we did not have the budget to hire grain trucks to reach all these distant sites, nor did we have the resources to help each of the over 6000 people affiliated with our churches.  Instead, we targeted the three most vulnerable people per church, and provided one month’s worth of food for this person, to be delivered by bicycle from various church distribution points.  This required meeting with our leaders, which brought me to Mbalika this rainy November day.

Frankly, our leaders hoped for more than we could provide in assistance.  We couldn’t spare anybody the loss of selling a cow, nor the toil of traveling many days seeking casual labor.  Additionally, we imposed upon them the burden of distributing the sacks of  grain to their respective villages--in many cases, over four hours on a bicycle with a 100 pound load on the rear carrier.  And, worst of all, we broke with the cultural norm that demands equal sharing of any gift, and dictated that this food would go to the most needy--the widows, the orphans, and those unable to work.

But it is exactly in this intersection of culture and scripture that our work here is most critical.  These are the teaching moments for which we have been sent to the Sukuma people.  These are the issues that make the extra drive to the village, the extra meeting with leaders, the long bible study worthwhile.  We are not only after helping the suffering, as integral as that is.  We are seeking after Christ, who through his Holy Spirit and his eternal word has the power to transform every community to reflect God’s holy kingdom.

So we sat together, myself and five leaders, scouring passages about our obligation to help widows and orphans, but also our obligation to work to provide for our family, all as part of our worship to God. And as we jumped from James to 2 Corinthians to Romans to 2 Thessalonians and 1 Timothy, and 2 Kings, we saw many familiar passages in a new light.  But I wasn’t sure if it was making the deeper impact, challenging these church leaders to see help for the vulnerable as one of their callings, not just the responsibility of wealthier churches in other parts of the world. So I stopped talking, and waited until someone else spoke up.

And after a long moment of silence, Thomas, one of our most respected leaders spoke up:

“Neno la Mungu linachoma kweli!” 

"The Word of God truly pierces!"

These leaders, convicted by the word of God, joyfully partnered in this ministry--helping procure the food, loading it into my Landcruiser, arranging a worship service at the central distribution point, identifying those most in need, bicycling the food to the various villages, praying over those receiving the food, and reteaching the scriptures we studied to their respective congregations. 

Though our assistance was limited, and my ability to communicate was weak, God’s word is powerful.  That day, fish and loaves took the form of chinese bicycles and dried corn.  And as God’s word pierces deeper and deeper, more and more widows and orphans will experience the blessing of Christian compassion--because more Christians, like Thomas, will know the joy of worshipping Christ in every aspect of their lives.