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Helping Another Church Reform

“In early April, we held our annual Nyamarambe conference in Kisii county, in which Pastor Sam Odeny (our church planter in Oyugis) and I ministered. Over 40 delegates attended and appreciated our ministry. By way of reminder, Pastor Andrew of ‘Christian Fellowship Baptist Church’ in Nyamarambe was introduced to us by a friend in the UK six years ago. We did invite him to our first annual family conference and since then Andrew fell in love with the ‘doctrines of grace’ and chose to convert his church to reformed doctrines. He has since pleaded for our help in doing this, hence our support to him in the conference.

I was amused to see a replica of our own conference details in Andrew’s, with meal cards and a time table running just like our own conferences. He is a good student! Pray that his church will see what their pastor is seeing and begin to appreciate it. We were there for four days of ministry. Andrew has since enrolled as a student in our seminary – KReST.

Teaching the Next Generation

Back at home, in the same week, our church youth conference was going on under the able leadership of our new deacon, Amos Omia. Amos shared the bulk of the ministry with our guest speaker, Houston, from Trinity Baptist Church in Nairobi (a church dear to our hearts). I only took one topic, ‘Christian discipline,’ in which I basically dealt with all the means of grace. Houston, being a web designer, taught the young people on ‘godly use of the internet’. He then handled ‘Open vs. closed theism’ and ‘work vs. betting/gambling.’ Betting is now a big issue amongst young people in Kenya. Houston handled these topics very well, and shows remarkable gifting. He got converted to reformed theology through listening to sermons on the internet. I am optimistic of his future as an able reformed preacher. We need to give support to such young men who are an asset to this work in Kenya, now and in the future.

Preparing Kampala for Autonomy

The week after the youth and Nyamarambe conferences, I was on the road to visit my dear brother Bill Issa, who is church-planting in Kampala, Uganda. This visit coincided, by
design, with Pastor Chipita’s (from Zambia, Conrad’s co-pastor) visit to Bill to teach a four day seminar on preaching. I attended the lessons and met wonderful men who came to be instructed on preaching, some from charismatic persuasions. On the last day, the three of us (Chipita, Bill, and I) had a meeting to review the progress of this church-plant on behalf of the elders of Grace Baptist Church Kisumu. GBC has served as the sending and overseeing church for Bill until his church is ready for autonomy. We were pleased with the work and agreed that it’s time we started planning the constituting of the church. Thank God for this work and continue to pray that it grows. There is a clear need for the church to start thinking of buying a piece of land and moving. Please pray with us for this.”