Sustainable Living by the Word of God - The Ministry of Lutherans in Africa
This month we welcomed a missionary from one of the missions we support at Holy Cross, James May from Lutherans in Africa. About thirty-five worshippers from Holy Cross gathered for Pie and Ice Cream and Pastor May shared about life and ministry on the far side of the Ngong Hills in Kenya. Yet, since not everyone was able to attend, I’d like to share a bit of his ministry with you.
Lutherans in Africa serves African churches across 23 different countries providing seminary training for evangelists and pastors. Our church body, the LCMS, has approximately 1 pastor for every 375 people, and we feel we have a shortage of pastors. In Tanzania, however, there is only 1 Lutheran pastor for every 3,500 people. Here we are struggling to find people who want to be trained to be church workers. There many are eager to serve, but there are not enough seminaries to train them. So Lutherans in Africa is helping to fill that need and to build a seminary where Africans can train Africans to serve as pastors to their people, without long term dependence of Lutherans from outside Africa.
Pastor May shared that his goal is to create a sustainable community. The seminary campus they are building is off the grid. It’s power needs are supplied by their own solar panels on top of their buildings. Their water needs are supplied by their own well and cisterns that catch rain water flowing from the tops of their buildings. Their buildings are built with stone dug up on site as they excavate the ground with pick axes and shovels. The foundations of the buildings are poured with concrete from premix using wheel barrows (not concrete trucks). About a third of their property is crop land for growing fruits and vegetables that are used to feed the seminary students and excess is sent to market to provide funds. They raise chickens, goats, and dairy cattle to provide dairy and protein for the seminarians, and the students themselves work the farm, cook the food, and build the buildings. They study four hours a day and spend the rest of the day working.
There are no paved roads where they are and no stores; they are about 45 minutes from the outskirts of Nairobi. The temperatures are temperate with high temps in the range of 70-80 degrees year round. The stones walls of the buildings provide enough cooling during the day and radiant heat during the night that they need little energy for heating and cooling. In addition to their own livestock Pastor May said there are about 35 Giraffes that frequent the property and readily look eye-to-eye with those sitting on the second floor balconies of some of the buildings.
Life there is quite different than what we are used to in the urban and suburban living of Spokane. In many ways the life Pastor May described seems to be much more in tune with the Lord of creation than what we are used to since so few of us today live that kind of a sustainable agrarian life. Yet Pastor May’s encouragement to us was not that we all ought to disconnect from the grid and build sustainable communities out in the bush, his encouragement was that we find our primary sustainability in the same place the seminaries at Lutherans in Africa find theirs, in God’s word. The true sustenance of the seminary is the four hours a day those students spend in God’s word. So Pastor May encouraged us to make time for at least a chapter a day from God’s word in our life or with our family. That’s an agrarian life that God calls us all to be part of, “We have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for ‘All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.’ And this word is the good news that was preached to you” (1 Peter 1:23-25).
In Jesus, Pastor Mike
To support Lutherans In Africa simply go to www.lutheransinafrica.com. Or give your offerings to Holy Cross and mark clearly on the envelope and memo line that it is for Lutherans in Africa and we’ll forward it them.