Category Archives: Updates

CCBTI update

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We may be in America, but we continue to be engaged with our ministry in Kenya, mostly behind the scenes.  The two CCBTI branch campuses in Maasai Land are still going well.  Last month (June 2018), Sam Ntinga Tome was in Ewaso Ng’iro to teach Life of Christ and Gospel of Mark.  Here are a couple of pictures.

A day in our life in Kenya

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What’s it like to be missionary in Africa?  Our days revolve around teaching national Christians and our six children, whom we (mostly Ruth) homeschool.  To read more, visit today’s post on CMF’s blog, which was written by Ruth.

UPDATE (1 January 2019):  As we are continuing with the same work, but are now with affiliated with MissionStream, we have archived a PDF copy of the blog here.

Unhindered Disciple-making

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Christ’s Kingdom in Kenya is continuing to expand and deepen in so many exciting ways!  …  Since our last newsletter, we have witnessed baptisms, heard of many other baptisms and new church plants by our national co-workers, planted two new branches of our Community Christian Bible Training Institute (CCBTI), and have our Discipleship Training Institute (DTI) on track to have two sessions this year instead of just one.

Our missionary team has grown during this term — we are now twelve adults and twelve children.  As part of this time of growth, we have been working on developing a new vision and strategy.  Our team vision is simple — unhindered disciple-making.  To read more, including about these pictures, here is a pdf version of our latest newsletter.

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For a copy of the newsletter with better image resolution for printing, drop us a line.

site maintenance: video clips

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An update of the WordPress site architecture was causing all of the embedded videos we have posted to display only the now archaic and out-dated code instead of the actual videos.  This has now been corrected, both on the video pages and in various posts.

Of special note are two new Maasai worship songs recently posted:  one sung by the students of my recent CCBTI class and one written during this year’s DTI session.  So if you haven’t seen those yet, we invite you to take a look.

Bible Training REMIX

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Community Christian Bible Training Institute (CCBTI) has two new campuses.  In addition to Turkana Bible Training Institute (TBTI) in Lodwar, we have successfully opened two new branches serving the Maasai churches.  The Ewaso Ng’iro campus, in Narok County, opened classes in August 2016 with six students.  In September the campus in Nga’tataek, in Kajiado County, offered its first class with 17 pastors attending.

I taught our Enkinosata Ororei le Nkai (“Eating the Word of God”) class at Ewaso Ng’iro in October.  Here’s a two minute video of a worship chorus, in Maa, which I composed during the class:

Discipleship Training Institute

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One of our favorite ministry opportunities has always been time spent with our DTS (Discipleship Training School).  In order to avoid confusion with the similar ministries of YWAM (Youth With A Mission) that use the same name, we just changed the name to Discipleship Training Institute (DTI).

We’ve just spent a week out in the bush with the DTI.  Ruth has written a delightful blog post that touches on our time there.  And check back here later for another update.

Visit our Ministry page for more details about the DTI (you’ll need to scroll down).  You can also revisit our older post, “Discipleship Training School reborn“, read the full story of that rebirth (.pdf file), or browse the “Reader’s Digest” version of that story (shorter .pdf).

Phases of Ministry: Planting, Parenting, Partnering

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There are different phases of ministry.  Missionary pioneers begin with the Planting phase:  proclaiming the gospel, making disciples, and planting new churches.  In the late 1970s, CMF was kicked out of Ethiopia by the new communist dictatorship.  Some of the CMF-Ethiopia team came to Kenya, starting pioneering church planting work among the unreached Maasai and Turkana.  When we affiliated with CMF in 2003, the ministry had reached the Parenting phase.  As a result of CMF’s work, today there are strong churches in both Kenya and Ethiopia.

Moreover, our team is blessed to have entered the Partnering phase of ministry with the Community Christian Churches of Kenya.  At the end of 2015, there were 201 congregations.  As of this writing (April 2016), there are at least three new church plants for a total of 204.

Check out this short and exciting video, in which our teammate Joe Cluff explains what’s going on: