Category Archives: Updates

2013–2017: An Overview

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Successes and failures and ongoing challenges. During our first eleven years in Kenya, we’ve seen our share in each of these categories. In this update, we want to share with you some of our key successes from our third term (2014-2017) as we continue to work with our support partners in the work of expanding Christ’s Kingdom in Kenya.

To learn more, read our August 2018 update here.

new church plant: Oltarakwai CCC

new church plant:  Oltarakwai CCC — 2018 June 10th
photo credit: Thomas ole Pesi

expanding influence

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Most of you know that our Eating the Word of God curriculum has been published in three languages:

• Enkinosata Ororei le Nkai (in Maa)
• Kujilisha kwa Neno La Mungu (in KiSwahili)
• Akinyam Akiroit a Akuj (in NgaTurkana)

(Maa, the language of the Maasai, is spoken in Kenya and Tanzania.  KiSwahili is the primary second language of most Kenyans and Tanzanians, and is spoken across East Africa.  NgaTurkana is the language of the Turkana people, who live primarily in Kenya’s northwest, between Lake Turkana and Uganda.)

Just to remind you, this is the textbook for the Eating the Word of God course of the Community Christian Bible Training Institute (CCBTI; there are three branch campuses).  The highfalutin academic title would be “Equipping Congregations for Biblical Understanding,” but we keep it simple.  The books are also used for teaching grass-roots level seminars.

Today some missionaries to the Tonga in Zambia (in Southern Africa) have asked if they can adapt our materials for the Tonga churches.  (We said “yes,” of course.)

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: