Tanzanian missionaries take the gospel across tribal lines
MARA REGION, Tanzania – Cross-cultural Christian mission is a pioneer undertaking in any generation. Missionaries leave their traditional homes behind in exchange for all the uncertainties and complexities of life among a new people.
In 1934, Mennonite missionaries from Pennsylvania arrived on the eastern shores of Lake Victoria and began to preach, teach, and live the good news among the tribes of that region. It was a region where the Christian church had not yet been planted, and in the next thirty years many fellowships of believers sprang up and blossomed there, becoming the Tanzania Mennonite Church (KMT).
Throughout these first seventy years, it was most common for Tanzanian Mennonites to reserve the term “missionary” for those who came from the United States. Yet in the very middle of this period, in 1967, God called a Tanzanian brother and his wife to go beyond their traditional borders as cross-cultural missionaries with the good news.
It was May 1967 in Nyabange, Tanzania, when Jackson Magangira received this call to cross-cultural mission. He was thinking about how the Mennonite Church could be spread all over Tanzania, and he sensed that God was calling him to go and preach outside the Mara region to the Maasai people. Jackson shared his call with his young wife Monika, and to his delight she not only affirmed the call for him, but whole-heartedly received the call from God for herself.
For the next seven years they lived and worked in the village of Ichwankima, starting the first Mennonite congregation in that region; they then served in the Tabora region for nearly thirty years.
Tabora, unlike Jackson’s Mara home, is located in a region where Islam is strong. Jackson and Monika found themselves in a region in which the receptivity to the Christian gospel was less than it was in many other parts of the nation. Yet they never complained or abandoned their call. Patiently, persistently, year after year they pressed on, sharing the gospel wherever they went.
Jackson sometimes used his medical skills as one approach for sharing, but more often than not his approach was friendship evangelism. He made friends of his neighbors and shared Jesus unapologetically at home, at work, or in meetings. He did not apply pressure.
He identified with the local people, and his life inspired neighbors and family members alike. For example, in Ilolangulu he was given a room in the home of a Muslim business woman, Sada Kashobha. Since he himself had lost both parents at a young age, he adopted her warmly as his mother. In a visit in 2006, though now a bishop, he sat beside her on the floor in a gesture of intimate companionship since she was then in her eighties, growing blind and incapable of much movement. The love between them was almost palpable.
Jackson was never alone. Bright-eyed Monika reached out to the women just as her husband unreservedly followed Jesus in mission. She gathered women into pottery and basket-weaving classes, and used the money they made to help support the work of the church. Like her husband, she shared the gospel freely.
She willingly served the stream of guests which came and went from their home. She remembers the highlights of her life as those times when teams of people came to assist in gospel outreach. When she was asked at age 59 what was her most important goal for the future, Monika replied without hesitation, “Because I am still strong, I would like to preach the Word of God more and more where the gospel has not yet been preached.”
God used Jackson and Monika to catalyze the formation of a dozen congregations in 35 years, all beyond the traditional boundaries of the Tanzania Mennonite Church and all in new cultural settings, thus helping to lay the foundations for new dioceses and still further extensions of the church. Significantly, all this took place in a period of history when most of their peers considered cross-cultural mission to be a function of the Western church, not the Tanzanian.
They were radicals, following the tradition of their Anabaptist spiritual ancestors. They heard the call of God, and obeyed. They sought and accepted the leadership of their spiritual authorities. They chose to live by faith, fully accepting the forms of the faith given them by their leaders, but refused to be limited by the assumptions of those either in Africa or North America who might have counseled them to wait for further human security before venturing out in mission.
Though Jackson was eventually selected in 2004 to serve as a bishop of the Tanzania Mennonite Church, his restless, innovative missionary spirit moved him to dream of how in such a position he could continue moving away from the centers of the church to its unevangelized peripheries.
Jackson and Monika Magangira were authentic missionary pioneers in their generation and in their church. May their tribe increase.
– Richard Showalter, EMM president.
(This article is an excerpt from a longer piece Showalter wrote after a visit to East Africa in October 2006.)
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