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Kenya Mennonite Church: A convention recipe to consider
CHWELE, Kenya – Convention planners for the Kenya Mennonite Church (KMC) cooked up a daring mix for their national assembly, December 13-17, in the market town of Chwele at the foot of Mount Elgon in western Kenya.
This convention was not “business as usual” but a fresh, bold attempt to mobilize the entire 16,000-member conference for cross-cultural missions.
Held at a site far from the Luo homeland of nearly all Kenyan Mennonites, convention attenders streamed onto the Busakala school grounds just west of town, full of anticipation – and trepidation.
Each morning after breakfast, prayer, and fellowship, leaders divided the whole convention group of more than 100 people into small teams that left the school grounds for door-to-door evangelism in the surrounding region.
Teams were intergenerational, consisting of 2-8 persons. Bishops and evangelists walked with high school students and nursing mothers. Their Luo mother tongue was not understood here, so they used trade languages like Swahili or English. Almost everyone needed translation of some kind, and no one knew what to expect.
In early afternoon the teams reconvened at Busakala to report. By the second day, excitement ran high as team members reported meeting many who knelt to receive Jesus as Savior and Lord. Under one courtyard tree, seven men took the step together. In other places, teams met fugitives from tribal land clashes nearby on Mount Elgon, family members were reconciled, and there was fervent prayer for personal needs.
Following the team reports, the whole convention left the school grounds once again, this time for a daily open-air meeting in the market center. Visiting choirs from the Lakeside and Nairobi dioceses of KMC ministered powerfully. Preachers shared the gospel, and invited those who stood listening to receive Jesus. Every day, people prayed to receive Christ.
On the third day a convention team traveled to another market town an hour away on the slopes of Mount Elgon, where they had heard that people were interested in establishing a Mennonite congregation. The bishops selected ten persons to represent the convention and sent them off with prayer in the morning. In the evening they returned, reporting with joy that people were waiting for them, and they had helped form a new congregation.
The small local KMC congregation just forming in a home near Chwele was strengthened and encouraged by the convention. They have enthusiastic plans to follow-up with the new believers who committed their lives to Christ during the meetings.
Richard Showalter, president of Eastern Mennonite Missions, who visited the convention as a guest speaker and member of a visitation team, found himself deeply inspired and curious about how this KMC convention recipe would taste in North America.
“The closest equivalent for us would be to hold our annual Lancaster Mennonite Conference (LMC) Celebration of Church Life in a Spanish section of Philadelphia or New York City – then go visiting door-to-door and hold open-air evangelistic meetings every day,” he said.
“Maybe we ought to try it!” he added. “It was a great week. The KMC is a healthy, growing circle of congregations, roughly the same size as LMC. One of its fine young bishops, Clyde Agola, is an alumnus of EMM’s Youth Evangelism Service program from the early 1990s.”
“There was an unusual spirit of excitement and joy at these meetings,” Showalter added. “And the usual convention business got done around the edges of the outreach.”
He reported that KMC convention planners were pleased to see what God did among them as they put cross-cultural evangelism front and center on their convention agenda. What will God direct them to do next year?
-Jewel Showalter
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