Beacon of Hope
Posted December 15, 2010
NAIROBI, Kenya – Amidst a towering trash pile and streams of open sewage stands a tin-framed beacon of hope in Eastleigh, a community of 800,000.
Starving children playfully jump from dirt mound to rubbish mound to avoid the steady flow of human excrement. The trash piles are heaped with bags filled with feces because of the lack of toilets in the slum. Women congregate outside their single-room homes to wash laundry in buckets and hang clean items on lines to dry. Men flock to nearby bars to fill up on a popular Kenyan beer, often mixed with deadly ingredients like battery acid for a stronger high.
And inside the structure of hope, in the center of a slum called Kinyago, 30 members of First Eastleigh Baptist Church worship the living God.
Established in 2001, in the southernmost part of Eastleigh, the church is steadily working to spread the Gospel of Christ through all of the community, specifically focusing on the less-reached central and northern districts, where many Muslim immigrants from Somalia live.
First Eastleigh Baptist Church began in the open spaces of Kinyago, which has an estimated population of 200,000, drawing attendance through door-to-door evangelism. As more lives were impacted with the hope of Christ, the space grew to a two-room shack and eventually to a 10-foot by 20-foot structure, funded by the Baptist Convention of Kenya. Attendance remains steady, fluctuating between 30 and 40 regular attendees, yet growth is stalled, as space is limited and the eight wooden benches are already filled with both believers and seekers.
A banner hangs high in the front of the small, one-room church building, signifying a much deeper message than the simple lines portray: “First Eastleigh Baptist Church, ‘being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.’ Philippians 1:6.”
Church staff say the declaration on the vinyl rectangle expresses their desire to pour out into the community of Eastleigh by planting multiple churches; “… this being the first,” says Victor Ongaki, outreach pastor.
This young body of faith has already encountered many setbacks. Financially, the church struggles with resources to move forward in outreach and growth, as tithes and offerings are given by members who live well below the poverty line. Demographically, the church is surrounded by lost people who are resistant to the Gospel. Geographically, the church has little space to develop, with a much larger concern of public health issues due to the rubbish and sewage nearby. Relationally, the church is undergoing changes in leadership.
Yet the Lord is in this work.
He has called men such as Ongaki and Methuselah Manyasa, community development coordinator, to leave larger churches and influential jobs and devote themselves to serving Him in Eastleigh.
Ongaki, who is of Somali descent, is excited “to be involved fully to train and to try to bring [church attendees] into a certain level of spiritual maturity” and desires to “go out to the less reached” and use his God-given identity to minister to Muslims in the community.
“These Muslims, they are not our enemies,” he says, “they are our friends, they are our neighbors. So the best thing that we can do … [is] to look for a strategy — how we can be able to minister to these people.”
Many church members work in the homes of Somali Muslims, and they are encouraged to share their faith with employers.
Manyasa aspires to use his 20 years of social work and teaching experience to reach the area with the knowledge of Christ. He has helped the church implement several community programs: feeding orphans, youth school programs and women’s small business development. The church also started a primary school for first through third grade.
Associate Pastor Tom Mboya references Matthew 9:32-38 and describes Eastleigh as a “field full of those who are in need.” His vision for harvesting the field is to acquire partners who will support their work. The church is hoping to enlist the help of multiple teams willing to invest time in the Eastleigh community year after year by organizing sports programs, offering medical clinics and distributing the Bible in multiple languages.
The leaders of First Eastleigh Baptist admit there is a long way to go in impacting their spiritually-lost community with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Yet, says Manyasa, they recognize they have been given the “new life of salvation,” and they want others to “see the light.”
One woman, a former Muslim, shares with gratitude about the new life she found. “When I was a Muslim, I felt lonely,” she says, “but now that I am a Christian, I feel the warmth of sisters and brothers in Christ. There is great change in my life.”
Fiona Kerrigan served as a short-term missionary in Kenya. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and currently lives in North Carolina, where she hopes to pursue a seminary education.
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