Church Life

We’re a Broken People. But We Still Break Bread.

J. A. Myhre

In the wilderness of western Uganda, we feast on peanut butter and malaria meds and gardening tips.

Morning queues at the Bundibugyo clinic include Ugandan and Congolese women and babies.

Scott Myhre

The chattering buzz arrives in the morning like a party. Mothers greet one another, laughing over their mishaps along the muddy miles they walked to get to this clinic in Bundibugyo, at the western edge of Uganda. A fortunate few came by boda, a rugged motorcycle that tackles footpaths while several adults and kids squeeze onto the seat.

The women untie infants and toddlers from colorful kitengi cloths that snug the babies to their backs, then crowd inside the clinic, where a dozen wooden benches are arranged beneath a tin-roofed porch. More patients queue up in the main intake area. They stack handwritten medical records on a table. They undress their children and place them to be weighed in a crocheted rope basket dangling from a scale.

The mood is nothing short of festive. As a missionary and pediatrician who lives and works here, I see it all the time.

Clovis, a dedicated member of the clinic’s nutrition team, enters each child’s name in the register while I talk to the first few women in line. Mercy’s nine-month-old son can’t yet sit, and his thin limbs make his head look heavy. 

I ask if he’s her first baby, guessing she might have had trouble breastfeeding. “Yes,” Mercy offers, “but he was born after seven months, not nine.”  

Photo by Scott Myhre

More of her story emerges: Mercy has given birth prematurely three times. The first two babies died at birth. This third infant is her only survivor. A blood smear test shows his small body teems with malaria. Like all these mothers, Mercy is seeking help and leaning into the hope around her. 

Another mother in line, Agnes, wears a smile that belies her struggles. Two of her six children are in our nutrition program. She crosses back and forth over the Uganda-Congo border between her relatives on one side and her husband’s family on the other, subsisting from their small gardens. Like Mercy, Agnes kept searching for solutions, and her confidence grew when her kids started eating. Now the younger one, licking his fingers, is eating a locally made peanut paste we provide many of the children who come to the clinic. 

Malnutrition is sobering and sorrowful. But our clinic is a place of hope and action—it’s a place of provision in a little stretch along the Albertine Rift that runs west of Africa’s Lake Victoria.

The rift is a long line of mountains, volcanoes, valleys, and lakes that mark the boundary between ancient tectonic plates slowly fracturing the continent. It is also a border between countries and realities, one that marks the historical limits of colonial powers and that is frayed by armed conflict and greed for resources.

Miseries incubate in our remote, rainforest region. There’s a strain of Ebola named for our district. Bundibugyo is one of the poorest parts of the country, where wages average $3 a day. 

Agnes’s cross-border migration for medical and nutritional aid puts her among thousands of Congolese who have been uprooted from villages attacked by the Allied Democratic Forces, a rebel group operating on both sides of the border. Our region is contested and contradictory: both densely populated and wildly biodiverse, rich in rare minerals and poor in disposable income, bursting with potential for growth yet struggling to thrive.

Our circumstances are similar, in many ways, to those that fed Israel’s skepticism in Psalm 78: “Can God really spread a table in the wilderness?”

God’s people here are enmeshed in all the challenges of this wilderness: the hunt for drinkable water, secure homesteads, and food. They also struggle to ensure survival of the youngest and oldest, peace with neighbors, a sense of place and purpose, and to be seen by God.

But I think this is the perfect place for God to prepare a feast.

Bundibugyo is one of the poorest parts of the country, sitauted in a little stretch along the Albertine Rift that runs west of Africa’s Lake Victoria.

Our small cross-cultural mission group has for more than three decades invested in concrete answers to wilderness dilemmas. That includes schools, churches, Bible translation, and youth development. And importantly, child nutrition programs in western Uganda, eastern Congo, and central Burundi. We live locally in simplicity and partner with churches and communities that are making all things new. That includes little bodies beset by hunger.

Some of the children arriving for today’s clinic will qualify to be admitted to inpatient wards for further treatment. Many will receive a peanut butter–like paste called Plumpy’Nut, which we source through various United Nations programs, or fortified milk or packets of flour to take home.

Sometimes, however, we can’t get what we need, and our community improvises supplemental foods of its own. 

Peanuts and soybeans grow in these jungle parts, also moringa trees with nutritious leaves. All these can be combined to make a tasty peanut-based puree. (Plumpy’Nut is free, but when we purchase peanut paste made locally, we are helping to grow businesses.) Gardens of sorghum grains and maize stalks added to the soybeans yield heaps of complementary protein that can be dried, roasted, and milled into a blend that families use to cook a wholesome porridge. 

Serge, as our ministry is known, enables these communities to fill the hunger gap at rural hospitals and clinics. There the food is portioned out, wounds are bandaged, and ills are treated. One of us examines a child whose frailty has not yet responded to care, while another peels boiled eggs for the day’s arrivals, while the mothers listen to a Bible story and a nutrition lesson. 

This is what a feast in the wilderness looks like. 

recommended

God Calls Me to Give. But to Everyone?

Anthony Sytsma

Along this African rift, hunger has a thousand faces. Visit any one of the programs and you will find countless variations on the stories of Mercy and Agnes. A child may be orphaned and unfed because his mother lacked access to a postpartum blood transfusion. Another might start breastfeeding but wean prematurely because his mother has become pregnant again, bowing to pressure to solidify her marriage ties or beset by the unavailability of appropriate family planning. A family might be underfed because their ancestral garden has been subdivided too many times over the generations. Another may be fighting tuberculosis. And still another may be born to a family struggling to feed the children after paying school fees.  

By the time 10 or 20 new children enroll in the day’s clinic, their collective stories hold the weight of a broken world. 

Childhood malnutrition, injustice in the distribution of land, family conflicts, untreated disease, droughts, floods, and wars. Blame the world, the flesh, the devil, or all the above, but it’s the smallest humans who suffer.

Jesus delights to bring life to the least likely places, and it’s his story that brings hope in these stories. On earth he wandered just such a wilderness and fed those who came to hear him. 

From his first miracle providing wine for a wedding; to multiplying the five loaves and two fish; to his final moments with his followers around the Passover meal, sharing food was central to the community Jesus was creating. The table became a window on the unseen realities he spoke of. Jesus called himself the bread of life, his body given and broken to save us all.

Photo by Scott Myhre

To relieve suffering and to fix the harm that mars creation is a holy and worthy calling that our mothers, aunts, neighbors, nurses, and nutritionists at Bundibugyo embrace. Tying such tastable truth to the substance of eternity, to the life we arc toward, tethers Jesus’ work and the acts of his followers to the hidden glory we long for. These meals are some of God’s “nodal points of relationship,” as Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz call them in their book, The Home of God—material things that connect humans to one another, to creation, to life, to God, to home. East and central African cultures grasp this meaning deeply: Love is never just a concept but always an embodied action. 

In the African rift, in spite of 21st-century evils, a cultural tie to Eden persists. At the site of abutting tectonic plates, languages and stories intersect: a diversity of gifts in the body of Christ for creating a new table. 

Photo by Scott Myhre
Photo by Scott Myhre

Whether outsiders who come to this remote area or those who find themselves here by birth, all bring their loaves and fish. Some bring clinical training, donors, or just a determination to see change. Others bring gardening techniques, communication skills, or courage to innovate. Jesus intentionally commissions this mixing of humanity because none of us adequately embodies the answers alone. Those sent to serve and those who receive blend the nuts and grain, the stethoscopes and explanations, the alertness to acute need and the willingness to take risks. 

Together, we create feasts that daily broadcast this truth: the status quo of hunger and injustice is not the end of the story. Jesus continues to call us into the wilderness, where he provides both the tangible necessities of survival and the behind-the-veil goodness of his presence. He shows the church how to embrace places of paradox. In these rural, marginalized places with their limited options, the table is spread with peanut butter and pencil stubs, vitamins and malaria medicine, Bible teaching and gardening tips. 

One day, the lion will lie down with the lamb. For now, a few groups of nurses meet mothers, people who speak one language stumble through another, workers with two dozen years of schooling engage patients with two, families who have nothing to spare take in an orphaned niece and tell their story to people who have the internet at their fingertips. Like sparks, ideas fly, hope shines, and everyone moves a step closer to home.

Real home, where the feast never ends. 

J. A. Myhre is a pediatrician and missionary serving in Africa with the ministry Serge. She lives with her husband in Bundibugyo, Uganda, and is the author of the Rwendigo Tales series for youth.

This article appeared in the The Globe Issue 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Daily Bread".

Church Life

When Refuge Is Still Ruin

Esther Kline

Syria’s war split refugee families across oceans and continents. A church is trying to help.

Photo by Nadia Bseiso

Lama Marwan Alhazzouri lived with her husband and young sons in Homs before the war in Syria began in 2011. She had never left the city, Syria’s third largest, where she grew up and married at 17. 

With its wide boulevards and tree-lined neighborhoods, Homs bustled with business, an oil refinery, and agricultural production. Sunni and Alawite Muslims, Orthodox and Catholic Christians—diverse groups lived in adjoining enclaves, their ancient mosques and churches dominating the skyline.

Lama had no reason to venture elsewhere. Her parents, grandparents, and older sister Shatha Marwan Alhazzouri, all lived nearby. Her husband, Tarek Fouzi Masharka, worked a 10-minute walk away. Almost every afternoon she walked to see her parents. She even did it in heels, she recalled with a grin, her dangly gold earrings winking on both sides of her face.  

Now she lives in Jordan. She wears shoes like a man, she joked, to navigate its hilly streets—a commentary on how the war changed everything. 

Photo by Nadia Bseiso
View of Amman hills from Marka. Jordan.

Lama and her relatives fled Syria in 2012 to settle in Marka, a district in east Amman, the capital of Jordan. Known in ancient times as the “city of seven hills,” Amman now spans 19 hills. Its population of more than 4 million is roughly quadruple that of Homs. Yet Lama acclimated easily to life in Jordan at first, adjusting to the topography, the Jordanians’ Arabic accent, and new customs. With her parents living next door and her sister upstairs, she didn’t feel like a stranger in this strange land. The family spent Fridays together as they always had, with Lama’s mother cooking for everyone. 

But then the war stretched from months to years, and then to more than a decade. Lama’s daily life began to shift. More than a million Syrians took refuge in Jordan, testing public services and housing. With tens of thousands of war victims from Iraq already in Amman, resentment among Jordanians simmered. Refugees crowded stores and pushed up prices. 

At the same time, Lama’s close-knit family, now refugees at the mercy of international dictates, began to scatter. First her brothers Ihsan and Husam left. Ihsan immigrated to Washington State while Husam and his wife were allowed to resettle in Canada. 

Next, Lama’s sister Shatha, along with her husband and their then-five daughters, moved to California. 

Other relatives found sanctuary in Lebanon and Sweden. When Lama’s parents, approved for resettlement by the UN Refugee Agency, moved to Washington State in 2022, it was the final blow.

“When my siblings left, I hated [Jordan],” Lama said. “I hated it so much.” Only she and her sister Nuha remain in Marka.

“This isn’t called spreading out, it’s called ruin,” Shatha said, her black headscarf emphasizing the fierce expression in her thickly mascaraed eyes.

“When you take a family and break it up like this, that’s not dispersion—it’s destruction.”

Photo by Nadia Bseiso
Portrait of Pastor Ibrahim Nassar at Marka Church, Amman-Jordan.
Photo by Nadia Bseiso
Marka Church, Amman, Jordan.
Photo by Nadia Bseiso
Portrait of Pastor Haytham Mazahreh at Marka Church, Amman-Jordan.
Photo by Nadia Bseiso

Shatha is now an American citizen. In late 2022, she returned to Jordan for five weeks to visit her sisters, savoring her last hours with Lama and Nuha before parting again. Over glasses of sweetened verbena tea and bowls of mixed nuts, they reminisced about their life in Homs, their flight to Jordan, and their challenges as refugees.  

The family fled Homs early in the Syrian conflict, before rebel forces there were squelched by Bashar al-Assad’s regime. At first, Lama didn’t want to leave Homs to shelter in Damascus. Even when they decided to leave, she and her relatives thought their stay in the Syrian capital would be temporary. But after 10 days in hotels converted into temporary housing, they learned the road to Homs had become blocked by explosions. Assad’s army was takng men of military age by force. Lama’s husband was in danger of conscription, so crossing the border to Jordan became their next best option.

recommended

How Should We Then Live Among Muslims? Four Arab Christian Views

Jayson Casper

Gradually, in small groups, the family twisted their way toward safety by way of Dara’a, staying some days in border camps before trickling into Jordan and finally to Marka. 

The situation in Jordan is bad, Tarek said. “There’s no aid—not from the UNHCR, not from the UN,” he said, using the acronym for the UN Refugee Agency. “And there’s no work. If you want to get a work permit, you have to pay monthly to social security … and if you don’t have work … how are you going to pay that?” 

Tarek has not been able to work, so Lama’s two oldest sons, both in their late teens, dropped out of school to help support the family. The boys slouched quietly on the living room’s periphery, listening to the adults’ conversation. 

Finding steady work is not the only challenge for Syrian refugees in Jordan. Many families are saddled with niggling paperwork issues—whether byproducts of mismanagement, bureaucracy, or blatant corruption, no one really knows. Nuha’s husband, Mohamad, cannot get official refugee status, and also cannot return to his homeland.

Maysoon, another marooned relative, lives alone in the apartment below Lama. As a single adult she has her own refugee file with the UN. Because of this, she was left behind when her family members were resettled. Her parents and siblings are now in Canada, France, Sweden, and the United States. Without the presence of a father, brother, or husband in a society that values male protection, she finds herself particularly vulnerable. 

Lama believes humanitarian organizations receive plenty of financial aid but do not distribute it equitably. Some families receive rent supplements, while theirs has ended. Some families are resettled together, yet theirs has been scattered. “There’s no justice,” Shatha and Lama said over and over.

Photo by Nadia Bseiso
Lama and her son Qusai at their home in Marka, Amman – Jordan.

Where Lama’s family found support, surprisingly, was at a local church. Christians from Marka Church visited them multiple times. They forged a friendship with a church member living in their neighborhood. When the family first arrived, teams from Marka Church delivered heaters, blankets, and mattresses. They brought staples like oil, rice, sugar, bulgur wheat, tomatoes, and mortadella. Lama’s family also participated in Marka’s fruit and vegetable voucher program, which partners with a local produce shop. 

The Nazarene church sits a block off Marka’s main thoroughfare, a street that rides a ridge of hills, shuttling commuters in grimy white buses and green-tagged public transport vehicles between Jordan’s two largest cities, Amman and Zarqa. Restaurants, clothing and accessory stores, banks, pharmacies, and cell phone providers line the congested boulevard. On either side lie Marka’s residential buildings, limestone-faced apartments surrounded by olive trees and rows of scrappy cypress.

Though Christians comprise only 3 percent of Jordan’s population—about 250,000–400,000 of more than 11 million—the Jordanian church pulls disproportionate weight in caring for the needs of close to 1.5 million Syrian and Iraqi refugees. Among evangelical churches in particular, Marka Church has led with creativity and innovation since 2004, when its pastors began outreach to refugees from the Iraq War. 

The overarching goal of Marka Church is mercy and truth meeting together, said Pastor Haytham Mazahreh, quoting Psalm 85:10. The church recently launched an aid organization, Sense of Community, which serves as an umbrella over a variety of mercy ministries meeting physical needs in the community. 

A permanent clinic operates on the main church building’s third floor, staffed by general practitioners, eye doctors, dentists, and physical therapists. They serve anyone in need—Iraqi, Syrian, Palestinian, Jordanian, or other. Across the street, Good Shepherd Center provides education for around 130 Iraqi Christian children, who are unable to study in local schools. Handcraft workshops around the church’s campus supply vocational training and income to mainly Iraqi refugees.

Shiite women and their children who fled south Lebanon for shelter in Beirut.
recommended

Lebanon Evangelicals Serve Shiites Displaced by Hezbollah-Israel War

Jayson Casper

Mercy flows beyond Marka Church’s walls as well. Pastor Ibrahim Nassar and another leader, Intesar Mazahreh, served for years with the church’s neighborhood visiting team—a vital component of ministry in a region where home visits form the foundation of social interaction. 

“This is an opportunity to care for [refugees], comfort them, even without giving them anything,” Ibrahim said. “It makes a difference—it makes a difference that someone is asking about them.”

Ibrahim also pastors Church of Glory, an Assemblies of God congregation nextdoor. With his soft voice, salt-and-pepper scruff, and bushy eyebrows, he greets refugees like an eloquent, Spirit-filled bear. The Syrian conflict, coinciding with the rise of Islamic State militancy in Iraq and Syria, sent fresh waves of the persecuted to Jordan. Pastor Haytham invited Ibrahim to join Marka’s visiting team.

Intesar Mazahreh, a petite woman whose first name in Arabic means “victory,” joined the visiting team in 2015 after having a dream about serving refugees. Five mornings a week, she and others met for prayer, Bible study, and worship before breaking into small groups to visit two or three households each. These visits involved listening to people’s stories, encouraging them, and praying for them. 

Initially the church also supplied a variety of household needs, she explained.

“When they came, they could hardly rent unfurnished apartments—without anything, gas, heaters, cushions, nothing—this is how their needs were,” she said. When their needs were greater, she added, “they liked to listen more to the words about Christ and about peace and love and mercy.”

Photo by Nadia Bseiso
Photo by Nadia Bseiso
Photo by Nadia Bseiso
Photo by Nadia Bseiso
Lama’s sons playing at their backyard in Marka, Amman- Jordan.
Photo by Nadia Bseiso
Lama and her son Odai at their home in Marka, Amman – Jordan.
Photo by Nadia Bseiso
Photo by Nadia Bseiso
Lama’s neighbourhood, Marka, Amman – Jordan.

Barred from legal employment in Jordan, Iraqi refugees struggle to settle in Marka. Many Syrians, on the other hand, have been in the country for nearly a decade. Though they still face financial challenges, they have become like Jordanians in many ways, more self-sufficient and networked within the community. As refugees’ needs change, the visiting team’s work morphs. Currently, church visits focus more on sharing the Word and discipling believers.  

The seeds of love planted by the visiting teams help soften local attitudes toward the evangelical church, too. Everyone from Syrian Muslims to Iraqi Christians—usually from Orthodox and Catholic backgrounds—have been helped by Marka Church. Suspicion and fear melt away when confronted with unconditional love. 

“Those people stood with us,” one refugee said. “Those people have love. Those are the people who visited us—nobody asked about us except them.”

Lama and her family also praise the help they received from the church. They miss the early visits of Marka teams and make do with less and less aid, as other crises, regional and global, take precedence over the plight of trapped Syrians. Their crisis has gone on for so long, Lama said, “the world has gotten bored.”

Last year, as a winter storm dropped flurries of snow and canceled three days of school, Lama set laundry to dry on racks around her apartment. “The days have all become like each other now,” she said, sitting beside a softly whooshing kerosene heater.

In spite of the time difference, Lama talks with her mother in Washington State every day, with Shatha in California, and with her brother in Canada. (In April 2024, Lama’s father died; she never saw him again in person.) 

Sometimes she recalls their Fridays together before their dispersion—mornings with fattet hummus for breakfast, afternoons with stuffed vegetables, kubbeh, or grape leaves made by her mother.

After Shatha visited Lama in Jordan, she returned safely to the United States in January 2023, packing Middle Eastern bread and carrots in her suitcase as a taste of home. The cooked carrots made her husband happy, she said. Shatha talks now about Welcome Corps, the then newly launched US State Department program allowing Americans to privately sponsor refugee families for resettlement. Could Welcome Corps help bring Lama and Nuha to the United States? Could American churches help them the way Marka Church helped them in Jordan?

Until then, she waits—for a successful way to bring her sister to America and to reunite, at last, what remains of her family.

Esther Kline, a pen name, is an American writer living in Amman, Jordan.

This article appeared in the The Globe Issue 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "The Restless".

Related

Christians in Syria

Syrians walk past one of Aleppo's destroyed structures near the northern city's historic citadel.

After Assad: Jihad or Liberty?

Jayson Casper

Christian Syrians lift crosses and independence-era flags as they rally in the Duweilaah area of Damascus

Syrian Christians Are Anxious About New Regime

Jayson Casper

Church Life

Espresso in Exile

Mindy Belz

A Cyprus café ministry has irritated local authorities. It’s also inspiring imitators in the Muslim world.

Ryan Keating launched Exile Coffee and Wine in Cyprus after learning the coffee business in Turkey.

Photo by Hagin Bengo

This is the story about a coffeehouse.

It’s a business with a public face, with people who show up every day and make it go. It could be your local coffeehouse—perhaps tucked under awnings on a downtown street, the hum of conversation mixing with the aroma of freshly ground beans, where the barista knows your name and starts your order before you can say it.

Exile Coffee and Wine is like that, except the menu comes mixed with ministry, and big ideas percolate in the people who run it. Ryan Keating is the coffeehouse’s 47-year-old face and the catalyst behind the community that has grown up around the business in Northern Cyprus.

By morning, Keating is at the shop roasting beans or going over the day’s menu. A few hours later, you might find him up the coast at an ecotourism farm, leading a discipleship training seminar for young people from around the world, talking about creation and the work of Alvin Plantinga. By afternoon Keating is back at the coffeehouse, prepping food in the kitchen and going over the evening’s wine selection. In between, he might put on a tie for a court appearance, then take it off to help with an olive harvest. Or he might find some time to write poetry (he recently published a book of poems). 

Photo by Hagin Bengo
Exile stays open late, offering pizza nights and wine pairings and a revolving menu.

For Keating, the 24 hours of a day seem measured by a different clock. It is as if, by sharing time in community, Keating has learned how to have more of it. 

When I first visit the café it’s late in the day for caffeine, but we are cupping anyway, tasting coffee from a lineup of demitasses. Freshly made coffee breaks down into five observable parts, explains Keating—sweetness, body, acidity, flavors, and finish. We are drinking Arabica beans from Ethiopia that Keating roasted himself. 

“We might pick up fruity or herbal or floral notes. Is it tarragon or black tea or bergamot, something herbal? Or sometimes it might be negative, and it could taste like grass,” he observes as we sip. (The variety we are drinking is fruity, he says.)

A slant of Mediterranean light spills over the bar top. You really can taste those things? I ask. 

“It’s not about equipment, it’s just about attention,” Keating says. “It’s about paying attention to what you’re tasting and learning from other more experienced tasters. If one of them is telling me there’s tarragon or apple here, then hopefully I can taste that, and learn.”

Coffee beans can release a thousand flavor compounds when roasted, ground, filtered, and poured. An expert taster can unearth them all in one sip. The taste varies based on where the coffee is grown—the climate and altitude, for instance—and when it’s harvested. What season? What’s growing nearby? Beans generally should be roasted lightly, to preserve those delicate flavors.

It takes skill and time to learn all that the coffee is saying, and that kind of experience comes at a price. Merely paying attention doesn’t lead to automatic success. Rather, it requires patience, generosity, and knowing failure is always lurking. (Oh, you don’t pick up the apricot notes?)

Those are lessons that Keating, like many Westerners who work in Muslim-majority parts of the world, will have to learn sooner or later.

Photo by Hagin Bengo
Locals gather for Friday’s open mic night.
Photo by Hagin Bengo
Photo by Hagin Bengo
Photo by Hagin Bengo
Photo by Hagin Bengo

Keating discovered that coffee tasting, which he learned as a hobby while teaching and working on his doctorate in Turkey, could become a transferrable skill during years of working as a missionary—first in Turkey, and now in the divided island nation of Cyprus. It led to coffee roasting, to importing and exporting beans, to opening cafés and training others in the business. 

The coffee trade fed Keating’s interest in winemaking, which led to hosting meals and to organizing events, from art shows and piano concerts to worship services and Bible studies. All the while, what the café really does is crack open ways to connect with the community.

For an American in the Middle East, that’s no small achievement. 

“I love the café,” he says, “but I love it because of the way it fuels the other things I do.”

Those other things include helping to start fellowships and churches of new and old believers. They include yearly discipleship training programs that draw a small and diverse group of global participants—most in their early twenties— to Cyprus for three months. 

Students learn how to think theologically while working with their hands. They spend mornings in seminars taught by Keating, among others, and afternoons working in a nearby olive grove or behind the counter at Exile. They learn to be part of the café’s community. 

On Sundays, the café’s first floor turns into a worship area, hosting three distinct congregations: an African group, as well as separate English- and Turkish-language services. Keating usually preaches at one of the services. He sees to all the coffee roasting himself and usually makes food for café events. “I came into this work because I believe ministry training is incomplete if I am not modeling the sacredness of work and giving people skills,” he says.

Keating arrived in Northern Cyprus with his wife Vanessa and four children in 2017. Before that, the family lived for a decade in Turkey, where Keating joined in church planting and launched a business that included three coffeehouses in Ankara, the capital. 

A century ago, Western missionaries built and staffed schools and hospitals in this part of the world as a comprehensive way to share a Christian message. Keating thinks of street-fronting businesses in the same way: A good coffee shop should employ locals, model Christian service, show hospitality, and provide a brick-and-mortar setting for other ministries. 

As a 16-year-old exchange student, Keating fell in love with Turkey, a majority Muslim country that straddles Europe and Asia. He graduated from Biola University, earned a master’s degree from Yale, and returned to Turkey with Vanessa to start a ministry and a family there.

The couple’s time in Turkey was marked early by tragedy. In 2007, three friends, fellow church planters, were tied up and murdered, their throats slit by Islamic extremists who showed up at their office posing as seekers. The Malatya murders made global headlines. Keating had to help identify one of the victims. 

related

Despite a Murder and Visa Denials, Christians Persevere in Turkey

Jayson Casper

Speaking to a gathering a year later, Keating said he learned, “Martyrdom is deadly. But it is worth it.”

He added, “People aren’t lining up to go to the hard places of the world. This is not because God isn’t calling them there. It’s because you might die there.”

His own family’s time in Turkey would come to an end in a different but also abrupt way. In 2016, authorities canceled his residency permit “for reasons of national security” while Keating was helping to plant churches, running coffee shops, and working on his PhD. The charges (which have not been dropped) came amid a nationwide crackdown on Western Christian ministries and the much-covered arrest and trial of American Andrew Brunson, forcing the Keatings to leave. 

Northern Cyprus wasn’t a logical next stop. Turkey invaded the island in 1974 to prevent a Greek takeover, and the northern third, where the Keatings live, is a de facto state administered by the same Turkish government that deported him. Northern Cyprus is still not formally recognized by the United States or any country besides Turkey. A buffer zone patrolled by the United Nations divides it from the autonomous Republic of Cyprus, which occupies the rest of the island.

Despite his experience in Turkey, Keating welcomed the chance to work again among Turks. He and his family could also learn what it means to be in exile.

“I was forcibly removed from my home, yet I had lots of options that many people in exile don’t have,” he said. “I could have gone anywhere. I could have returned to America.” 

After arriving in Cyprus, however, Keating found himself asking God for a clear vision for why he should stay. He began doing what he knew how to do—roasting coffee and training people for ministry. He traveled to other Turkic countries, developing ministry connections in Kyrgyzstan and other parts of Central Asia. As he got to know Africans in Cyprus, he visited Nigeria too.

Cyprus sits about 150 miles off the coast of Israel and Lebanon in the eastern Mediterranean. Even before the apostle Paul landed here on his first missionary journey, the island hummed with busy ports at the intersection of Europe and Asia. Today, it’s not unusual to track one or two US carrier groups just offshore, pulled there by nearby military conflicts. (Cyprus often morphs into a launchpad for aid to victims of wars in the region; lately it has warehoused humanitarian supplies for Gaza.) Neither is it strange to see refugees arriving by the boatload—from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Israel, and elsewhere.

Keating saw the importance of the divided island nation as more than a transit lounge for displaced people. He prayed for God to make Cyprus “a deep well for the blessing of the nations.” His prayer led to a new understanding about the Asians, Africans, Greeks, Turks, Europeans, and Americans living around him, he says now. It spurred a vision for recruiting young people from Central Asia, Europe, and Africa to train for ministry. The three-month discipleship course in 2023 included young people from Belarus, Germany, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kyrgyzstan, and California.

As he watched students grow, he knew he wanted to cultivate in particular the coffee and wine businesses, “things that teach the value of time and investing in a place.”

Photo by Hagin Bengo
On Sundays, the café turns into a worship space.

Along Northern Cyprus’s coastal road—an area once home to Barnabas, the disciple who traveled with Paul—hay bales, olive trees, and low-slung farmhouses mingle among resorts built with Russian money. The only church in Northern Cyprus is one the government considers a museum, built where Barnabas is buried, just up the road from the city of Famagusta—a commercial hub with a deepwater port fronting the eastern Mediterranean.

Exile Coffee and Wine sits on a busy downtown street. The coffee bar and seating area occupy the first and second floor of a corner building that in its former life housed an online betting shop, and before that a fish market. Keating says it needed “a lot of work.”

The labors have paid off. As customers arrive in the cool of the morning, voices drift from ground-floor tables to the opened second floor, a mezzanine with additional seating. A window-lit alcove upstairs is reachable by a ladder, while an open hallway lined with shelves serves as a closet for giveaway clothes. A sign reads, “Only take 3 items, please.”

The café stays open late into the evening. Wednesday is pizza night and Friday is open mic night, a community staple. Families from the congregations that meet at the café on Sundays join unchurched twentysomethings and local students. Coworkers come for drinks and entertainment.  

Exile staff pair regional wines with the menu, which Keating plans. He usually insists on making the food (lasagna, the night I was there), then advertises it on social media in English and Turkish. Audience participation is robust, and the mic stays open for hours. Musical numbers might range from an old Turkish hymn to Broadway hits and are interspersed with poetry recitations. If the electricity goes out, which is not uncommon, regulars jump up to keep the night going with light from their phones. 

“We don’t have a big army of God here,” says Steve, a church team member who did not provide his last name because of security concerns. “We have yeast, a little thing, that changes from inside.”

As open mic night ends during my visit, Milad Rezapour cleans up behind the counter, giving direction to a barista-in-training from Germany. Rezapour first met Keating in Turkey, after he and his brother Hamed left Iran. His brother, like Keating, was kicked out of Turkey in 2020, and Rezapour decided to join him here.

Rezapour became a Christian in Turkey. He said he quickly felt pressure to do traditional “church work.”  But “here Ryan is happy running a coffee shop and teaches us how to do all this ministry for God’s glory,” he said. “This is a big change for me. I have a job and it is for God’s glory. When I am making a drink or helping a customer, I am showing God’s glory. In Turkey I could not take my Bible in the street, but as a barista I can show God’s love and make friends.”

Helene Coleby, who’s from Germany, worked onboard a ministry ship before coming to the discipleship training program. She thought she was headed overseas to serve in missions, but as her time in Cyprus draws to a close she is thinking more about returning home. She’s feeling more confident, she says, about living as an exile, a Christian among many nonbelievers in her hometown. “I want to take the skills I’ve learned here about hospitality and community and the truth of the gospel back to a place I care about deeply.” 

Others who come here for training choose to return home too, spreading the work of Exile in their own parts of the Muslim-majority world. Umed is from Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, an ancient city built along a Silk Road trade route and known for its tea culture dating back millennia. 

“My grandfather drank tea—green or black—but younger people drink in the coffee shops now,” he explains to me by phone.

Umed already had a coffee business of his own, started as part of a women’s ministry run by his mother. But Keating helped him professionalize it after Umed attended the discipleship training sessions in Cyprus.

“Ryan helped us grow a good coffee culture,” Umed says. “Our coffee is the best quality and he helped us with roasting, with understanding that it’s about how it smells, how it looks, and how it tastes. I can call him for help anytime.”

Umed manages the shop while his brother runs the counter and roasts the coffee beans they sell. Two thousand miles from Famagusta, Umed’s shop employs refugees and runs a kitchen like Exile. Umed and his family also work with a local church to manage shared space and ministries. 

Now after a few years of pursuing his “deep well of blessing” prayer, Keating finds the work in Cyprus possibly more intense than it was Turkey: “Here we are seeding the clouds for workers in ministry.” 

Photo by Hagin Bengo
Ryan Keating launched Exile Coffee and Wine in Cyprus after learning the coffee business in Turkey.

It carries risks, too. 

In 2021 local Cyprus authorities detained Keating for 11 hours while police raided the café and his home. They confiscated a box of Arabic- and Farsi-language Bibles. They released him only after friends raised $20,000 in bail by bonding deeds to their property and vehicles, including a tractor.

Local officers accused Keating of not having a license to make wine, yet Keating was able to produce licenses for operating the café and for winemaking. The Bibles were sent by a friend and used for people in his congregations, he said, but a charge of illegally importing Christian materials remains against him. 

Keating makes a court appearance every month or so to hear the judge delay the case, again and again. The court continues to hold his passport, but so far a judge has been willing to release it when Keating needs to travel. He attributes the trouble to “a localized network” of bureaucrats who target foreigners and especially Christians.

Some may hope to wear him down. Keating said, “I don’t enjoy quitting and I don’t mind fighting.”

He isn’t afraid of running out of time in Cyprus either. For all his challenges, Keating sees ministry in a new way after years of learning from experience and paying attention. “The lesson of exile in the Old and New Testament is that God uses it to teach his people to seek God above all else and to love the nations. That’s what I want to impart.”

Mindy Belz is editor of the Globe Issue and former senior editor at World magazine. She reported this story from Famagusta, in northern Cyprus.

This article appeared in the The Globe Issue 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Cup by Cup by Cup by Cup".

Related

A painting of the disciples with Jesus holding a coffee cup.

Wired for Jesus

Isaac Wood

Can Bubble Tea Bring Gen Z into the Chinese Church?

Isabel Ong and Sean Cheng

Church Life

A River (of Aid) Runs Through It

Ellen Vaughn

Church volunteers in western Ukraine are the hub of a global network channeling provisions to war refugees and the front lines.

Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)

The air raid sirens rarely sound in Chernivtsi. The evidence of war seldom reaches this city of 300,000 in southwestern Ukraine that sits about 25 miles from the Romanian border. Residents are spared the buzz of the killer drones, the concussive bomb blasts, the shattering glass, the howl of ambulances, and the cries of the injured. 

“We just don’t have anything significant for the Russians to bomb,” says a pastor.

Chernivtsi is a town of cobbled streets, whimsical hotels, mustachioed statues, and dreamy gardens. It’s home to a university whose grounds hark back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its brick-oven pizzerias and cozy cafés conjure a European holiday, not the edge of a war zone. 

The relative peace and quiet, though, hasn’t insulated residents from suffering. The New York Times calls Chernivtsi and western Ukraine the “back office of the war,” a place of determined efforts to help alleviate the hardships brought on by Russia’s invasion. Chernivtsi, in particular, feels like the beating heart of that effort—pumping medicine, blankets, transportation, food, and encouragement to those in harm’s way all over the country. It is the center of a global supply chain helping Ukrainians survive. It has also been a waystation for tens of thousands who’ve fled the fighting, often arriving with only a small bag of possessions. 

But hearts grow tired. Now, two years after the war began in 2022, once-robust outside humanitarian aid has slowed, diverted by crises elsewhere in the world: The February 2023 earthquake in southern Turkey that killed almost 60,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless. The war in Israel and Gaza. 

“I can understand people’s thinking. When their life is not in danger, why should they share the fat piece of bread they have when we are so far away? We are the same way,” says a young pastor in Chernivtsi who, like other pastors interviewed for this story, requested anonymity for fear of being targeted in wartime. “When the war in the Middle East began, we watched on TV and we prayed, but not so often.”

Vyatcheslav Nagirnyak, an energetic organizer who coordinates much of the aid in Chernivtsi, says that in the beginning everyone gave Ukraine’s war victims “the last of what we had.” Churches and Christians in the West also were supportive. “They filled our hands when we would not have had anything more to give. We are a big Christian family.”

Now the family is weary, and so is Ukraine. Russia’s relentless bombings have worn down resolve. Rising prices have also taken a toll, particularly in the bitter winters. The price of wood is up, along with the cost of fuel to run generators that are increasingly needed to maintain electricity. Some churches say they are paying ten times more per month for heating than they paid when the war began. 

Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)

Yet help for the displaced, wounded, bereaved, and traumatized is a persistent need. And volunteers, even in a nerve center like Chernivtsi, are worn thin.

“Yes, we are all weary,” says Volodymyr Vasylovych, a 55-year-old pastor. “But God gives the strength. Everyone asks if we are tired. Yes, but so what?”

Slava Lesyk, a tall, salt-and-pepper-haired pastor with rectangular glasses, laughs when he recalls his efforts to help when the war began.

On February 24, 2022, Lesyk had jolted awake in his 18th-floor Kyiv apartment to the sound of explosions. He grabbed his wife and child and prayed that God would show them what to do. He pulled on a sweatshirt and jeans and ran down to the street. Panicking people were driving erratically, crashing into each other, leaping from their cars, and running away. They looked like mice fleeing an angry cat. 

In a daze, Lesyk went to a pharmacy. He bought some iodine and two styptic pencils. He went back to his apartment and sat on the sofa, staring in shock at his little paper bag of “war supplies.”

“It was just so ridiculous. How could God use people like me, so naive about war, so primitive in my thinking?” he says, laughing. Yet now, he realizes, God loves to use people who don’t know what they’re doing, as long as they’re available and willing to show his love.

“He used us to [eventually] deliver thousands of tons of humanitarian aid shipments to people in need,” Lesyk says.

Even in their shock, Lesyk and others jumped into action through networks of local churches that spanned the nation and the globe. There were no official directives from administrative offices; this was an organic movement of the Holy Spirit, like a heartbeat. 

As in other cities, it wasn’t hard for Christians in Chernivtsi to find people in need; they were on the roads, at the border crossings, stuck in endangered areas, and weeping in the wreckages of their homes. Within just a few months, the war had displaced 8 million Ukrainians inside their country (out of a population of 43 million) and sent an additional 6 million Ukrainians across borders to other countries, creating the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. 

“I told the people in my church, ‘You be salt and light to these people! Hug them! Be with them! Serve them!’ ” says Mikhail Prodan, a Pentecostal pastor. 

Everyone knew the churches could not serve everyone. Yet people opened their homes and churches opened their doors. One church fashioned makeshift mattresses from rolls of thick construction foam and lined its sanctuary and overflow balcony with sleeping spaces. Church members from Chernivtsi carried steaming pots of tea to cold and exhausted people waiting in line at the nearby border with Romania. They gave refugees blankets, food, and Bibles. They asked people where they wanted to go and coordinated with churches at those destinations to welcome them. Chernivtsi’s Christians even cleaned, sanitized, and restocked the border crossing’s reeking bathrooms. 

As aid poured into Ukraine from abroad, pastors in Chernivtsi and other cities partnered with international groups like Bible Mission Global (BMG), a German nonprofit that supports local churches across the former Soviet Union and Central Asia. It also partners with International Cooperating Ministries (ICM), a US-based ministry working with churches around the world. BMG and ICM together have built 358 churches and church-based community centers in eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia—72 are in Ukraine.

Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)
Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)
Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)
Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)
Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)
Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)
Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)
Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)
Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)

With ICM’s help, in the past two years BMG has distributed more than 2,000 tons of food, clothing, blankets, cookstoves, firewood, Bibles, children’s gospel materials, bicycles, and generators from their warehouse in Niedernberg, Germany. They’ve sent 100 trucks from Germany to Ukraine, along routes through countries like Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Austria, and Romania. 

The trucks are unloaded at four warehouses that serve as distribution hubs in Ukraine—Chernivtsi, Uzhgorod, Lutsk, and Kyiv. Coordinated by BMG’s Ukraine director Roman Zlydennyj, Ukrainian believers come to the hubs with vans, load up with supplies, and drive them to churches in the 22 regions where Ukrainians are in need. 

Another US-based organization, Mission Eurasia, has also used warehouses in Chernivtsi as hubs to distribute more than 300,000 food packages to displaced families. More recently, the group, which is led by Ukrainian pastor Sergey Rakhuba from Nashville, began staffing mobile medical clinics to serve in areas of fighting.

“The greatest needs are often found in heavily damaged villages and towns close to the frontline, as well as in communities where large numbers of displaced people are concentrated,” says Rudi Myhovych, a neurologist and president of the Christian Medical Association of Ukraine.

Sasha Riabyi, who pastors a church on the outskirts of Kyiv, coordinates with the church networks and warehouses in Chernivtsi. Riabyi works as national director for US-based nonprofit Novi Community. He has funding and other support from groups like the Mennonite Central Committee, the American Ukrainian Relief Association, and Friends of Ukraine. “We are acting to solve all kinds of needs on a daily basis,” Riabyi says.

He often travels to the frontlines himself—to places like Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Kharkiv, with trucks loaded with food supplies and coffee. “I don’t go as a tourist,” he says. “We are often following the soldiers in.”

International support is crucial to Ukraine’s frontline war efforts. In Germany, BMG ran into trouble when officials limited sales of food staples to Ukraine out of concern for shortages at home. But a staff member knew a truck driver, who knew the owner of a Turkish market in Germany. 

The staff member had coffee with Muhammed, the truck driver, to explain the situation. “What do you need?” Muhammed asked. 

In that way, a Turkish-owned grocery supply chain sent food to Ukraine, which church volunteers unloaded from Muslim-owned trucks. In a similar story, German Christians bought 20 tons of surplus rice from a Chinese restaurant in Hamburg, then put them on trucks bound for Ukraine. It worked so well they did it again a few months later.

Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)

Christians in Chernivtsi, like so many other Ukrainians, have also helped troops through countless smaller and more eclectic efforts. (At least three-fourths of Ukrainians know someone who’s been killed or wounded in this war, so soldiers are on everyone’s minds.)

Church volunteers, ranging from grandmothers to young students, gather to pray and sing while making camouflage netting for troops, stringing fishing nets over wooden lattices and weaving in strips of camo fabric. 

Church families buy knee pads and waterproof boots. They save empty cans, stuff them with rolls of cardboard, and pour in melted wax to make “trench candles,” so soldiers can have light and warmth in the cold. 

These are delivered to the military checkpoints near the “zero line” by church volunteers willing to take the risks every month. It’s a round trip of about 20 hours, depending on weather and war conditions. 

Chernivtsi and its Christian community are not unique in their efforts, but residents use its unique setting away from the war to help others.

Denys and Daria Kovalenko lived in Mykolaiv, a port and shipbuilding city in Ukraine’s south that came under attack in the war’s early hours in February 2022. An enormous queue of people waited for medicines at the pharmacy where Daria worked. She had served 860 people by closing time that afternoon, when more air raid sirens sounded. She ran to the market for supplies but found the shelves empty. The couple, both pharmacists, spent the next nights in bomb shelters and on mattresses in narrow apartment corridors. When they saw the airport on fire, the Kovalenkos threw documents, a few clothes, and some snacks in a suitcase. 

They spent weeks on the run. As they drove away from Mykolaiv, they passed burned military vehicles and saw bodies in the streets. They called friends, trying to figure out what to do. Eventually, a family friend in Chernivtsi called a church that agreed to help them. When Denys and Daria arrived at the Pentecostal church in the village of Chahor, about five miles south of Chernivtsi, a young family took them into their home.

They “accepted us, not even knowing who we were or what we were doing,” Daria says. “The first day we arrived, we took a little walk, and the family entrusted their two-year-old child to come with us.” 

Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)
Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)
Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)
Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)
Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)

Nominally Orthodox but practically agnostics, Denys and Daria found themselves attending the worship services. “It was weird,” Daria says. “But we saw the difference. … It was like the difference between heaven and earth.” 

Together they embraced this familiar yet also new faith. They moved into the church, where volunteers had started a pharmacy for displaced people. Denys and Daria run it now, a big stockroom lined with long, tall rows of handmade shelving full of donations from humanitarian groups. 

“There’s so much we don’t yet understand about faith,” Daria says. “Like our pastor was telling us we need to love our neighbor. When I first heard that, I burst into tears. Forgiveness and love are so hard … particularly when I think about the Russians.”

 Denys says they need to pray for the Russians. “We have to pray for them to have wisdom so they will leave our country.”

“Our life has changed so completely,” he continues. “Before the war, we wanted to get our life arranged in a material way. You know, get a house, a car, the next thing and the next. But then we had to run with just a little suitcase. Now we are living in a church! We have nothing. No house, no car, but we are happy. We have what is truly important.”

Photo Courtesy of Bible Mission Global (BMG)

Pastors and Christian volunteers say only a small portion of those displaced by the war have experienced such clear conversions. But all experience God’s love through his people serving them during the worst experiences of their lives.

Those serving in Chernivtsi and other cities also say the worst of times have included some of the best of times.

“What we are doing and how we are serving as Christians right now has never happened in the life of our church,” explains Riabyi, the pastor near Kyiv. “Before the war there would be about 30 people at our church, and to invite one or two non-church people was a real challenge. Now I text out a message to invite people to the church to pray, and I can have over 200 or 300 people in the church, and this is a church with 100 seats. And it will include people from the community who did not know they wanted to pray before the war. People are listening and trying to understand God, and they are turning to God. These are difficult times but there is a purpose in the difficulty.”

In Chernivtsi, aid coordinator Vyatcheslav Nagirnyak says, “In the first months of the war we were witnesses to miracles that the Lord did. We prayed, God answered and provided what we needed. So we felt like we were living in the book of Acts.”

Despite the persistent military stalemate, the shortages, and the weariness of Ukrainians everywhere, Nagirnyak’s confidence in God’s power has not ebbed. He’s seen too much light in the dark rubble of war. It’s just that now the context is even more urgent: “Now,” he says, “we see that we are actually living in the book of Revelation.”

Ellen Vaughn, an author and speaker based in northern Virginia, reported this story from Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Her latest book is Being Elisabeth Elliot.

With additional reporting by Mindy Belz.

This article appeared in the The Globe Issue 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Chain Reaction".

Related

‘Continue to Remember’ the Suffering in Ukraine

Andrew Moroz

Left: A rocket embedded in the asphalt on a rural road between the villages of Piskivka and Kukhari, northwest of Kyiv. Right: Passengers wait on a crowded train station platform in Lviv, Ukraine.

They Fled Ukraine, and Ukraine Followed

Sophia Lee

Sandbags in the windows of a Kherson church.

Ministers in Ukraine Are ‘Ready to Meet God at Any Moment’

Sophia Lee

Church Life

In From the Cold

William E. Yoder

How Siberian farmers have turned gospel faithfulness into economic success.

A boy plays in the snow during Siberia's notoriously cold winter.

Photo courtesy of Rudolf Langeman

Far from Kremlin leaders in Moscow and the frontlines of war in Ukraine, Mennonite Brethren and Baptists today farm tens of thousands of acres of land in Russia. They are using state-of-the-art machinery to do it, growing agribusinesses along with grain and livestock in a place with some of the coldest winters on earth: Western Siberia.

The economic progress among Siberia’s Protestant population is little noted but breathtaking. Thirty years ago, the residents of Apollonovka and Solntsevka, remote villages in the flat region west of the city of Omsk, lived in wooden cabins with outdoor toilets. Now, many reside in brick, ranch-style houses that would fit into many neighborhoods in North America. The Protestants had few private cars before the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. Today they drive luxury cars from Japan and China. Contact with the West, once prohibited, now happens round the clock. The farmers and business owners here use smartphones to keep in touch with relatives in Germany, Canada, and Paraguay. 

Theirs is not an overnight success story. Baptist and Mennonite immigrants built their prowess in large-scale agriculture over generations, in a journey marked by perseverance and ingenuity, as well as setbacks. One ingredient, they say, is that economic success has remained embedded in church life—from before the Russian Revolution, through the Communist era, and into the current Russian Federation. 

“We preach Christ crucified” was a verse ensconced behind the pulpits of many Soviet-era churches, says Alexander Scheiermann, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East. According to him, the 1 Corinthians reference was intended not least of all as an admonition for preachers not to veer from their primary topic. The Siberians in the Omsk region today see adherence to that gospel message as essential to their success in business and in growing food.

Photo courtesy of Rudolf Langeman
Baptism in Neudachino, east of Omsk, in front of the words, “I believe”.

And they do know how to feed people. At Apollonovka, a settlement founded by Mennonites from Ukraine in 1911, one grain operation farms 12,850 acres. At Medvezhe, 13 miles to the west, Willock Farm works more than 15,000 acres. The farm mainly produces wheat, plus other cereal crops and legumes.

“We have been able to supply people with bread and work. This has helped our congregation, for we have the practice in our church of paying the tithe. If business is good, then things are also good for our church,” said Jakob Dirksen, one of Apollonovka’s village directors.

As these farmers watched Soviet-era collective farms fail, they leaned into their heritage and a global network of like-minded farmers to improve operations, turning collectives into self-made cooperatives. A Canadian Mennonite farmer with Russian roots provided interest-free loans after visiting Apollonovka in 1997. That led to the construction of a feed mill. Next came a bakery that employs locals and makes food more abundant in a region lacking in transport. 

Farm employees have learned to diversify along the way—becoming feed mill operators, butchers, beekeepers, bakers, veterinarians, auto mechanics, sawmill owners, carpenters, and painters. A younger generation has opened successful businesses in construction materials and truck sales. 

Photo courtesy of Rudolf Langeman
A newly built church or “house of prayer”.
Photo courtesy of Rudolf Langeman
Winter in Siberia
Photo courtesy of Rudolf Langeman
Willock Farm workers.

Willock Farm launched a second enterprise called Sevmaster to produce farm machinery and supply its 50-plus employees with indoor work during the long winter months. Sevmaster, run out of a neighboring village, produces harrows, rollers, discs, and carts for hauling planters sometimes connected to aging machinery once imported from North America. (Willock once imported much of its equipment from North America. Now buyer has become supplier: China is beckoning for the Anabaptist-made implements.)

Mennonites arrived in the western reaches of the Russian empire in the late 1700s, driven by European persecution of Anabaptists and the quest for farmland. They began moving to Western Siberia in 1890, and by 1915 over 80,000 ethnic Germans lived in Siberia. The number of baptized Mennonite adults throughout Russia peaked at 120,000, near the onset of World War I. 

The immigrants faced hostility during the war, followed by the Bolshevik revolution that ushered in Communism. By 1937, all Baptist and Mennonite pastors in the Omsk region had been “eliminated” and their churches shuttered, according to a report from Mennonite lay historian Peter Epp. Most elderly ethnic Germans still living today in Apollonovka and Solntsevka grew up without fathers or grandfathers.

When the Mennonites were allowed to restart church life after World War II, “there were only grandmothers around who still knew anything about our Mennonite past. But they were afraid to talk,” reported Alexander Weis, a now-deceased pastor among the Baptists in Slavgorod.

Somehow, a great awakening followed and churches grew, only to be followed by another new low in the 1990s when the breakup of the Soviet Union led to hardships in Russia’s outer enclaves and made emigration easier. Many of the German Russians moved back to Germany. 

But large families remain the norm in the Omsk region, which borders Kazakhstan. Thirty years later, some of those who left for Europe have returned to what turns out to be opportunity in Siberia’s open spaces. 

The church in Slavgorod lost more than a thousand members from the 1970s to 1990s, but attendance is now back up to 400. A Mennonite Brethren congregation at Solntsevka baptized 34 people in 2022 and now has 217 adult members meeting in a brand-new sanctuary. A congregation in Isilkul with 15 members at the breakup of the Soviet Union now has 130. In Apollonovka, the community of about 900 dedicated a larger church building in 2018 with 230 baptized members and more often in attendance. 

Photo courtesy of Rudolf Langeman

While church regeneration is evident everywhere, luring people to and keeping them in Siberia is still a hard sell. Membership in the registered Baptist congregations in Omsk city dropped from 3,000 to 2,000 over the past two decades and has not recovered. Faith alone will not sustain communities without adequate incomes. That’s why new agribusinesses are so important. 

Economic development also curries favor with the state. In Omsk, the Mennonite and Baptist congregations have never registered with the state, and their religious activities are essentially illegal. Their “houses of prayer,” which can seat hundreds of occupants, officially are private dwellings owned by individuals. “Improper” usage of private dwellings is becoming a government issue elsewhere in Russia, but not in the Omsk region.   

Local authorities are fond of the evangelical entrepreneurs. Siberians, on average, receive more government subsidies than other Russians and can access cheap loans. The state provides subsidies for newborns and for the construction of new homes. Continuing economic success and high birth rates make these villages rare beacons of light in Russia, where nationwide birthrates have plummeted, and the Mennonites’ progress has attracted further state investment on the barren, forsaken plains of Western Siberia. 

At the same time, the enterprises of Apollonovka have voluntarily taken on projects serving the common good. When a road between Apollonovka and Medvezhe was needed, Willock Farm trotted out its road grader and plowed a route through the steppes without waiting for official consent. Apollonovka had long suffered from seasonally high water. So volunteers heightened road surfaces, deepened ditches, and diverted the excess water into a swamp. Willock and other Mennonite and Baptist firms covered two-thirds of the cost.

Photo courtesy of Rudolf Langeman
Residents dine in the hinterland of Omsk.

Any success and favor, though, the evangelicals attribute to God’s blessing. They believe God has blessed them also for displaying loyalty to the Bible’s commandments and fealty to the ways of their forebears. Preaching Christ crucified, they say, has kept them off the barricades. Despite pressure, most avoid political questions, disputes, and protests.

They also believe success and survival depend on balancing obedience to the Word and compromise with earthly powers. 

Compromises have meant adopting Russian as their mother tongue. In Apollonovka, only children’s classes are held in their ancestral Low German. Adults speak Russian and services are held in Russian. Most adults know Low German and may use it among themselves, but mastery of Russian allows them to thrive in the business world and to carry on mission work. Three hundred miles north of Apollonovka, that means working among local drug addicts and ex-prisoners in the heart of Siberia. Over the years several dozens of Mennonite families from Omsk have resettled in the north to hold services and work among those who live there.

“We do not remain on location because life is better or easier here. We have made our choice and want to share in the fate of the peoples of Russia. All of us here are a part of Russia,” said Peter Epp, the lay pastor and historian who lives in Isilkul.

No one forgets when their forefathers refused to compromise.

Photo courtesy of Rudolf Langeman
Photo courtesy of Rudolf Langeman
The village of Malaya Bicha in Omsk.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, Nikita Khrushchev’s government launched programs to force atheism on the children of believers. Fathers in the Omsk region went to prison. The head of the Mennonite Brethren, Nikolay Dikman, served two sentences of hard labor in the rugged coal mines of arctic Vorkuta. Now 95 years old, he is venerated not only for opposing communism, but for protecting the church and its families. 

Others were imprisoned too. Many died under hard labor, including the grandfather of Jakob Dirksen, one of the two owners of Willock Farm, who died in 1985.

For these faithful, church life—with its two-hour services and long meals and fellowship—is a kind of reunion, a celebration of what Mennonites and Baptists have survived. Choir festivals and feasts are a payoff for enduring the hardships of living in a rural setting with a harsh climate and harsh realities.

These believers know their success is unique to their rural context and heritage, and they also have never expected the state to supply them with happiness. They expect that to come instead from God and their church community.

William E. Yoder is an American writer living in Kaliningrad, Russia.

Related

Mikhail Manzurin

A Russian Pastor Spoke Out Against Putin’s Invasion. It Cost Him His Church.

Sophia Lee

A woman holds a "Stop the war" placard in central Moscow during a protest against Russia's invasion of Ukraine, on March 3, 2022.

Hundreds of Russian Pastors Oppose War in Ukraine

Jayson Casper

Church Life

The Little Farms That Could

Angela Lu Fulton

Whether drying seeds with computer fans or fashioning water filters from barrels, a global agriculture ministry combats poverty with improvisation.

Manali Dutta, an intern at ECHO Asia Impact Center in Chiang Mai, Thailand, conducts germination tests with seeds from the seed bank.

Photo by Tim Barker

In the fight against world hunger, Patrick Trail sees weapons everywhere. A bike pump, for instance.

Farmers in the jungles of Vietnam or the floodplains of Cambodia may not have money to buy a vacuum-sealing machine, which they could use to preserve seeds and store them for future planting. So Trail, who leads the ECHO Asia Impact Center in Thailand, found ways to improvise. He took apart a bicycle pump and rebuilt it to suck air rather than blow it. Then, with a glass jar and a piece of tape, he used the pump to remove oxygen and moisture from a handful of seeds.

And just like that: dirt-cheap seed saving.

In fact, Trail and his coworkers have found that across locations and with different seed varieties, the bike pump works better than most vacuum sealers, which cost hundreds of times as much. Contrary to popular belief, “cheap can be good too,” he said.

A large majority of people in Southeast Asia live in rural areas, where agriculture is the dominant livelihood. But farming is getting more difficult. Rising energy prices and limited access to credit are hitting farmers at the same time that climate change is making temperatures and rainfall more volatile. Farming smarter, in Asia and elsewhere, is key.

On a seven-acre farm outside of the city of Chiang Mai, staff are experimenting with ways to turn waste into resources. Some of the experiments are stunning in their simplicity: A ballooning black plastic tarp traps gases released by decomposing pig manure, and a pipe transports the gas to heat pig feed. Black soldier flies eat food scraps and leave behind their grub-like larvae, which is harvested as chicken food. 

Photo by Tim Barker

Other projects are more technical: Workers tinker in the kitchen to find tasty ways to cook plants like the leafy chaya and Spanish needle, which are edible and nutritious but not generally viewed as food in Asia. They dry seeds in a cabinet using four light bulbs and a cheap computer fan. They heat wood chips and plant scraps in a metal barrel to make biochar, a charcoal used to filter water.

“You got all these resources available, but people might just not know, with a few simple techniques, how to take advantage of them,” Trail said. “We’re all about turning waste into value.”

The farm in Thailand is one of three such sites around the world operated by ECHO, a Florida-based organization that shares its knowledge, research, and seeds with missionaries, development workers, and local pastors. (The idea of using a bicycle pump for a vacuum, for example, didn’t originate with ECHO, but the organization has tested and refined it for use in specific contexts.)

ECHO and its network in Asia exist to improve small-scale farming in impoverished rural areas. In addition to research and training, ECHO maintains a seed bank for underutilized and hard-to-find seeds that thrive in Asia, hoping to ensure farmers have access to them for generations. 

For 40 years, the Christian organization has been providing resources for frontline agricultural workers. Especially as the climate warms and governments close their doors to missionaries, ECHO sees its role as increasingly important for ministry across the globe. Christians with expertise in sustainable farming are often welcomed where traditional missionaries are not. 

“There’s a growing demand for holistic approaches,” Trail said. “We’ve seen pastors come to us saying, ‘We are planting a church to share the gospel, but of course we’re going to help our neighbors with food insecurity [because] they’re hungry and their children are malnourished. Jesus met people’s physical needs, so why wouldn’t we?’”

Photo by Tim Barker

ECHO’s original vision was small. In the 1970s, American businessman Richard Dugger went on a mission trip to Haiti and returned home to Indianapolis overwhelmed by the poverty and need he saw. He founded the Educational Concerns for Haiti Organization (ECHO) to find long-term solutions to food scarcity in Haiti. 

In 1981, Martin Price became ECHO’s first executive director and broadened the organization’s focus from Haiti to the entire world. He emphasized agricultural research, training, and providing seeds for groups already in the field: agricultural missionaries, Peace Corps officers, and Christian nonprofit groups like World Vision. The H in ECHO was switched to stand for “hunger.”

During Martin’s tenure, missionaries sent him questions by mail, and he responded with hand-typed suggestions, according to Abram Bicksler, the group’s president and CEO today. Martin kept in touch with a growing network through long-distance calls and trips to visit projects. 

“Back in the day before Google, we served as the Google for sustainable agriculture for the developing world,” Bicksler said. “Even to this day we get a lot of requests; it’s just moved online.” 

ECHO purchased a 7.5-acre demonstration farm in Fort Myers, Florida, in 1991, where researchers experiment with best practices. ECHO began its first seed bank there. Today the farm is 57 acres with training facilities, administrative buildings, and a bookstore. About 10,000 visitors tour the farm each year.

The advent of the internet allowed ECHO to grow its global agricultural network. In the mid-1990s, ECHO began its first international conference, now held annually. Its ranks swelled with not only missionaries, but also indigenous pastors, aid and development workers, and environmental academics. Roughly a quarter of ECHO’s network today are non-Christian organizations.

“We invite anyone to come to our conference, but really we see this as a gospel issue,” Bicksler said. “Our example is Jesus, who ministered through holistic, spiritual, and social healing.” 

Photo by Tim Barker
Photo by Tim Barker
Photo by Tim Barker
Photo by Tim Barker
Photo by Tim Barker

Through an online community, ECHO members find resources and exchange knowledge. In one recent thread, someone from Kenya asked for suggestions on dealing with drought. Another member recommended water harvesting trenches. A few weeks later the Kenyan farmer posted a photo of a water pool she’d captured using his technique.

ECHO opened its first global farm in Chiang Mai in 2009. In the following years, it opened farms in Tanzania and Burkina Faso to contextualize the organization’s practices and ideas for Africa. Like the farm in Florida, the overseas centers are repositories of information and laboratories for best practices.

Along the way, ECHO’s work in the development community has led some people to Jesus. When Manali Dutta from Calcutta, India, arrived at the ECHO conference last October, she immediately felt drawn to the people at ECHO. “I felt like I’m one of them, like a part of the family, even though I just met them,” she said. 

She grew up in a Hindu home but never felt connected to her family’s faith. Instead, Dutta always sensed someone was protecting her, like hands waiting to catch her if she fell. When she shared this with a conference attendee, he told her: “Do you know what, you are actually talking about the Bible.”

As they discussed the gospel, Dutta felt like she finally found what she had been looking for. 

Dutta traveled to the Chiang Mai farm for a three-month internship, where she cared for the farm and the seeds, putting to use her master’s degree in zoology and at the same time learning more about her new faith. “Wow, it feels so joyful, it gives so much inner peace,” Dutta said. “I feel like I’m not alone, I know God is always there for me.” 

Under the sweltering mid-February sun, Trail walks me through row upon row of plants growing in raised beds—stalks of quinoa and sesame, green jack bean and tobacco (for natural pest control), brilliant red amaranth and drooping calabash gourds. Some plants have to be protected by strips of shade cloth. Others are watered by plastic water jugs that workers peppered with holes and buried in the soil, filling them with water to drip-feed certain beds. 

Trail points to green tomatoes hanging heavy on the vine, noting that, while the fruit would be ready to harvest in two weeks, he plans to keep them on the vine another six. Tomatoes left to rot on the vine will leave mature seeds—perfect for collecting and saving in the seed bank. 

Seed saving works like this: ECHO staff cut up the overripe tomatoes, scooping out the seeds and soaking them overnight. The seeds ferment, breaking down the mucilage, a gelatin-like protective coating. Workers rub away that outer pulp with a screen, then dry the seeds in the sun or an open-air rack. Dry seeds are vacuum sealed and stored in a chilled, insulated seed bank. 

Every seed requires different techniques: some plants, like lettuce, produce thousands of seeds. Others, like jack bean, only have about eight per pod. 

The seed bank is the centerpiece of the Chiang Mai farm. It houses around 200 varieties of seeds, most of which produce food for humans or livestock or can be used as cover crops or natural pesticides. ECHO collects and exchanges seeds with local farmers, as well as with partners across ECHO’s networks, said Rattakarn Arttawutikun, the farm’s agricultural operations manager. 

ECHO also trains its local partners to save and store seeds, because only local communities can ultimately ensure the stability of future crops. (And ultimately, sustainable farming practices are only useful if communities choose to adopt them.) Country-specific seed banks are becoming more important, Trail says, as Southeast Asian countries tighten restrictions on bringing seeds across borders.

“If [farmers] know how to save, how to clean well, how to dry well, they will be able to save the seed longer,” Arttawutikun said. The seeds in ECHO’s seed bank last between three and ten years. “With our technique, it’s available a whole life,” she said. So “the next generation, they don’t have to worry about that.”

Photo by Tim Barker
Photo by Tim Barker
Photo by Tim Barker

The biggest barrier to creating seed banks in impoverished areas is cost. In humid, hot climates, it’s difficult to keep seeds cool and dry. ECHO Asia’s seed bank occupies an insulated, climate-controlled room, chilled by an air conditioner to a steady 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Inside, shelves are lined with plastic bins noting the seed names and filled with vacuum-sealed bags of seeds. Should the electricity go out, the farm has a backup generator. And should a fire or other disaster destroy the seed bank, there are more seeds in a deep freezer. Every year, ECHO staff does germination tests to make sure seeds remain viable. 

ECHO’s setup, however, is too expensive for farmers in places like rural Laos. So ECHO experiments with lower-cost storage designs, such as structures built from earth-filled bags and insulated with sawdust or rice hulls to keep heat and humidity out. 

To help disseminate this kind of knowledge, ECHO partners with local pastors who are farmers themselves, who have congregations made up of farmers, or who are trying to reach out to farmers. The thinking is that communities benefit by learning about nutritious new crops or natural ways to control pests, and pastors can build trust by helping families improve their livelihood.

By using the Chiang Mai farm as a resource center, “We have this opportunity to take on the risk,” Trail said. “Farmers just don’t have much margin. It’s risky to try anything new. So one of the benefits is that [we can] just try and fail and try and fail until we find things that work.”

On the day I visited ECHO farm in early 2024, 25 people from eight countries—including Thailand, Myanmar, India, and the United States—were finishing up a weeklong course on tropical agriculture and development. Most of the participants had little to no farming background. 

One worked at a children’s home in Myanmar and had come to learn how to build a garden to feed the children. Another was a missionary who grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania and planned to do community development work in northern Laos. “We’re getting really excited about [taking] a holistic approach,” he said, requesting his name not be used because of the Lao government’s restrictions on missionaries. “I believe the community has resources and we want to help people value that and use that.”

On the last afternoon of the course, students sat in a classroom learning about four-barrel water filtration systems. The training to build these systems is ECHO Asia’s most popular class.

After Myanmar’s coup in 2021, many of ECHO’s partners working with displaced people along the Thailand-Myanmar border urgently needed low-cost water filtration. Trail had heard about a four-barrel system that only required plastic trash cans, pipes, rocks, charcoal, and sand. The team did some research and tried to build one. 

Once they found a design that worked, they shared it. They held workshops on how to build the system. Now dozens of these water filtration systems—which fit well in a school or a church—are in use. 

Participants Albert “Jelly” Molsom and her husband, Abel Debbarma, said they hope to take what they learn in the course to a Christian retreat center they help run in southeastern India. They want to build a demonstration farm where they can grow food to feed guests, and they want to train locals to set up backyard gardens and raise small livestock. Molsom’s parents are farmers, but “everything is new for us,” she said, gesturing to the water filtration system. 

A Singaporean missionary to Chiang Mai named Philip, who requested his last name not be used, came to the course with three colleagues. His specialty is biblical counseling, but he also wanted to incorporate some community development into his work.

The Thai church Philip partners with told him it had a training center 45 minutes outside the city with plenty of land to build a farm. The only problem: Philip is from urban Singapore, with very little experience in agriculture. “We needed something more systematic, and this course fit,” he said. “It’s better than learning from YouTube or whatever source. Now we have a proper way to learn.”

Philip said the training taught him not just what to do, but why. “If we have a good harvest, we share it with the community,” he said. “If we have good seeds, we can share it with the community. It helps to build trust and build relationships and that presents the opportunity to share the gospel.” 

Peter Jan de Vries, an environmental consultant for the Christian nonprofit SIL International, came to ECHO’s farm to network and learn more about the challenges facing farmers in the region. After the training, he traveled to Indonesia to teach Christians how the Bible relates to farming and to demonstrate building the water filtration system. 

What ECHO is doing, de Vries said, “is the practical implementation of the mustard seed—that you have to start with the small farmers. You’re not doing it to immediately change the world, but you start changing [it] through people who have no one else to take care of them.” 

He added: “And it really supports the growth of God’s kingdom because, if you help people where they are, where their challenges are, then they are also very open. [They wonder] Hey, why are you doing this instead of just selling a product? You’re trying to help us. That is the testimony in itself.”

Angela Lu Fulton is CT’s Southeast Asia editor. She reported this story from Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Related

Blessed Are the Meek Missionaries in Thailand

Tessa Sanchez

Retired missionary Henry Breidenthal praying at Grace New Life church in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

God Called Him to Thailand 60 Years Ago. He Still Hasn’t Left.

James Thompson in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Water, Water Everywhere: How Christians View Thailand’s Water Festival

Tessa Sanchez

Church Life

Stealing Death’s Sting

Eva Chou

As China’s population ages, few receive end-of-life care. Christians are helping the elderly face death with hope.

Illustration by Xinyue Chen

Part I

When a 70-year-old man infected with anthrax bacteria asked church members to visit him, Xi Feng Zhao joined, even though for the past week he’d suffered his own bout of nerve pain with sleepless nights. He and the other church caregivers arrived to find a man wracked with pain. They had to cover their noses. Some vomited because of the foul odor. 

Zhao, known to many as Brother Faithful, didn’t hesitate to go to the patient’s bed. He was overcome to realize that the pain he had suffered for the past seven days and nights was preparing him to care for the person in front of him.

The man with anthrax was the director of the anticorruption bureau in Harbin, an industrial city of nearly 10 million people in China’s northeast. He had a reputation for strict integrity and impartiality. He did not know how he contracted the disease but, after he fell ill, many Christian lay people and pastors visited him and urged him to come to faith in Christ. But when sin was mentioned, he could not admit he was a sinner, not someone like those he had caught in his work.

But the day Zhao visited, something broke. The director surrendered to God’s holiness and sovereignty.

The two men held hands and shared each other’s pain. Zhao started to sing hymns. The man cried. More surprising, he started to pray and to confess that he was a sinner needing God’s forgiveness. One half of his face, festering from infection, grew more distorted as he cried, yet the other half could not hide the joy of release. Zhao held tight his hand and prayed for him. Both men were filled with peace and joy, even as they shared the man’s highly contagious tears and saliva.

Within a week, the director was dead.

Photos courtesy of Brother Faithful and Pastor Li

In China, end-of-life care is still developing, and spiritual care is often left out. Nurses and doctors who see the hospital as a field of physical healing may fail to see that a patient’s spiritual needs cannot be met by healing the body.

Experts say China’s once-surging population is aging and shrinking. By mid-century it will have up to 200 million fewer people, while the median age will climb from 38 years old to 50. China also has the world’s highest number of patients with terminal cancer, with 6,000 deaths per day from cancer, according to the 2020 World Cancer Report.

At the same time, the current trend of one-man authoritarian rule makes reforms to health care systems challenging and elder care a low priority for most officials. Those hardships are acute in China’s rural areas, where the elderly receive pensions that are just a fraction of what the elderly in urban areas receive.

Enter Christian groups like Zhao’s and the Golden Apple Life Care Team, which began in 2017 as a ministry to China’s rapidly aging population and to the critically ill. 

The deepest problem triggered by illness, according to Golden Apple founder Pastor Li, is the loss of the value and meaning of life. “These patients have psychological anxiety and despair in addition to physical pain. Only when a person has a correct understanding of life can he see the value and meaning of life and thus complete his farewell on earth calmly and peacefully. Only when he is filled with love can he have hope instead of despair.” 

As the founder of the Golden Apple Life Care Team, Li observed through his years of exploration and practice that for a seriously ill patient, medical care must be combined with spiritual care for healing to happen. The team’s track record has drawn attention from wider clinical circles. 

In 2018, Liu Jin, a Beijing-based psychological counselor with a PhD in sociology, grew frustrated as she visited critically ill patients. Often she found herself wrapped up in their despair, dragged with them to the edge of death’s abyss. She joined her teammates on patient visits in silence, only to return to her office and cry. In the midst of this helplessness and pain, she began to understand that God had brought her into critical care ministry not to use her talents and abilities, but to fulfill her own life.

Liu says she could not face the truth of death if God had not led her to a wide place and given her the power of the Holy Spirit. She also learned from Li and his Golden Apple care team about the simple gift of care.  

“Are you all right?” Li would gently ask, drawing near to a patient. And the patients’ faces, which were gray and stiff, blossomed into expression, some eyes red with tears. To them, Li is a messenger of love.

With such examples, Liu said, “God has given me a true knowledge of life and death through serving the flesh that is weak and broken . … My life grows in patience and tolerance, and I see more and more the meaning and value of service itself.” 

Zhao, for all his decades of critical care ministry, has never received formal theological training or a day’s salary from the work. Though he dropped out of elementary school, he seized the opportunities created by China’s economic reforms and opening in the 1990s to become a wealthy businessman. But he squandered his money with eating, drinking, gambling, and chasing women, he says. He was a “society big brother” with bodyguards in front and behind him during the day—but at night he couldn’t sleep because of the emptiness in his heart.

During those years his Christian mother and sister prayed for him. He found a church where a man greeted him with, “Brother, who are you looking for?” Brother Faithful was immediately in tears, discovering he believed in the gospel. That day he went from being a “big brother” in society to a brother in Christ. 

He began reading the Bible with thirst and hunger every day. But the turn of his life was greeted by cursing from his wife and abandonment by his friends. That experience helps him, he says, to stand firm in care ministry when doctors and nurses want to throw him out and patients are indifferent.

“Where the gospel is to break through, there are bound to be forces of darkness that stand in the way. God allows persecution to come in order that our faith, having been tried, may truly persist,” Faithful says. 

Scolded on a first visit to see a patient, he has learned to come back the next day with a meal he has prepared to share. 

Photos courtesy of Brother Faithful and Pastor Li

One patient he met this way was Xie Zishan, an executive at a large business group in one of China’s three northeastern provinces. Hospitalized with leukemia and suffering from high fever, Xie maintained a violent temperament. Over and over, he forced doctors, nurses, and Zhao out of the ward. 

One day, Xie had a high fever that wouldn’t go away. His joints hurt and he was bleeding in many places. His wife said to Zhao, “Pray for him, and if his fever goes down, our whole family will believe in your God.” 

Zhao replied, “I prayed and asked God to change his life, and whether the fever goes down or not, God is true and righteous.”

Xie’s fever did go down, and he trusted Jesus then and there. 

Zhao never tells patients they will be healed if they believe in the Lord, but he helps them through prayer to see that they are sinners needing the Savior’s forgiveness and cleansing. It helps that he, along with others in his church, cook and serve meals for the sick.

Through Golden Apple’s ministry, views on life and death are being reshaped. Confucius said, “If you don’t know life, how can you know death?” Yet facing death directly is not a strength of Chinese culture today, according to Li.

Traditionally, Confucianism and Taoism have seen death as a natural part of life, like the change of seasons alternating with the gathering and dissipation of qi (the rhythmic energy that constitutes all things). Morality and meditation pave the way to an afterlife. 

But modern Chinese are greatly influenced by atheism and materialism. For most people, death is not a familiar, controlled, and necessary process of life, but a mysterious and terrifying black hole that destroys all meaning and hope.

“We used to think of the body as the whole of life,” says Li, “so when the body is coming to an end, we are scared. But if you know that the body is just a vehicle, you can understand that though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. When your inside is satisfied with love, you will find that love transcends time and space, and perfect love drives out fear.”

Li’s Golden Apple care team, working with Liu Jin and caregivers like Zhao, has developed a curriculum around life and death as part of its innovative approach to elder care that has helped thousands in their final days. The course, “Life Care for the Critically Ill,” has become popular in wider Chinese circles. The team is helping churches in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, and Shandong to establish their own hospital ministry teams.

As China has tightened religious restrictions, some large local churches have been returning to more “underground” methods, like meeting in small, in-home groups. As many house churches begin to look for new ways to reach out to their communities, China’s elderly and critically ill populations are the kind of groups that are easy to overlook but in urgent need of the gospel message.

Li and Zhao see the church as precisely the right group to help China’s aging population see that hope in this life is anchored in hope for the next. 

“After understanding what life is, when going through their own difficulties, they will gradually realize that things are not so miserable after the fear is removed. It is then that they can make the right judgment and choice, face death with no fear, and live life with no regret,” Li said. 

Illustration by Xinyue Chen

Part II

“Auntie” Niu, at over 70 years old, was reluctant to socialize when she moved in with her son in Beijing several years ago. Instead, she made a hobby of buying health care products, taking all kinds of fraudulent health care telemarketing calls. When her son told her to avoid such schemes, she grew angry and sullen. 

Niu was widowed at an early age. She worked hard to bring up a son and a daughter, but her daughter committed suicide in her 20s. Her son, too, was depressed. Had he not met the Lord, Niu says, both her children might be dead. Niu was known as a strong person, but she grew to feel that fate had abandoned her.

Her son thought it might help Auntie Niu to participate in something he’d heard about called the Life Storybook program, where she could work with a dozen other seniors to do crafts and games and participate in sessions where she would craft stories from her own experiences. In these storytelling workshops she could sort out her life, from birth to old age, helping her understand the struggles and recapture the good memories.

The program is an innovation of the Golden Apple Life Care Team, a ministry that aims to reach older Chinese people with physical and spiritual care.

Niu gave the Life Storybook group a try. But she wanted to quit after only a few lessons. For her, family memories were full of pain and unpleasantness.

Her perspective gradually shifted, however, with the guidance of mentors and in the company of other group members. Niu recalled that as a rural midwife, she had saved the lives of many unborn babies and newborns in the countryside. Time after time, her perseverance had brought joy to mothers after the pain of difficult deliveries. Niu realized that others in her group—both the elderly and the younger participants who accompanied them—were attentive to her stories. Soon she grew confident enough to share more. Her memories of saving babies became a comfort in a life that seemed to have lost purpose.

At the end of 12 “storybook sessions,” Niu became more actively involved in the program. She volunteered to promote it. She participated a second time. She testified in the class that “looking back at my life again, I don’t think I have any regrets anymore.”

“There are many Christian teams that provide what the elderly need, but we want to help them enter the depths of their own souls and truly know life, through our companionship and guided by our professional skills,” said Liu Jin, a Christian psychologist and counselor in Beijing who helped to develop the curriculum.

“The renewal of life is the renewal in the soul, and we can renew it every day if we want to. The same is true of the elderly, and the power of their life renewal will amaze people,” Liu said.

Combating depression, which is pervasive in China’s senior community, is one of the program’s major goals. Depression in the elderly can lead to rapid physical decline, pseudo-dementia, and even self-harm and suicidal thoughts. 

“The elderly, like other psychologically vulnerable groups, suffer from a deep sense of loneliness. But behind the loneliness are two deeper issues. One is the fear of death. The other is the loss of a sense of worth that comes from the loss of control,” Liu said. Physical incapacity exacerbates feelings of loss, which can lead to the collapse of values.

“Older people are more likely to avoid relationships than younger people and become trapped in self-imposed isolation,” the psychologist said.

More and more churches and Christian teams across China have become involved in senior care ministries in recent years, reaching out to help their communities at a time when the church finds itself under more state scrutiny. According to Golden Apple, the Life Storybook program has also found its way into non-Christian social care institutions, where seniors from different backgrounds of various religions participate in the courses.

The elderly in China, one Chinese pastor told CT, “have an important place in missions.”

Eva Chou is a journalist living in Shanghai. 

This article appeared in the The Globe Issue 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "No Fear In Death".

Related

How One Family’s Faith Survived Three Generations in the Pulpit

Sophia Lee

A woman looking at her young and old reflection in the mirror

At My Mother’s Deathbed, I Discovered the Symmetry of a Long Life

Jen Wilkin

On the Streets of China, the Cross Shone Bright

Daryl R. Ireland

3 Ways I’ve Learned to Support China’s Christians Better as an American Pastor

Corey Jackson

Church Life

Feast of Eden

Angela Lu Fulton

Closed to outsiders and plagued by addiction, a Vietnam village tuned its radios to a California preacher. It has bloomed into a showcase for Hmong culture and an unlikely tourist destination.

Photo by Tim Barker

On a chilly Saturday morning, Hmong women sit in the sun and chat while embroidering and selling their harvest of jicama. In the marketplace behind them, a woman uses chopsticks to flip balls of dough in sizzling oil. A man displays handmade knives atop a wooden box. 

The Hmong village of Sin Suoi Ho, home to more than 100 families in the highlands of northern Vietnam, draws weekend shoppers from nearby Hmong and Dao villages, as well as tourists from the capital of Hanoi. Until just recently, getting here required an 8-hour, 250-mile trip past terraced rice paddies and up winding, teeth-chattering dirt roads that reach high into the mountains. 

The shoppers browse stalls filled with colorful hats, bags, and clothing. They examine pillowcases covered with traditional Hmong embroidery. They snap selfies in Hmong dresses and giggle at elaborate silver headdresses. Beyond the market, visitors stroll along a lane lined with potted orchids for sale. They eye young men lashing peach tree branches to motorbikes (the budding limbs will go to another market to be sold as decorations for Tet, Vietnam’s lunar new year celebration).

The tourists come not only for the wares but also to partake in a story of transformation—a story of economic advancement and changed hearts.

Photo by Tim Barker
Pastor Chang A Hang drives his motorbike through the gate outside the Sin Suoi Ho church.

Fifty-nine-year-old Chang A Hang is a witness to the change. I find him sitting in a plastic chair outside his store next to the marketplace. Children gripping ice cream cones drop coins into Chang’s outstretched hand. The lines etched into his face and the weary look in his eyes betray the hard life he’s lived.

For much of Chang’s life, Sin Suoi Ho was the poorest village in Lai Châu province. He and his family often lacked rice to eat. Residents grew opium poppy, and Chang, along with most of the village, was addicted to opium. Chang was also one of the village’s 10 shamans, responsible for curing the sick through the spirit world, yet tormented by spirits himself. 

In 1992, villagers began hearing the gospel through a Christian radio broadcast. Faith spread quickly, despite government persecution. Chang at first brushed the new religion aside. But everything changed in 1998, when he says that one night he saw a spirit float to the bed where his wife lay fast asleep. The next morning she was deathly ill. Powerless to help, Chang asked the village pastor to come and pray for his wife. She was healed immediately. 

The encounter changed Chang completely; he is now a pastor too, working in a nearby village church. Thirty years later, the majority of Hmong families in Sin Suoi Ho are Christians, save for about 20 families.

For these converts, the gospel has manifested itself not only in personal transformations but in community-wide change. Village pastor Hang A Xa, who prayed for Chang’s wife, taught villagers to apply the Bible to every aspect of their lives. They detoxed from their addiction. They gave up opium cultivation and grew orchids instead. They cleaned up their village and built a road. Because the Bible declared that men and women were equal, parents stopped the practice of demanding prohibitive bride prices, and they allowed young women to complete more schooling. 

Photo by Tim Barker
Corn cobs are hung out to dry outside a Sin Suoi Ho home.
Photo by Tim Barker
Two young girls walk down a roadway in Sin Suoi Ho.
Photo by Tim Barker
Orchid’s flower from a pot in a Sin Suoi Ho garden. The business of growing orchids is thriving and bringing considerable incomes to families in Sin Suoi Ho. In the month preceding the Lunar New Year, people from low land provinces, including Hanoi, come to the community to buy orchids to decorate their homes or business premises.
Photo by Tim Barker
Portrait of Hang Thi Do outside of her home. She has a number of crosses painted onto the walls of her home.
Photo by Tim Barker
Children play soccer on a field at the edge of the forest in Sin Suoi Ho.

And against all odds, Sin Suoi Ho became a tourist destination.

Villagers tell their story in religious terms, not economic ones. Across Vietnam, Christian belief has faltered among Vietnam’s majority Kinh population, who possess more of the country’s freedoms and wealth. But in ethnic-minority communities like Sin Suoi Ho—only 11 miles from the Chinese border, in a sensitive region where the Vietnamese government prohibits outside visitors—Christianity has spread.

Vietnamese pastors say the country’s rapid economic growth and the trappings of wealth are obstacles to sharing the gospel in the cities. In hardscrabble places like Sin Suoi Ho, however, the good news can bring beauty, flourishing, and a taste of Eden.

Vang A Chu, the associate pastor in the village, noted that Adam and Eve’s sin forced them out of the Garden. Yet in Sin Suoi Ho, “Jesus has come to earth and now we have freedom.” 

“Where we live is Eden,” he said. “And we have to take care of our village.”

The Hmong people originated in China and began spreading to the mountainous areas of Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand in the 18th and 19th centuries in search of agricultural opportunities and to escape persecution from the Qing dynasty. 

During the Vietnam War, the United States recruited Hmongs in Laos to help fight against the Communists. Hmong soldiers, led by General Vang Pao, blocked Hanoi’s Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and rescued downed American pilots. After the US military withdrew, many Hmongs were targeted by the communist government in Laos, leading thousands of Hmongs to resettle in the United States and other Western countries. Many Hmong refugees converted to Christianity. Their history of resistance led the government in Vietnam to view them suspiciously. Decades of government attempts to resettle, develop, and assimilate the Hmong left them “marginalized by programs that purport to development,” wrote anthropologist Tam Ngo in The New Way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam.

Photo by Tim Barker
Children play on the second floor of a building site next to Xa Cha restaurant in Sin Soui Ho.

Foreigners and missionaries had largely fled Vietnam by 1975, but the Far East Broadcast Company (FEBC) continued broadcasting the gospel into the country in minority languages. Beginning in the 1980s, Hmongs in Vietnam started tuning into a broadcast from a Hmong pastor in California who went by the radio name John Lee. Families, then whole villages, came to Christ. The new Christians started sharing the gospel with other Hmong villages. 

Initially, Lee didn’t realize the impact his program was having in Vietnam, according to Reg Reimer’s Vietnam’s Christians: A Century of Growth and Adversity. By the late ‘80s he was receiving thousands of letters from Hmongs in Vietnam who had accepted Christ and wanted to learn more about the faith. Today more than a third of the 1 million Hmong in Vietnam are Christians.

Some Hmong villages saw their standard of living improve as they abandoned religious practices that required expensive animal sacrifice and learned to read in order to study the Bible.

Nowhere is the transformation more apparent than in Sin Suoi Ho, now a burgeoning destination for tourists who want to experience “untouched” Hmong life. In the 1980s, the village was no more than a few wooden houses in the jungle. Neighboring communities called it “Opium Village,” yet growing opium was never profitable; it left villagers poor, sick, and addicted.

Former village chief Hang A Lung first came across Lee’s program, Source of Life, in 1992 on a radio gifted to him by local government officials. He kept listening, as it was the only program in his native Hmong language. Soon he was hooked. Speaking in a melodious lilt, Lee incorporated Hmong folktales into his teaching to help Hmongs understand the gospel. 

Photo by Tim Barker
Pastor Vang A Chu with his grandson Vang Thi An outside of his home in Sin Suoi Ho.
Photo by Tim Barker
Early morning outside the Sin Suoi Ho market held on Saturday mornings.
Photo by Tim Barker
Sung Thi Le and her husband Vang A Tua 6enjoy a meal of Pho (rice noodle soup) with their daughters at the Sin Suoi Ho market.
Photo by Tim Barker
Orchids grow in pots that are raised above the ground onto stacks of bricks in a Sin Suoi Ho garden. The business of growing orchids is thriving and bringing considerable incomes to families in Sin Suoi Ho. In the month preceding the Lunar New Year, people from low land provinces, including Hanoi, come to the community to buy orchids to decorate their homes or business premises.
Photo by Tim Barker
Portrait of village leader Vang A Chinh at the Sin Suoi Ho market. Chinh is the owner of the land that the market is built on.
Photo by Tim Barker
Orchids grow in pots that are raised above the ground onto stacks of bricks in a Sin Suoi Ho garden. The business of growing orchids is thriving and bringing considerable incomes to families in Sin Suoi Ho. In the month preceding the Lunar New Year, people from low land provinces, including Hanoi, come to the community to buy orchids to decorate their homes or business premises.

A Lung was struck by Lee’s declaration that Jesus is the only way to heaven. During the rice harvest that year, he and his family became the village’s first Christians. They burned their altars to the spirits and their traditional burial clothes. “We prayed to Jesus to come into our house,” remembers A Lung’s daughter, Thi Do, who was 13 at the time. 

Christians from a neighboring Hmong village came to teach the family more about Christianity and joined them in sharing the gospel with other families. Some, unhappy with Hang’s eagerness, reported them to the authorities. 

Fearful that conversion to a “Western” religion would lead Hmongs to resist government power, local officials arrested and beat the new Christians. They confiscated radios, Bibles, and cassette tapes. Thi Do’s husband was beaten so badly that he could only eat rice porridge for weeks. Police held her brother-in-law in a house and tied him to a table. He gnawed through the rope to escape. 

At the time, Thi Do said, their faith was so strong that they didn’t think about turning back. Other families joined their number: Villagers came to Christ after miraculous healings or finding freedom from the constant fear of spirits. By 1995, about 20 more families had turned to Christian faith. They started to gather for weekly worship in homes or in the jungle to avoid detection. 

Most were still addicted to opium. Some worshipers smoked before and after services. One day while studying Matthew 5:16 (“Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven”), the believers felt the Holy Spirit convicting them to quit. “We had to stop using opium so that we could shine for other people to know about God,” said A Lung’s son, A Xa.

Church leaders brought addicted believers up into the jungle-covered mountains to help them detox. They cooked them meals, massaged their aching bodies, and washed their soiled clothes. To help pass the time, they taught them about God and sang worship songs. When withdrawal kicked in, they stopped them from running back into the village. 

Returning to the village at the end of a two-week detox session, most eventually relapsed. But the few who stayed clean led the next group into the jungle. Some returned seven times before they could completely kick the habit, A Xa said.

It took 10 years, but by 2005 every Christian in the village had stopped using opium.

Escaping opium’s grasp was the first step of Sin Suoi Ho’s transformation. Next came breaking the village from cycles of generational poverty.

After deciding to become a pastor at age 20, A Xa went to study the Bible with other Hmong Christians in Yunnan, China, and later in Hanoi, despite having only a primary school education. Each time he returned to the village, he’d teach about the Bible and how it applied to everyday life. He led a small group—the first one in 2005, after which members went on to lead their own. By 2010, 100 villagers were trained to lead house church–like groups. 

God called Christians to be witnesses, A Xa taught. So villagers needed to clean their homes and their village. Both humans and livestock shared the village roads. Feces, food scraps, and trash littered the ground. Even inside their homes, chicken and pigs roamed free. A Xa taught them that cleaning their living spaces prevented disease and sicknesses from spreading and was a way to take care of the land God had given them. 

“It will be like salt and light to other villages,” said his sister, Thi Do. “They will know about God, that God is good, and that Christians are good, not bad.”

Next, A Xa taught villagers about setting goals and planning ahead, rather than being content with subsistence farming. He taught basic business skills to help them make more money for their labor. He pushed against the Hmong tradition of early marriage, where girls wed as young as 13 and cut short their education. He encouraged parents to keep both their sons and daughters in school.

A Xa also advocated against the custom of marriage dowries. Traditionally, a Hmong man’s family would pay the wife’s family a large dowry, saddling the newlyweds with debt and effectively selling the bride to her husband’s family.

To combat this, A Xa had to lead by example. His own daughter became the village’s first bride to not seek a dowry when she was married. (All three of his daughters graduated from college, another pioneering act.)

Photo by Tim Barker
Pastor Vang A Chu preaches during the Sunday church service.
Photo by Tim Barker
Sin Suoi Ho church members in prayer during the Sunday church service.
Photo by Tim Barker
Sin Suoi Ho church members in prayer during the Sunday church service.
Photo by Tim Barker
Early morning light on a sign pointing towards the Sin Suoi Ho church.
Photo by Tim Barker
Sung Thi Le (middle) and Hang Thi Su (second from right) perform with the worship team during the Sin Sui Ho Sunday church service.
Photo by Tim Barker
Worship team members Hang Thi Do and Sung Thi Le before the Sunday Church service.
Photo by Tim Barker
Church band members practice at Sin Suoi Ho church.

None of these changes happened overnight. Some villagers protested against A Xa’s ideas. “It’s so difficult to change people’s minds,” he said. “If we didn’t have the Bible, we couldn’t change.” 

Another first: Residents decided to grow orchids to beautify the village in 2011. They trekked out to the jungle to find them and planted the orchids outside their homes. Then visitors from around the border region began offering as much as $42 to buy the plants. (Orchids are a common decoration for Tet.)

Sensing opportunity, villagers grew the flowers in earnest, making three times as much from selling orchids as they did their traditional crops. Today in Sin Suoi Ho, the orchids grow in pots and cover off-season rice fields. Growers train them to bloom during the week of Tet, when they fetch the highest price.

By 2012, A Xa and the new village chief, Vang A Chinh, realized the village needed a working road. It would make it easier to transport their rice crops to markets where they could sell it for more money, and it would allow people to visit the remote community.

The two men approached local officials. Would the government provide cement if the village provided its own sand and gravel? The officials agreed, then taught villagers the basic steps for construction. And the people of Sin Suoi Ho came together to build three miles of road.

Next, they opened a Saturday market. To lure customers, villagers put on roadside performances showcasing Hmong singing and dancing, catching the attention of passing motorists. Tourism grew, and the government began holding up Sin Suoi Ho as a model for local development without any outside help. 

The persecution of Christians in Sin Suoi Ho gradually eased too. A Xa’s church, which is now part of the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination, earned official government recognition in 2011.

When they talk about their success, A Xa and other villagers don’t withhold their strategy: “If it was only based on the work of humans, we can’t change,” Vang, the associate pastor said. “Now you can see the village looks beautiful. It’s because we use the Bible for living our life.”

In 2015 the government officially recognized Sin Suoi Ho as a tourist destination, an act that effectively removed government restrictions on outside visitors. That sealed the transformation: A village once persecuted and isolated could now host visitors from across Vietnam and from around the world.

Photo by Tim Barker
Early morning outside the Sin Suoi Ho market held on Saturday mornings.

Families opened up their homes to tourists. They set up beds in their living rooms and extra seats at their tables. Those who couldn’t house visitors could sell their orchids, their vegetables, livestock, and handiwork—all at higher prices. They could run herbal baths or rent out Hmong dresses.

By the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Sin Suoi Ho saw about 100,000 visitors a year.

“When I was a kid, I never dreamed Sin Suoi Ho would become a tourism destination,” said Vang A Chinh, the village chief, sitting in the courtyard of his homestay with a creek flowing through a jungle-like garden and outdoor café. “After we became Christians, we learned how to make a plan for our lives and work to follow that plan. God changed Sin Suoi Ho into this.”

The pandemic paused tourism for two years. Villagers focused on growing orchids, cardamom, and rice. They built new bungalows and guesthouses. And they waited for the tourists to return.

Today, the main road in Sin Suoi Ho is clean and paved, running up the mountain past the thatched-roof church framed by an imposing gate made of curved tree branches. A woman dressed in a patterned Hmong jacket and skirt—over sweatpants—talks on her smartphone while a buffalo and her calf feed on a nearby tuft of grass. Further up the mountain, a coffeeshop overlooks the village and beyond—to rice paddies and jagged layers of blue mountains. 

The owner of Ka Sha Coffee is A Xa’s daughter, 28-year-old Hang Thi Su. Rather than wearing traditional Hmong clothing, she’s dressed in a fuzzy brown jacket and jeans as she snaps photos for her Facebook account to promote the village. Not only was she the first woman here to sidestep an early marriage and graduate from college, but she was also the first to marry someone who is not Hmong (her husband is Kinh, Vietnam’s largest ethnic group). She is Sin Suoi Ho’s only English speaker. 

When Thi Su and her sisters went to college, villagers called them lazy and whispered that they’d lost their way. “But [my father] didn’t care because he knows us, he knows what we are studying and what we are doing,” Thi Su said. “Now parents say, ‘Go to school and be like them.’”

Since returning in 2018, Thi Su has taken to heart her father’s exhortations that tourism doesn’t just help the village financially but is also an opportunity to share the gospel. When tourists visit, she introduces them to time-honored Hmong traditions like handwoven hemp clothing, harvest season dances, or tuj lub, a game where competitors try to knock each other’s giant spinning tops off balance.

But she’ll also tell them about traditions they’ve left behind: flutes and drums used in religious rituals, shamans, and bride kidnappings. She repeats the story of how God brought their village from filth to beauty, from addiction to freedom, from barrenness to bounty.

“Everything we do is for God, not only to make money,” Thi Su said. “I hope we can keep the Hmong culture, we can share our culture with the world, and we can share the gospel through our culture.”

Angela Lu Fulton is CT’s Southeast Asia editor. She reported this story from Sin Suoi Ho, Vietnam.

Related

Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

Angela Lu Fulton in Hanoi

It Is Not Best for Man to Eat Alone

Anna Broadway

Church Life

A Seattle-Area Ministry Wants More Cooks in the Kitchen

Sophia Lee

Hillside Church helped refugees grow vegetables. Now it’s growing a whole community around food and preparing immigrants for culinary careers.

Margaret Chege teaches students how to make Kenyan sambusas and mandazis in the World Relief Community Learning Kitchen.

Photo by Reva Keller

Margaret Chege rolls out golf ball-sized pieces of dough, drizzles oil on top, and drops one ball of dough onto another. 

“This is Kenyan tortilla,” she says, pressing down. “We use it to wrap sambusas.” 

Sambusas are crispy, deep-fried triangular pastries stuffed with all sorts of savories—spiced beef, lamb, potatoes. Chege is here to demonstrate how to make sambusas and mandazis—pillowy, nutmeg-scented doughnuts—at the first cooking workshop of the World Relief Community Learning Kitchen. Hosted at Hillside Church in Kent, Washington, the workshop attendees on a Wednesday morning include mothers who hired babysitters, a home economics teacher, and a mother-and-son cooking team. 

Chege chose these fried snacks because they remind her of home. “In Kenya, we like tea, and we eat sambusas and mandazis with tea,” she tells the class. “Anytime we see sambusas or mandazis with tea, we think, ‘Oh, now we are home.’” 

As she teaches, Chege radiates confidence and pride. She came to western Washington from Kenya in 2013 with her three children. She grew up in Nairobi’s Kibera slum, the largest slum in Africa and the third largest in the world. There, as many as 50 households may share a latrine. Chege remembers how sometimes people walked carrying bags of flour, leaving a powder trail so they wouldn’t lose their way home. 

Photos by Chona Kasinger
In Paradise Parking Plots—a parking lot converted to community gardens outside World Relief’s training kitchen—immigrants grow produce from their mother countries.

She learned how to make sambusas and mandazis as a young girl, helping her mother stuff beans in dough and sometimes beef, if they could afford it. She remembers following her mother through the streets, hawking bags of the hot food. Her mother died when she was 12 years old, and then it was just Chege and her sister selling treats to make ends meet. She was in high school when she wore her first pair of shoes. 

Chege rolls out more balls of dough. Oils them. Stacks them one over another. And then she flips the whole pile onto a dry hot pan, spins it around to let the bottom toast evenly, and slowly peels off each thin layer. Now they are ready to be stuffed with ground beef and cilantro. 

After all the labor of making the wrappers, Chege hands her students a tip: “Usually, I just buy Mexican tortillas from the store. I think they taste even better!” 

Chege has come a long way since she and the children arrived in the United States. She was reunited with her husband, who had already been in America for years and had earned asylum, but she barely saw him; he was working 16 hours a day. Chege remembers walking to Safeway to buy a bag of flour to make sambusas—something to remind her of home—and being overwhelmed by the endless aisles of products. When she mustered up the courage to ask where she could find flour, the cashier couldn’t understand her thick accent. She returned home flustered and fatigued. She was finally in America, where she didn’t have to worry about armed groups kidnapping her son or people forcing genital circumcision on her two daughters. She felt safe here. But she also felt utterly alone, lost, and homesick. 

Photo by Reva Keller
Chege and Tustin.
Photo by Reva Keller
Margaret Chege teaches students how to make Kenyan sambusas and mandazis in the World Relief Community Learning Kitchen.
Photo by Reva Keller
Margaret Chege teaches students how to make Kenyan sambusas and mandazis in the World Relief Community Learning Kitchen.
Photo by Reva Keller
The final product of Chege’s demonstration: fresh sambusas and mandazis.

And now here she is, in a brand-new commercial teaching kitchen, using her mother’s recipes and sharing childhood memories.

Standing outside the kitchen, Everett Tustin, the senior pastor of Hillside Church, peeks in one last time before retiring from the office. His heart feels full. Tustin knows Chege and her story—she and her family are members of the church. He also knows the story of World Relief kitchen coordinator Jeff Reynolds, who’s there to supervise the event. Reynolds too is a member of Hillside Church. 

Tustin knows how much it took for World Relief to finally open this kitchen, years after dreaming and planning and fundraising. Tustin had also long dreamed of a church that reflects and serves the community. This kitchen—and the people who made it happen—are a manifestation of years of prayers. Now he’s proud and full of joy: This is it. Except he couldn’t have imagined it like this. 

The kitchen is a 1,215-square-foot room that’s fully certified to make food to be sold to the public. Under state law that means it’s not only a teaching center, but potentially an income-generating enterprise for the community. Four student cooking stations surround an instructor station in a light-filled space where teachers and learners can mill about. A camera over the main station allows students to watch techniques up close on a TV monitor. 

When he first became the pastor of Hillside Church in 2012, Tustin had a hazy vision of where he wanted to lead its ministry. At the time, the average Hillside church member was around 60 years old and white. Yet a third of the population of Kent is foreign born. 

The city’s housing costs—lower than nearby Seattle—and growing diversity attracted refugees and immigrants, who saw opportunities to settle and build businesses. At Kent’s public schools, kids speak more than 80 different languages. The city has halal markets selling whole goats, Afghan bakeries offering sesame seeded barbari bread, and churches worshiping in Ukrainian and Russian. 

This isn’t the Kent that Tustin once knew. He grew up in a rural farming and dairy town 20 miles away called Enumclaw, where the population of 4,000 was majority white. His world got larger after he married his wife, Rhonda. They did ministry in Chicago, and he pastored churches in Washington and Idaho for 11 years. They spent another nine years overseas, serving in Kenya, Bulgaria, and Poland as Nazarene missionaries. Then, with aging parents and two adult daughters back in the United States, Tustin accepted the senior pastor role at Hillside and the couple returned to Washington state.

Tustin had grand plans for the congregation. He wanted a more intercultural and intergenerational church. He wanted it to reflect the community’s growing diversity and serve its needs. But how to start?

The first change Tustin made was to hire a new worship leader. He wanted people on stage to represent the community of Kent. He hired a Black man from Detroit whom he had met in Poland while he was leading choir workshops. Later, the worship leader moved back to Poland, and Tustin hired another worship leader, this time a man from Trinidad. Next, he hired an assistant pastor from Barbados, and a woman from Liberia as the children’s ministry leader. The congregation also voted in new church board members from diverse backgrounds. 

Photos by Chona Kasinger
In Paradise Parking Plots—a parking lot converted to community gardens outside World Relief’s training kitchen—immigrants grow produce from their mother countries.

The shift in leadership led to both subtle and unsubtle changes. Worship services became more expressive—people pumped their arms and shouted, or let out tribal whistles and yodels. At times it was extemporaneous and organic, as people from African countries spontaneously asked if they could perform a duet or a song. Sometimes they sang in Swahili, Spanish, or French. Services didn’t always start or end on time. A growing number of the congregation didn’t speak fluent English or spoke with strong accents.

For some longtime church members, the changes were too much. It was uncomfortable, it was different, and it stopped feeling like home. Many left to find other churches. 

It was a hard season for Tustin. He had difficult conversations with congregants who were unhappy and uncomfortable. He worried about tokenism, then worried about how to help the church not only catch his vision but lead it. It was like stretching a rubber band. How far could he pull without it snapping?

Often, Tustin wondered how the early churches did it, with all their cultural and linguistic differences between the Jews and Gentiles, the Hellenists and Romans and Hebrews. 

“They just powered through,” he said. “There’s no evidence of them stopping and saying, ‘OK, let’s make this easy. Let’s make this comfortable.’ It seems like they just slammed right through it, and they broke down all those barriers.” 

That first year of pastoring Hillside Church, Tustin walked to the local office of World Relief, which at the time was just down the road, and introduced himself as “the pastor of that church up the hill.” He asked if there were ways they could partner. 

It was a natural move. The Christian resettlement agency provides refugees and immigrants with housing services, English language classes, employment, and immigration legal services. In those days, in the early 2010s, refugees and asylum seekers from Afghanistan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and elsewhere were walking into Tustin’s church and asking for help. For baby food. For immigration advice. Tustin often directed them to World Relief.

The two ministries’ relationship began to grow. In 2016, World Relief held listening sessions with the local refugee-immigrant community, hosted at various sites including the church. They asked, What would help you thrive? What are your needs, struggles, dreams? 

Attendees expressed a yearning for community. They wanted a space to connect with others, with their cultures, and with nature. Living mostly in small apartments without yards, they missed growing their own produce like they did in their home countries. They also had no safe place for their kids to roam and play.

Hillside Church is near multiple public transit lines, close to many schools and apartment complexes housing refugees and immigrants. It also had a massive parking lot that stood mostly empty and often flooded the neighboring middle school with rain runoff. So the church donated 1.5 acres of the parking lot to World Relief to develop it into a community garden. 

Over several years, with funding from King County and other organizations, and with help from about 1,500 community volunteers, Hillside’s asphalt desert became Paradise Parking Plots, a community garden with 44 plots and six raised beds. It also includes rain gardens, cisterns, and flood-control bioswales, which collect rainwater before it can swamp the middle school.

Photos by Chona Kasinger
The Paradise gardens are a place to create friendships: watering each other’s plants, sharing tips on gardening in a new climate, and learning about one another’s produce and seeds.

At any given time from April through September, people from 16 different countries are planting and harvesting in the Paradise plots. They pay $40 to lease a plot for the entire growing season. Two brothers from Bhutan, for example, have planted mustard greens to make the Nepalese staple gundruk, a mix of fermented and dried greens that’s pungent, tangy, and full of flavor, perfect with a bowl of rice or stewed into soup. 

Another refugee, a bee farmer from Ukraine, grows wild strawberries using seeds from Ukraine, plus rows of organic tomatoes and beets to make borscht, the East European beet soup staple. 

Another, a farmer from Kenya, made $1,200 in one growing season selling his tomatoes at the farmers’ market. 

But the Paradise gardens are not just a place for immigrants to grow produce from their mother country. It’s a place to create friendships. They water each other’s plants, share tips on gardening in a new climate, and learn about one another’s produce and seeds. 

From the start, World Relief was intentional about making this a community-supported project. Local companies have donated seeds and supplies. Neighbors have volunteered time and expertise to help maintain and improve the garden. Occasionally on Sundays, the gardeners hold a farmers’ market at the church parking lot where church members can shop and engage with them after service. 

Once the gardeners had a space to grow food, they needed a space to cook it. Hillside had a small, underutilized kitchen. The church donated it and some adjoining rooms to World Relief to turn into a commercial teaching kitchen. 

The project took seven years to finish. (As workers tore out walls from a church building that dated to 1968, they found lots of things that needed fixing.) In June 2023, World Relief and Hillside Church finally soft-launched the kitchen. In January 2024, they opened their first cooking workshop, where Margaret Chege demonstrated how to make mandazis and sambusas.

“This kitchen is a representation of conversations,” said Jeff Reynolds, World Relief’s kitchen coordinator, who oversees the cooking programs. The kitchen will continue to host workshops from chefs such as Chege, and it will also offer a free, three-month curriculum to help refugees and immigrants kickstart culinary careers, so that they don’t have to start out making minimum wage as dishwashers. It will also offer nutrition classes to help families navigate food deserts and American markets that are full of highly processed foods.

Photos by Chona Kasinger
In Paradise Parking Plots—a parking lot converted to community gardens outside World Relief’s training kitchen—immigrants grow produce from their mother countries.
Photos by Chona Kasinger
The Paradise gardens are a place to create friendships: watering each other’s plants, sharing tips on gardening in a new climate, and learning about one another’s produce and seeds.
Photos by Chona Kasinger
The Paradise gardens are a place to create friendships: watering each other’s plants, sharing tips on gardening in a new climate, and learning about one another’s produce and seeds.
Photos by Chona Kasinger
The Paradise gardens are a place to create friendships: watering each other’s plants, sharing tips on gardening in a new climate, and learning about one another’s produce and seeds.

Reynolds is particularly excited about starting a preservation class dedicated to curing, pickling, and fermenting garden produce. 

The project has gifted him with a new community too. He graduated from culinary school and worked in kitchens for many years, then in alcoholic beverage sales until he was furloughed in 2021 during the pandemic. That was when he and his wife started attending Hillside Church. A relatively new believer, Reynolds told his pastor, “I don’t know how my knife skills can bring people to Jesus.” Tustin told him about the kitchen project and introduced him to World Relief. And now here he was, teaching people from around the world how to properly dice onions without slicing off their fingers. 

Sometimes there are language barriers and cultural misunderstandings. But that’s part of the ministry, Reynolds said. “You have to insert yourself into the uncomfortable. There’s no other way to do it. And as uncomfortable as that is, at the end, man! It changes your life.” 

Chege, too, had to push through discomfort. She and her family visited Hillside in 2014 after her oldest daughter, who was attending the church’s youth afterschool program, kept begging her parents to check it out. That first Sunday, they sat at the back. After the service, Chege’s husband went up to greet Tustin, and Tustin greeted him with the few Swahili phrases he remembered from his two years in Kenya: “Habari yako? Karibu. Jina langu ni Ev.” “Hello, how are you? Welcome. My name is Ev.” 

“I was like, wow. It’s my first time hearing white people speak Swahili,” Chege recalls. Immediately she felt a little more at home.

Tustin invited them to an after-service church picnic at a local park. When they arrived, Chege’s husband told her, “This is amazing. This is the exact park where I used to do daily prayer walks, asking God to find a way for you and the children to join me in America!” 

They became regular attenders at Hillside. It was awkward at the start for Chege. She would leave for home almost immediately after the service. She was frustrated when people kept asking her to repeat herself or looked at her blankly because they couldn’t understand her accent. “So I think, ‘I’m just not supposed to talk,’” Chege recalled. “That was a big challenge for me.” 

Tustin and his wife kept encouraging her. Your English is good, they told her. At their urging she hosted a small group at her home, where she served chapati or mandazi and tea, or, if she had time, sambusas and tea. People from other East African countries came to the group. Sometimes they worshiped in Swahili. 

Chege eventually grew more confident interacting with English-speaking church members. “I gained understanding,” she said. “It’s not their fault they cannot hear my language because we have a language barrier. I became more patient in listening more and trying to explain in different ways.” 

There’s a painting hanging in the church sanctuary. It’s called The Table. It features a large, wooden table in the shape of a cross, with Jesus in a white robe sitting at the head, and people of various skin shades dining before him. 

Tustin’s wife Rhonda painted that picture during the pandemic years—when the nation was upside down with civil unrest and racial tension—and she had her church family in mind. It’s a vision of reconciliation, of holy communion at the feet of Jesus, of a table where family members can feel so safe that they will freely voice their thoughts, disagree and forgive, compromise and celebrate.

It’s the vision that Tustin had for his church 12 years ago when he moved to Kent. The reality is not as beautiful or peaceful as the painting. The reality is messy, hard, and frustrating, and oftentimes disappointing. 

Photos by Chona Kasinger
In Paradise Parking Plots—a parking lot converted to community gardens outside World Relief’s training kitchen—immigrants grow produce from their mother countries.

Tustin turns 62 this year. He doesn’t know how many years he has left as the senior pastor of this church, and he likes to quote an Indian proverb: “Blessed is he who plants trees under whose shade he will never sit.”

He still has yearnings for his church that have not come to fruition. But, Tustin said, “I feel like the vision of the things we’re trying to do is bigger than my lifetime.” 

What he is already seeing, however, sometimes brings tears to his eyes: listening to the kitchen workshop, seeing Chege and Reynolds lead, bumping into the Afghan women who gather for sewing classes in the church basement three days a week, watching church members from all walks of life pray over one another. 

Each moment reminds him: It’s not his table. It’s the table Christ built, when he bore all sin and brokenness on the Cross and invited the whole world to join his family. It’s the table he set when he said, in the Gospel of Mark, “Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” ′

Sophia Lee is global staff writer at Christianity Today. She lives with her family in Los Angeles.

This article appeared in the The Globe Issue 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Kitchen Aid".

Related

Called to Kenya’s Chinatowns

Sophia Lee

My Unlikely, Cross-Cultural Friendsgiving

Carrie McKean

Meet the People Who Minister in America’s Food Chain

Bekah McNeel

Church Life

Grace in Gangland

Jamie Dean

Amid violence and shortages, a Haitian pastor dares to believe that Jesus still fills the hungry.

Photo by Octavio Jones / Genesis

For the last few years, Haitian pastor Octavius Delfils has been preaching through the Gospel of John.

Throughout that time, Haiti has endured a presidential assassination, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake, and a spiral of gang-fueled violence that has plunged the Caribbean nation into an even greater crisis than did the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed an estimated 200,000 people. 

Another alarming trend: Nearly half the Haitian population is facing acute hunger. By the end of 2023, 97 percent of the population in some cities faced severe hunger, with most Haitians surviving on one meal a day.

Given the string of calamities, some pastors might consider turning to topical sermons: How should Christians respond to violence? To disaster? To poverty?

But Delfils feels his congregation in the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince, is better served by focusing on Jesus’ words in the fourth Gospel:

“I am the good shepherd.”

“I am the bread of life.” 

“The thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. I came that they may have life and may have it abundantly.”

Photo by Octavio Jones / Genesis
Pastor Octavius Delfils, at his church in Port au Prince, where he has served since 2010. For years now he and his congregants (about 70 in 2021) have battled high gas prices and shortages, and dangers from the gangs that now control the city.

What does abundant life look like in such dark days? How does a local pastor shepherd a congregation scattered across a dangerous city? How does a minister tend to bodies and souls hungry for daily bread and bread from heaven?

For Delfils, the answers are more ordinary than heroic. He preaches through the Scriptures in his local church. He feeds hungry children in his corner of the city. And as many Haitians flee the country, he stays.

Staying put is its own ministry in a nation where many aid organizations, foreign mission groups, and government entities no longer can run big programs because of perilous conditions. Daily provision now comes more modestly—often methodically, block by block, and sometimes pastor by pastor. 

“I know that it’s dangerous,” Delfils says. “But I know that the Lord is there.”

Looking for danger is part of the pastor’s daily routine.

When he wakes in the morning, Delfils and his wife listen to the radio to plan their day. Is it safe to leave the house for groceries? For gas? Scanning Facebook and WhatsApp sharpens the picture, as ordinary Haitians offer intel on what parts of the city to avoid. 

The situation changes daily. Gangs may block a neighborhood street for a few hours or a few days. Other parts of Port-au-Prince remain no-go areas, too unsafe to visit. Some areas are so treacherous that residents have abandoned their homes. 

That includes Delfils.

The pastor once was building a home across town, after losing his previous house in the 2010 earthquake that leveled much of the capital. But now it’s too dangerous to visit his new home. Thieves took the water pump from the well outside. Delfils heard they stole building materials from the yard. A relative recently finished a house in the same neighborhood, only to have it looted.

“They came inside and took everything, all the furniture,” the pastor says. “Everything is gone.” 

For now, Delfils leases a house near the congregation he serves that’s part of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in Haiti. 

Photo by Octavio Jones / Genesis
Pastor Octavius Delfils, at his church in Port au Prince, where he has served since 2010. For years now he and his congregants (about 70 in 2021) have battled high gas prices and shortages, and dangers from the gangs that now control the city

These days, sections of the city that once bustled with motorcycles and vendors and women carrying babies on their backs are now hushed. Running essential errands means heading out and coming back as quickly as possible. Often, Delfils says, “it’s like we are prisoners in our homes.” 

As hard as other hard times have been in Haiti, Delfils, 55, says this is the worst he’s seen. Since Jovenel Moïse, Haiti’s last democratically elected president, was assassinated in 2021, entrenched gangs have filled a power vacuum and now control most of Port-au-Prince.

They also control major roads leading into the city—severing vital routes that businesses, hospitals, and aid groups depend on for transporting goods. Attempts at crossing gang-controlled areas risk extortion, robbery, or kidnapping.

Even in churches, long seen as sanctuaries, many leaders and worshipers no longer feel safe. Some church buildings have been attacked and looted. In one high-profile kidnapping, gunmen killed a deacon and snatched his wife outside a Baptist church on a Sunday morning. In another incident, assailants kidnapped members of a worship team during a live stream service.

The world was shocked when, in October 2021, the 400 Mawozo gang abducted a missionary team of 16 US and Canadian citizens outside Port-au-Prince. The gang demanded $1 million for each member of the group, most of whom remained in captivity for 61 days before escaping.

But Haitians are by far the most common targets for kidnappers, and the ransoms demanded are usually much smaller. Kidnappers sometimes pluck children from the street and demand whatever a family can afford. 

Most church gatherings have been spared, but many church members wonder: How now shall we gather?

For Delfils, the answer hasn’t been easy, but it’s been clear: We keep coming to the house of the Lord. 

Preparing for Sunday mornings starts on Mondays. 

As Delfils studies the Gospel of John for his sermon, he also studies any hot spots near the church to make sure worshipers can get to the building. Usually, they can. But occasionally, blocked roads make access to the area impossible and some decide to
stay home.

One woman told Delfils that two Sundays she was stopped by armed men in the street on her way to church. (They eventually let her pass.)

Another pastoral task: How to shepherd the flock during the week? Delfils describes this as one of his biggest burdens. He wants to be able to visit church members, but often it’s too unsafe or roads aren’t accessible. 

Photo by Octavio Jones / Genesis
Pastor Octavius Delfils, at his church in Port au Prince, where he has served since 2010. For years now he and his congregants (about 70 in 2021) have battled high gas prices and shortages, and dangers from the gangs that now control the city.

While phone calls and Facebook messages help, the pastor longs to be in living rooms with his church members and next to their hospital beds, helping them face the traumas of their everyday. 

“We had one lady who was kidnapped at her work,” Delfils says. “She’s a nurse and she was working during the night and people came with weapons and kidnapped her.” At least three of his church members have been chased from their homes and can’t return. One family has chosen to stay in a dangerous area, and Delfils worries about them.

Some members are burdened for their pastor. When a gang briefly took over Haiti’s main fuel depot and triggered a severe gasoline shortage, friends dropped by Delfils’s home to share a few gallons with him, making sure he could drive to church on Sunday morning. 

Travel may be complex, but the heart of Sunday services remains simple: The congregation sings, prays, confesses their faith, listens to the pastor’s sermon, witnesses baptisms, and takes the Lord’s Supper. Delfils says the ordinary means of grace strengthen God’s people for extraordinary times. 

People sometimes question whether they should meet in person, but Delfils insists that the church remain open. “I explain that we need to continue to serve the Lord,” he says. “We can do that.” He says while online meetings are occasionally necessary, “the fellowship of the church—we cannot replace that. . . . We don’t want to miss being face-to-face.”

Another thing that can’t be replaced: the Lord’s Supper. The church has been able to buy bread and still has enough communion cups to keep serving the congregation. 

Once a month, the Lord’s table stands as a reminder: Jesus is living bread, broken for sinners living in a broken world. And sometimes the Bread of Life surprises his children with joy. 

In John 6, Jesus is concerned about a crowd of hungry people.

They’ve been following him in a remote place and listening to his teaching. Jesus asks one of his disciples where they can buy bread so the people can eat. Philip balks at the impossibility of the question, but Andrew points out a boy with five loaves and two fish. 

Jesus feeds the 5,000.

Photo by Octavio Jones / Genesis

In much of Haiti, hunger seems like an impossible problem. The UN World Food Program (WFP) reports the country has one of the world’s highest levels of food insecurity, with more than half of its population chronically food insecure and 22 percent of children chronically malnourished.

Between August 2023 and February 2024 alone, the price of food rose by 22 percent, making it even less affordable for millions of Haitians.

Delfils translates the statistics to daily life: A single meal from a street vendor can cost about a day’s wages for a typical Haitian worker. For some, wages are far lower and food far more expensive. Delfils estimates the average family subsists on one meal a day. 

“I don’t know how people are living with the money they make,” he says. “It’s a miracle they are.”

Delfils hasn’t miraculously fed 5,000 people, but he has methodically fed 500. That’s the number of children who attend the school Delfils helps to run. He’s taught at the Christian school for years, and his church has long met on the grounds. But when missionaries associated with the project had to flee the country, Delfils and local workers kept the K–12 school going. 

For many children, the daily meal of rice, beans, and meat is a literal lifeline. Donors outside Haiti help fund the food budget that’s almost as much as the budget for salaries. Delfils finds children and their parents aren’t just hungry for food. They’re hungry to learn and grow—to keep coming to school, despite the dangers. 

When the church organized a Vacation Bible School program over the summer, 300 children showed up. In the comfort of a secure compound, “they spent the days learning from the Word, playing games,” Delfils says. “It was a lot of joy.”

It was so much joy, a couple dozen of the children kept coming back for Sunday school on Sunday mornings, joining church members already gathering to feed on fellowship and the Bread of Life Jesus revealed himself to be in the Gospel of John.

Delfils says that gives him hope at a time when many concerned friends and family members are urging him to leave Haiti. The people need a shepherd, he says. And Haiti needs the church. 

“The only place where change can start is for the church to listen to the Word and live the Word, and people will see how we have hope in the midst of the catastrophe in Haiti,” he says. 

“I believe only the Lord can do something for Haiti.”

Jamie Dean is a North Carolina-based journalist with two decades of experience in domestic and international reporting.

Related

What Evangelicals Owe Haiti

Andy Olsen

Kenya's first lady, Rachel Ruto, center, participates in a national prayer gathering for Haiti and other countries in downtown Nairobi on April 15.

Kenyan Pastors Are Praying for Haiti. They’re Also Shaping the Police Mission to Save It.

Andy Olsen

Migrants, most from Haiti, ford one of many rivers they will cross on the trek toward the United States.

I Promised God I’d Return to Haiti. As the US Opens Its Doors, It’s a Hard Promise to Keep.

Guenson Charlot

A man identifies a body after an overnight shooting in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Pétion-Ville in March.

Haitians Are Ministering at the End of the World

Andy Olsen

addApple PodcastsDown ArrowDown ArrowDown Arrowarrow_left_altLeft ArrowLeft ArrowRight ArrowRight ArrowRight Arrowarrow_up_altUp ArrowUp ArrowAvailable at Amazoncaret-downCloseCloseellipseEmailEmailExpandExpandExternalExternalFacebookfacebook-squarefolderGiftGiftGooglegoogleGoogle KeephamburgerInstagraminstagram-squareLinkLinklinkedin-squareListenListenListenChristianity TodayCT Creative Studio Logologo_orgMegaphoneMenuMenupausePinterestPlayPlayPocketPodcastprintremoveRSSRSSSaveSavesaveSearchSearchsearchSpotifyStitcherTelegramTable of ContentsTable of Contentstwitter-squareWhatsAppXYouTubeYouTube