Building a Church in Tanzania
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We nailed down the last nail and crawled down off of the roof about 30 seconds after the sunset Friday night. The tin was creaking beneath us and we had to go slowly, because it was very thin and would give way if we weren’t careful. We had just a moment to examine the new church building by torchlight before we prayed.
The building itself is about 40 feet long and 16 feet wide. There are no walls, just two rows of six 8-foot metal poles planted in the ground supporting nine rafters. The rafters are two-by-threes and the roof above them is corrugated tin. Perhaps during the next year or two another group of volunteer will come help finish the malls after the Maasai have started them.
We don’t want to just give the church buildings away to the Maasai people. We want them to be proud of them, to take care of them and to have a sense of ownership concerning them. We want the building to belong to the church, not the mission. Missionaries won’t be here forever, but if we do our job right the Christians will be.
We held hands and prayed. White and black. Maasai, American, Swahili. Women and men. We joined together as children of the King and prayed for the congregation that would call this humble structure home.
This article was originally published in the Commission, April 2001, while I was serving as a Journeyman Missionary over 10 years ago.
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We nailed down the last nail and crawled down off of the roof about 30 seconds after the sunset Friday night. The tin was creaking beneath us and we had to go slowly, because it was very thin and would give way if we weren’t careful. We had just a moment to examine the new church building by torchlight before we prayed.
The building itself is about 40 feet long and 16 feet wide. There are no walls, just two rows of six 8-foot metal poles planted in the ground supporting nine rafters. The rafters are two-by-threes and the roof above them is corrugated tin. Perhaps during the next year or two another group of volunteer will come help finish the malls after the Maasai have started them.
We don’t want to just give the church buildings away to the Maasai people. We want them to be proud of them, to take care of them and to have a sense of ownership concerning them. We want the building to belong to the church, not the mission. Missionaries won’t be here forever, but if we do our job right the Christians will be.
We held hands and prayed. White and black. Maasai, American, Swahili. Women and men. We joined together as children of the King and prayed for the congregation that would call this humble structure home.
This article was originally published in the Commission, April 2001, while I was serving as a Journeyman Missionary over 10 years ago.
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