As our family continues to settle into our new life in Colorado, we are counting down the days until school starts.
But at Gospel Life, we are also beginning a countdown. We are preparing to launch new programming, including our first mobile version of Shepherds Academy in the next couple of weeks.
An encouraging visit
In June, Pastor Chuck Henderson from First Baptist Church, Henderson, Kentucky travelled to Malawi on a mission of encouragement. I cannot imagine a man more gifted for this purpose than Pastor Chuck.
He spent a week in Malawi, and while he did some preaching and evangelism, his primary purpose was to check in with our team, see how they were processing changes since I left Malawi, and help them envision the future. I think we will see Pastor Chuck’s visit as a pivotal moment in the years to come.
Our changing ministry model
When I founded Gospel Life in 2015, I founded it primarily as a missionary sending organization. It would be the conduit through which our sending church would send my family and others to serve churches in Malawi.
However, with the completion of my family’s time in Malawi, we knew that model would be changing. We believe that the local church is God’s own missions organization, and therefore, we want Gospel Life to function in a way that serves the local church rather than being a substitute for it.
Moving forward, Gospel Life’s work in Malawi will be done directly in partnership with Unity Bible Church in Zomba. UBC is an English-speaking Baptist church that was planted by Pastor Maya Kuthyola in 2022. Pastor Maya is like-minded in his theology and ministry philosophy, and he has a heart to reach both the college-educated middle class of Malawi as well as the farmers in the villages.
Isaac Dzimbiri, whom I worked side-by-side with for six years and whom we continue to fully support through Gospel Life, has already begun serving as a leader at UBC, and our primary goal will be to support ministries at UBC that align with our goals of planting churches and training leaders.
Where we are headed
Right now, I am working with Isaac and Maya to prepare a ministry strategy and budget for the upcoming year that we can present to the Gospel Life board for approval in September. While I look forward to sharing those details with you in the future, I am happy to already share with you the primary areas of ministry that your continued giving will be supporting:
College Ministry. Zomba is the home of the University of Malawi as well as a campus of the Malawi College of Health Sciences. With over 10,000 college students in the city, Maya and Isaac spend much of their time reaching students with the gospel and discipling new believers. We will be providing them with evangelistic and discipleship materials and possibly in the future with teams of college students from the US.
Discipleship Conferences. The believers at UBC are hungry to learn how the Bible applies to every area of their lives. Last year, I was able to speak at UBC’s marriage conference, and we hope to support UBC in hosting more conferences like this in the future to benefit their own members as well as Christians from other churches.
Shepherds Academy. Shepherds Academy will continue in the years ahead, although we are altering the format of our programs to better meet the needs of UBC and like-minded churches.
- English. For young men called to the ministry or currently doing pastoral internships in English-speaking churches across Malawi, we will be offering theology conferences to supplement what they are learning through discipleship and training in their own churches. In the future, we may once again offer these conferences for college and seminary credit.
- Chichewa. Starting in August, we will be meeting with a group of Chichewa-speaking pastors three times a year in their local public school building. These pastors will begin going through our Chichewa Shepherds Academy curriculum of 9 courses and graduate in 3 years. As we refine this mobile model, we hope to bring it to other locations. For now, we are starting with meeting at a school near Lake Chilwa and expect about 80 pastors and other church leaders to attend.
Sending Bivocational Church Planters. Eventually, we hope to assist trained men to move to new areas, especially Muslim districts, to plant churches. We hope to assist them in buying farm land or starting a business such as brick making or construction in order to support themselves as they plant new churches in unreached and under-reached places.
A little housekeeping...
As we make these transitions, there is a little bit of housekeeping that you will be seeing over the next month. For those of you who have been giving regularly to the Hutchens Missionary Fund, your gift will be transferred to the General Fund. We are so thankful for the consistent giving that allows us to continue supporting ministry in Malawi while our family no longer lives there.
Second, as we plan and budget for our new program model, we will reevaluate our student sponsorship program. If you are currently giving to sponsor a student, we would be blessed by your consistent giving that allows us to launch new programs. Later this year, we will share with you new budget goals and student profiles. Thank you so much for your commitment to theological training in Malawi!
