Simon Kathuga ministers in Mathare Valley, Nairobi, Kenya. It’s not a pleasant place but home to over ½ million people. The stench of the sewers, meandering through the slippery dingy alleyways between tin-walled hovels, makes walking uncomfortable and challenging. How can people live here?

However it is here that evangelist and passionate Christ-follower Simon Kathuga choses to work among the poorest of people in his country. Every week he walks these alleyways, enables over 300 children to attend school and be fed, passionately preaches to give them hope, and sacrificially gives of his time to serve His master. I’m humbled in the face of such dedication!

I spent a sobering day in the slums of Mathare Valley in Nairobi, Kenya. I was there with three of my ministerial colleagues from Canada, and introduced to the sounds, smells and squalor of slum life. One half a million (500,000) people live here. Absence of basic amenities of life like water, sewer, electricity, medical care or education, make their plight almost unbelievable. Yet they exist, denied normal community structures, threatened by unruly thugs, and in a sense voiceless against the injustices meted out to them. However there are caring people here, reaching out to the needy in the name of Christ. I admire their courage and care!

Lamumba Institute, built to train communist leaders back in the 1960s, is today a Christian University, in Nairobi Kenya, established to train hundreds of leaders for the church across the continent of Africa. I had the privilege to be with three Canadian church leaders in February, to listen to the voices of the university leaders to elucidate to us the state of the church in Africa today. It is a beautiful 23 acre site, very comfortable to accommodate a capacity of 1000 students.

2000 refugees sought safety on the church compound. As I listened to the pastor’s story I found it difficult to comprehend what it must have been like. I was in Soroti, Uganda, on the very compound where this happened just 6 years previously. Then I was told that they were here for over 2 years. As I listened to the story I realized this was truly a Christian community fulfilling the mandate of Christ, loving, caring and sharing.

Jesus refers to members of His Church as stones in a building of which He is the chief cornerstone. Teacher and evangelist, Terry Bone, put a new twist on this. In a conversation with him while ministering together in Bangladesh, he explained that God had reminded him that he was a “brick in a bridge.” Terry has been travelling from Canada to Bangladesh for over four years ministering to leaders of a growing movement known as Talitha Koumi. He has been able to connect a number of other people and ministries to this very successful church planting movement. This is a very critical role as the church in the majority world vastly outpaces the growth of the western church. Truly, we need to build more bridges!

We use a number of phrases to describe the church outside North America and Europe such as two-thirds world, majority world or global south. These phrases attempt to describe that part of the world where the church is growing at a phenomenal rate. The one thing they are consistently asking for is help to train leaders. I had the opportunity to do that again this week in an Asian context, responding to request to help train leaders for the church that is literally mushrooming.

What hits you in the face as you leave the Daka airport in Bangladesh is this sign – very significant in a country of 164 million people with 32% of the population under 15 yrs. of age. Furthermore nearly half of the population lives on less than $1 a day. Yet the people seem very resilient and the children play like children everywhere!

This is how they escape the floods in Bangladesh. Cement with rebar enforcement go down into the mud to sustain a somewhat questionable structure. Getting into the house is never easy.