Who, What & Where...Africa

Kenya Ministry Training Institute

IOM’s Kenya Ministry Training Institute was birthed in Africa for Africans. The school was designed by Dr. LeRoy Curtis to do the impossible: to take poor rural pastors, most with no previous Bible training, and teach them how to study and teach the Bible for the rest of their lives. When they begin to learn what the Bible actually says, countless men have remarked, "You would not believe the heresy I was teaching before KMTI!"

With classes scheduled to fit the pattern of their agricultural lives, and at a price each one could readily afford, the school has become one of the educational wonders of East Africa. Ranging out from the beautiful central campus in Kitale, satellite schools also now serve students throughout Kenya and Uganda.

Under the oversight of the all Kenyan staff, students learn much more than how to teach the Bible; they learn how to live in a Kingdom way. KMTI Director George Wafula says some of the greatest changes come in the family life of the student pastors. Because George was born in a polygamous family, he has a keen appreciation for the amazing cultural changes he now sees in African families. Teaching men to be the husband of one wife is also the best deterrents to the spread of AIDS, a ghastly plague in Africa.

East Africa has been heavily evangelized and claims to be 80% Evangelical. But this evangelism is “a mile wide and an inch deep”—converts simply don’t know the Bible, nor how to live God’s way. Over sixty percent of the Christians are in small village or town churches with untrained leadership. Most leaders cannot access or afford training in the Word or in Christian living. As a result, the nation lingers in corruption and poverty for lack of basic Christian training. Radical Islam is also creeping south in Africa— A strong Christian Kenya must stand in the way!

Training leaders how to study the Bible themselves makes them lifelong students of the Word. KMTI then trains the best of our students to become mentors and teachers of other pastors. We train inter-denominationally—serving the entire Body of Christ. East Africa Director Larry Neese says, “No other school in Kenya offers the inductive Bible training that we provide.”

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Uganda Ministry Training Institute

Next door to Kenya, Bob and Dee VandeBrake have worked with the KMTI staff to open satellite schools in Uganda over the last four years. Three years ago their team initially founded the Uganda Ministry Training Institute. Currently there are more than one hundred pastors enrolled in three separate schools across Eastern Uganda.

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Jobs for Kenya

In addition to his involvement with UMTI, Bob VandeBrake also works in tandem with KMTI to provide jobs for bi-vocational pastors who comprise the majority of KMTI graduates.

Economists estimate that the United States has invested one trillion dollars to aid Africa in the last 40 years with little improvement in the levels of poverty, hunger or the HIV pandemic. In Kenya, 50% of the population lives on one dollar or less per day. A Kenyans key issue in life is basic survival. They live on the edge of disaster every day. A case of malaria becomes an agonizing decision to buy medicine and go hungry, or not treat the malaria and risk lifelong damage to a child. Every day, ten million people in Kenya alone go to bed hungry with little hope for tomorrow.

The hope for Africa can be found in the history of the economic development of the United States. Millions of settlers spread across the American continent starting small businesses to support their families. We called it rugged individualism. In Kenya they see it as self-worth. Every man and woman wants to provide for their families. No one wants to be called a beggar.

Jobs for Kenya has a three step program to break the cycle of poverty that hangs over most Kenyan families:

  1. Money Management: Start a systematic savings plan for families. Each family must be committed to their future and willing to contribute a down payment on the loan business (No free lunch). For many this will mean giving up one meal or morning tea as a step toward prosperity).
  2. Vocational Training: With unemployment at 50% most young men and woman do not have a marketable skill. At our campus in Kitale (Kenya Ministry Training Institute) our team will be developing a 21st century vocational training center. This training will provide the skill sets to establish a successful business in small communities.
  3. Funding: Qualified members can receive a Micro Loan to create a business. Through our strategic alliance with the Navigators and seed money from Jobs for Kenya we provide funding for business creation. Each business owner will be involved in a one-on-one discipleship program (designed by the Navigators) to develop their business and personal life skills.

Jobs for Kenya will be developing a 21st Century vocational training center and micro-loan office in the new conference center building on the KMTI campus.

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Democratic Republic of Congo

Dean and Autumn Jordon live in Kinshasa, one of the largest and most difficult cities in Africa. They successfully raised their six children there. Now, deep in the interior, Dean partners with Congolese agricultural engineer and nurse, Pierre Nguelielie, and Pierre’s nurse/wife Beatrice.

To develop a unique pastoral training school in that war-torn and virtually road-less country, they are using smaller satellite schools, specially designed to meet the needs there. With little or no roads in most of the country, each satellite school becomes a small local community of pastors and families, who closely live, learn and work together for two years. In addition to the inductive Bible curriculum from KMTI, students and their families also learn to plant crops and raise small animals, often forgotten skills in a country where more than 5 million people – generations of parents and grandparents – were killed in just one year of civil war.

At the end of their two-year training program, each pastor and his family go back to their villages to begin a satellite school there, to include other local pastors who have the same needs. Each of these families takes tools, seed, and the needed starter-animals for a new beginning with a new satellite school and a new student body.

Learning the biblical skills of Kingdom living in the context of community has special advantages. A group of families living and working together in close quarters has abundant opportunity to learn to forbear and to forgive, to serve as Jesus taught his disciples, and to grow in the graces of kindness and generosity. Learning these truths from the Bible, as the occasion arises, means that each lesson is clothed in real life, the life they and their congregations will lead for years to come.

The basic starter-stock, seed and tools become not only a much-needed boost for hungry families, but also, in two more years, it will become the foundation for more learning communities with the badly needed means to support themselves as they teach others. From these communities will begin several others who will live together, work together and learn together to feed themselves and one another with daily sustenance, as well as with the Bread of Life. This is school frontier-style, where lessons learned are more likely to stick than those taught in a pristine Sunday school or classroom.

The teaching families, the Jordons and the Nguelielies, have themselves become a seed which is falling into the ground to yield fruit for others to eat.

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Dakar, Senegal

After a lifetime in education, including 20 years as a teacher, researcher, and program supervisor at The Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center at Gallaudet University, Angela Bednarczyk was searching for a new mission for her retirement years. On a church mission trip, while staying at the Tribal Mission Guest House in Dakar, she noticed a calendar for the The LeEcole Renaissance Des Sourds, , a school for the deaf also located in Dakar, and decided to arrange a visit. In turn, this led to an invitation for Angela to come back to Senegal to offer literacy training for their teachers for two weeks in February, 2011. The success of that training led Angela to decide to return as an IOM Missionary at the school starting in September, 2011.

The school interested Angela not only from her background in education, but also because on her trip to Senegal in 2010, she was to meet for the first time the World Vision deaf child she had sponsored for four years. While discussing the needs of Angela's World Vision child, the school administrator became aware of the many educational gifts Angela had to offer and invited her to return to help train her teachers to create a more visual learning environment; the invitation was readily accepted. The school currently serves 35 students and has five classrooms, five teachers, and a deaf teacher in training; all multiplying Angela’s experience several times over.

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Who, What & Where...Asia:

In Western nations, most people think of slavery as a curse of the past. However, the number of human slaves today is higher than at any point in history, as high as 30 million. At least half of these are held captive in human trafficking, forcing women and even small children in daily bondage to sexual exploitation. A number of IOM missionaries are battling this modern nightmare in Cambodia and China.

In Cambodia, most are working as part of the Hard Places Community, organized by Allie Mellon to free and rehabilitate young girls from brothels and small children from pedophiles. They work in cooperation with the International Justice Mission, some majoring in rescue and others in rehabilitation, functioning under a variety of sub – organizations such as Agape International, and Children in Families, which places rescued children with families as an alternative to institutions. Hard Places Community members also operate a safe house for young women, a school, an after care center, a kids club, and a recently-added boys center ministering to very young boys who have been rented to pedophiles.

At Daughters of Cambodia, Ruth Elliott facilitates girl’s exit from the sex industry by providing a number of well-organized resources and programs which enable them to set themselves free and to sustain healthy choices for their lives.

In China, Doug and Jenny McGee have a coffee house, and major in freeing girls from brothels. They have developed Starfish Project , a jewelry-creation and Internet marketing organization which provides alternative income for rescued young women. The Starfish Project was established in 2006 to empower exploited women in Asia. The Starfish Project developed a socially responsible jewelry business in order to provide women with alternative employment and a range of holistic care opportunities. In 2011, the project has grown to support approximately 35 women in 2 different cities, primarily through the jewelry company. There, women have taken on new levels of responsibility and leadership, and are able to provide for their families through meaningful employment. The Starfish Project also provides opportunities for women to heal and to grow through counseling, vocational training, language acquisition, family education benefits and health care access, as well as providing housing in a women's shelter. The Starfish Project is committed to restoring hope for each woman that enters its doors.

You can Participate in Traffickjam, USA walkathon for Hard Places Community at http://www.traffickjamasia.com Also, Give to IOM to end human trafficking in Asia.

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Who, What & Where...Europe

An IOM team, led by Paul Petrie, ministers throughout Europe from a base in Brussels, Belgium. The annual European Prayer Breakfast serves as a hub for ministry to European Parliamentarians and other government officials and royalty. This Team is also responsible for ministry within the Council of Europe in Strasburg, resulting in groups of Parliamentarians gathering in various national capitals. In 2010, the Belgian Prayer Breakfast was initiated.

Additionally, IOM’s Chris and Laura Christianson minister in worship development throughout Europe, as well as in French-speaking Canada and Africa. They help local churches develop their worship program, and also hold widely attended worship conferences.

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Who, What & Where...India

Through the efforts of Alli Mellon and Hard Places Community, IOM helps to support Asha house, a house of hope for the desolate and at risk children of India

Asha, the Hindi word for Hope, is a children's home located in New Delhi, India, offering real hope to the children of India. Now located in a rental facility, Asher is a home to twenty-six children and seven staff member's. Within the Asha family, there is a minimum element of institutional care. All of the children are made to feel like sons and daughters, rather than clients in an institution. The vision for Asha house was actually planted in the hearts of the house parents before they had met one another. Additionally, Asha house is a pioneering work in a part of northern India, where the gospel has not yet reached, and where there are little or no communities of believers.

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Who, What & Where...Indonesia

This IOM missionary (name withheld) lived with this highly resistant Muslim tribal group for a number of years. Instability in that area caused her to return to the USA in 2000. Subsequently, this people group was seriously affected by the tsunami in 2005. After the tsunami, our IOM missionary returned to help with relief work. Knowledge of the culture, and fluency with the language, made it possible to serve as an interpreter and guide, to give badly needed counsel on how to relate to this group, and to successfully open doors to senior leadership in the culture. As a result, a great deal of relief work and materials reached them, and the impact has been significant. Though working with a group like this is like walking on a tightrope, this ministry continues effectively eight years later. Due to the sensitivity of the situation, the name of this IOM missionary, as well as the people group, must remain confidential. However, contributions for support may be given by indicating “A Group” at IOM, PO Box 2140, McComb, MS 39649;

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Who, What & Where...Islam

The people of the twenty-two Arab Nations have probably been among the most isolated from the gospel among all the major people groups. Globally, even the Arab people who have migrated to non-Arab nations have remained significantly isolated due to language, culture, and to myriad religious factors.

In addition, sincere but misguided attempts to minister to Muslim Arabs have often been somewhat confrontational; suspicion between Muslims and Christians seems to be the order rather than the exception.

Finally, due to legal restrictions against missionaries on the part of Muslim governments, and, perhaps, due to the degree of difficulty, effective missionary ministry to Arab Muslims has been rare. Within the borders of those nations, there is an average of only 2-10 Christian missionaries per million Muslims.

In an effort to overcome these barriers to the Gospel, IOM has maintained an interactive Internet presence for the past 15 years. Our Arabic language website has been directed by a Muslim-background follower of Christ. The content of the site has been highly contextualized and non-confrontational. Subjects of discussion are on topic of current interest to Muslims. On average, between 10,000 and 20,000 Muslims have visited the site each month.

This site is temporarily inactive.

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Who, What & Where...Latin America

Guatemala Short & Long Term

IOM maintains a year-round ministry committed to ongoing village ministry, as well as to short-term team support as “The Landing Base.” The IOM team leader has in-depth experience in Latin cultures. If you are interested in ministry to remote villages in Guatemala, contact the IOM central office.

Child Rescue and Care

Nearly 20 years ago, Charlyn Simpson took a break from fashion design school for a short-term trip to Central America. There, the children she found in the dust of the streets stole her heart. She dropped out of fashion design school, moved to Costa Rica, rented a very small home in the barrio, began to learn Spanish, and continued to love the children. Later, she married a Costa Rican, Enrique Mejjia, and they began taking street kids into their home. Early, they determined that an typical orphanage was not what the children needed, but a home with their father and mother. Enrique and Charlyn Mejjia have established that home, and have raised many of those children. With the help of numerous IOM work teams, they are now building similar homes on the same property, where other street children will be parented to the glory of God.

Colombia Tribal Translation

For several decades, Vic and Riena Kondo have labored in a remote section of Columbia, completing a translation of the New Testament and an Old Testament summary, as well as bilingual dictionaries for the Guayabero and Guahibo people groups. As IOM missionaries, they have been working in Colombia under the auspices of Calvary Chapel of Columbia in close coordination with the Summer Institute of Linguistics. The New Testament has been completed and published, and is now being distributed to the Guayabero people. However, just after the time of its release, Riena was promoted to her eternal home, following a lengthy illness. Vic continues to work on the bilingual dictionaries, as well as the Old Testament, for the two people groups. Not long before her promotion, Riena told her husband, “Finish what we began." Vic is doing just that!

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Who, What & Where...Tibet/Nepal

Tibetans, a largely unreached people group, live on the "roof of the world" at an altitude of 12,000 to 16,000 feet on the far west side of China. High mountains and harsh bitter weather have created an almost impassable barrier to missionaries throughout history. In 1959, China annexed Tibet, increasing the difficulty for missionaries to gain access. About 2.5 million Tibetans live in their homeland and the surrounding Chinese provinces, while many others find refuge in Nepal and India. Most of them have never heard the good news of Jesus Christ. They are culturally Buddhist and extol the exiled Dalai Lama as "God – King", their spiritual and former political leader. Tibetans have a long history of resisting the Gospel.

Nepal is Tibet’s southern neighbor. A few Tibetans have been reached with the gospel in Nepal, but missionaries have found them still quite resistant. They have a deep-rooted fear of losing their cultural and religious identity. They have been taught by their leaders that to be Tibetan is to be Buddhist. In effect, very little strength has emerged among the Tibetan Church. However, missionaries have found accessibility to the refugee population in India and Nepal as never before. The refugees dwelling in remote Nepali villages along the Tibetan border have been much easier to reach than those directly under China’s influence. Our hope is that eventually they will take the gospel into Tibet in a way foreigners have been unable to. In 2010, we changed our focus from having our team reach out to the major cities in Tibet to these remote villages.

An IOM team, led by Bob Hill, has made numerous trips into Nepal and Tibet in the last 25 years. In 2011, they founded their first successful church plant along the border. Eighteen Tibetans have since come to know the Lord through this fellowship and there is a tangible, growing hunger among the villagers for the knowledge of Christ. There is evidence of the powerful movement of the Holy Spirit being birthed and hearts are opening to receive Him. The indigenous village leader has become the spiritual leader of the fellowship. It is an encouraging fulfillment of Jesus’ word about “the man of peace’ or “worthy man” leading, indicating a man of “weight” or centrality in the community. Jesus taught the disciples to seek out and focus on these specially chosen people of influence, and our team has followed this example by sewing the spiritual, financial and physical things of God into this man. We encourage you to pray for this team as they continue to work with this historically impenetrable people-group. Through your prayer, God will bind the forces of Satan and release the power and gifts of His spirit. To support them financially, label your gifts "Tibet" or “Nepal” and send them to IOM.

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Who, What & Where...Youth

San Jose, Costa Rica – FUNDADEJO Team

Begun in January, 2004, this is the first of the International Boy With a Ball teams and was seen as important enough for Boy with a Ball Founder and Executive Director Jamie Johnson to move his family to San Jose to launch it. The task was not an easy one. Team members worked intensively toward acquiring Spanish, assimilating with the culture and understanding the youth situation in Costa Rica. The process has gone so well with this team; they are now modeling what they believe a Boy with a Ball Latin American team needs to be. Staff and team members walk through the precario several times a week, making contact with families and developing relationships with them. Teams offer assistance to families in the precario in three primary areas: School Supplies, Medical Needs, and Occupational Help. These are developed within the context of Focused Small Groups and Family Groups in the precario.

South San Antonio, Texas, USA

The South side neighborhoods of San Antonio, Texas, are some of the most destructive youth gardens in the world. Gang activity, juvenile delinquency, school dropout rates, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are rampant in an area that is 95% Latino, with an overwhelming majority of that number being Mexican-Americans. The Boy with a Ball Southside team is a continuous presence on the streets working to reach and equip families in the following ways: Outreach, flowing regularly through the basketball courts and neighborhood streets, Mentoring Relationships, the first step toward change, Education/Equipping, helping young people to not only thrive on an individual basis, but to go out to others in the community to help inspire and equip them to do the same, Tutoring Centers, in which staff and volunteers tutor young people to graduate and to become leaders.

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Who, What & Where...Short Term Mission & Business

Ronald Gray is the Director of Mission Support for IOM, leading short term teams to various countries in the world. Ronald has traveled extensively in the United States and in more than 42 countries. He leads a number of teams to other countries on short term trips. Since 1984 he has helped to construct buildings in Costa Rica, the Philippines, Mexico and Kenya, Africa. Short-term Evangelism teams have made a significant impact as thousands of people have come to Jesus Christ through these outreaches.

Part of that support is given through Opportunity Inc., whose mission is “affecting lives by imparting Kingdom values that increase economic opportunities through business.”

Opportunity Inc. gives business people opportunities to demonstrate Christ and to impact communities by combining their spiritual strength and their business expertise. Opportunity Inc. is doing this by providing teaching seminars for local churches which allow both the church and business networks to reach the business community with sound principles for success. Opportunity, Inc. offers one public seminar that is open to the public and a second seminar to help business people within the body of Christ. These can be combined for effective outreach.” “Business seminars are also an incredibly effective way to reach the nations. We organize trips to various needy countries, where we share Biblical values and principles that can help people from every walk of life. We connect relationally through missionaries and indigenous leaders who already lead businesses in their cities, and we help others to start businesses for the first time. In this way, we can open doors of ministry that would otherwise never be opened, and help to alleviate poverty by economically developing regions and nations. Come; use your faith and your business experience to help change the world.”

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