Ethipia Updates – April 2022

1. Another Baptism Event

The movement of planting Churches and reaching out our communities by the Gospel of Jesus Christ continues. We thank God for opening this wide-open door of salvation for our people. Just few days ago 821 people got baptized in River Awash. What an excitement to see those precious people going down to the river expressing their joy by singing and praising God with their own local language.

Since they live in various villages and location in the region; majority of them were walking on foot and it took them from 45 minutes to 1hour to get to the bus stop spot. From the spot we provided them busses to bring them to river all together.

The celebration, the excitement and the passion that they have for Jesus was amazing. We are thankful to see the move of God in our region and how those precious people are so desperate for the Gospel of Jesus. Thank you, all friends and partners, for your prayers and support. We are looking forward the great work a head of us that to make those new believers true disciples of Jesus and help and equip them to be disciple makers.

2. Pastors’ Books Donation

Among many other activities we do; equipping our leaders are part of our mission as Unite 4 Africa team. Equipping can be done in many ways. Training, Coaching and Mentoring are our key activities that we do to help our leaders get equipped wholistically so that they will be able to transform their own lives and communities they serve.
Providing good and selective books to our leaders are also very important and considered as part of equipping. So, we held book donation event in Adama /Nazareth/ and we purchased 4 different Spiritual books from the local market that are written in Amharic and distributed for 100 leaders. The four books talk about Relationship & Marriage, Christ as the Son of God and books that address the current contemporary challenges of the church in Africa particularly in Ethiopia. We believe that those books will help our leaders to serve their people effectively. As we handed over those books, we also shared the word of God with them to encourage them to continue laboring in the kingdom of God and prayed for them.

They were so excited and thanked God for this provision. Since, majority of them can’t afford to buy important books that help their lives and ministry; they suggested that if we organize similar events to other leaders in different towns. We told them to pray for us for God’s provisions. And we are trusting Him that we would like to continue doing this ministry as a program in God’s willing.

Book Donation event

3. Leadership Workshop

In collaboration with a ministry called DAI (Development Associates International); we have organized a Leadership Workshop for our Key leaders on the title of Servant Leadership. About 40 leaders have participated on this workshop for 4 full days. The content, the materials and the delivery method of the workshop was so unique and loved by our leaders. The workshop contains 10 lessons and so far, we have covered 6 lessons. We are going to have another meeting in October to cover the remaining lessons.

We as leaders got challenged, inspired and started to evaluate our leadership styles and our identity based on the knowledge and the skill we got from the workshop. We thank God for our brothers Rev. Nicholas Wafula from Uganda and Francis Kalembera who facilitated this workshop by representing DAI.

Workshop Participants

4. Conclusion, Praise & Prayer Requests

These are praises and prayer request items to pray about with us:

• Thank God for the breakthrough that he has given to preach the Gospel, to win souls in the central region of Ethiopia and to see thousands of people to respond to the Gospel and got baptized.
• Praise God for connecting partners to work together with us in many areas of the ministry.
• Pray for the new believers who recently got baptized that may God would continue work in their lives so that they will be able to be a true disciple of Jesus.
• Pray for our ministry for the impact of our movement in the lives of our leaders to be seen in terms of multiplication and lives transformation.

Samson Weldemariam /Pst/
Vice – president and Africa director of U4A