Will You Pray & Rejoice With Us?

We would love for you to be praying for Samuel Koech and the church plant taking shape in Longisa. Samuel is 31, full of energy, and genuinely gifted, but stepping into church leadership for the first time is a lot to carry. He is currently leading a small group of about fifteen people who meet under a tin roof structure that floods when it rains hard, which in this season has been often.

David has been making the trip out to Longisa every other week to disciple Samuel and walk through sermon preparation, conflict in the group, and the practical questions that come with starting something from nothing. It is slow going. There have been a few families who started attending and then stopped coming, and Samuel has wrestled with discouragement over it.

We believe in what God is doing there, but Samuel needs prayer for confidence and endurance right now. He is young in this role and sometimes doubts whether he is the right person for it. Please pray that he would sense God’s presence clearly in the coming months, that the group would grow in stability, and that a handful of faithful families would emerge as the core of this church.

Pray also for David’s energy for these trips. The drive to Longisa is long and rough on his back, and we want him to be able to keep showing up for Samuel without it costing him more than he can give.

This request is a little different than the others, but it has been weighing on both of us lately. As we have gotten to know the families in Mathare and Kibera more deeply over these years, the needs we see are real and they are constant. School fees. Medical bills. Food running short before the next payday. People know us now, and people ask, and it is genuinely hard to know when helping is the right and loving thing to do and when it might actually be doing harm in the long run.

We have seen what happens in other ministries when good intentions create a cycle where the local church and local believers stop stepping up because the foreign missionaries always will. That is the last thing we want here. Four of our five churches are now led by Kenyan pastors who are capable, gifted men, and we want the people in their congregations looking to them and to each other for support, not to David and me.

At the same time, we do not want to hide behind a philosophy and ignore a widow who genuinely has nothing for dinner tonight. It is a tension we feel often and do not always navigate perfectly.

Please pray for wisdom for us and for the Kenyan pastors we work alongside as we figure out, case by case, what real biblical generosity looks like without undermining the strength and dignity of the local church. We would rather get this right slowly than get it wrong quickly.

We are starting to plan our travel for furlough this year, and a regular part of that season is visiting churches to share what God has been doing in Kenya. We always look forward to this, reconnecting with familiar faces, meeting new ones, and getting to put names with the people who have prayed for us all year.

That said, lining up speaking opportunities takes more coordination than people might expect. Calendars fill up fast, especially around the times we are actually home, and we are still working out a schedule that lets us visit as many supporting churches as possible without stretching our family too thin during a season that is also meant for rest and reconnecting with our kids and grandchildren.

Please pray for open doors as we reach out to churches about speaking during our time back in the States. Pray that pastors and ministry leaders would have room on their calendars and a genuine interest in having us share. And pray for David and me as we prepare what we will say, that we would represent the work faithfully, give honor to our Kenyan brothers and sisters who labor alongside us, and that whatever we share would stir people toward deeper prayer and partnership rather than just polite applause.

If your church might be open to having us come share sometime during our furlough, we would love nothing more than for you to reach out and let us know.