Eric's Blog

Many people ask me how I can to work with ministries in East Africa. Here is the LONG answer, step by step.

1. I retired and had to answer the question of whether my retirement was the “beginning of the end” or the “end of the beginning.”
2. To seek an answer to this question, my wife, Faye, and I entered into a deep and contemplative study of Henry Blackaby’s book “Experiencing God”. This gave us a profound belief that if we asked God to invite us to work with Him, that He would. The big issue was how to listen, comprehend and confirm God’s call.
3. A few weeks after our “Experiencing God” study, I suddenly became convicted that God wanted me to fast for 7 days. Now I am a very large person and fasting had never been my thing. I had fasted a few times but mostly for medical procedures–but never for 7 days. I talked to my pastor, thinking he might also be called to fast since he preached about fasting a lot. But no, he said that he wasn’t called to fast for 7 days. So nothing was left but to answer this call and see what God had in store. So by God’s grace and blessing, I fasted for 6 days and broke the fast on the 7th day. I can’t say that I had a epiphany during the seven days but the message that came through clearly from God was “I am with you.” An so He was.
4. A short time later, I was teaching a class on Spiritual Gifts. I liked to have ministry leaders visit the class to explain how people can use their spiritual gifts in a particular ministry. A woman who worked with our church’s English as a Second Language (ESL) ministry came one evening. None of the students responded but I felt the call upon me. And that began my work with ESL which continues to this day.
5. After working with ESL students for a year or so, I decided that the discussion materials needed to be improved. I decided to rewrite news stories in simple English that the students could understand and discuss. I had no experience doing this and started a web search for writing tools for simple English. The best of class was the Easy English Bible translators from Wycliff Associates UK (www.easyenglish.info). I emailed the coordinator in North Wales and asked for help. He was very kind and, after validating my Christian credentials, shared the writing tools with me. Soon after, on a trip to the UK, my wife and I met this person and we became good friends.
6. The Easy Bible coordinator shared with me that he was working with translators in Kenya and Tanzania to develop an “Easy Swahili” Bible and Commentary. I became interested (was called?) and helped support this work. After funding the translation of several books of the Bible, I became very engaged and soon felt the call to go to Africa to meet the translators and help plan the work. The Easy Bible coordinator agreed to go with me and introduce me to the translators and East Africa. So we went in February 2005.
7. In East Africa, God quickly confirmed that this was His call to me. He got me engaged with His servants in a variety of ministries in addition to the Bible translation. I was hooked.
8. I returned to East Africa in February 2006 with a student from the University of Idaho and Methodist minister from Yorkshire (other stories for other times). I became convicted that part of my call was to invite and bring other to “come and see” God’s work and people in East Africa. The second trip confirmed my conviction that God had called me to work in East Africa.
9. In November of 2006, I introduced my wife to East Africa. She met most of the people I was working with and we decided to work together with East Africa ministries. We agreed to begin focusing in selected areas.
10. I returned to Nairobi in February 2006 with my niece, her husband and a pastor friend. After a week traveling around southern Kenya, we were joined by three faculty and six students from the University of Idaho. During that trip, we began to establish a Trust in Kenya to affirm our long term commitment to God’s call.