NEWS END OF FEBRUARY 2016

Dear Friends,

I recently managed to write a 3000-word article, start to finish, in two or so hours sat at my computer on an afternoon. I am pleased to say that it has been accepted for publication. An email came back from the publisher: “I know it will be one our readers will ponder and interact with in significant ways.” Give thanks! (I am engaged in publishing many articles. This particular one has been accepted into a very ‘practical’ journal oriented to missionaries who are on the field.)

•Here are the opening paragraphs of chapter 1 of my FREE book just published, pdf available here.

Elijah Oloo was crowned King of Africa in Western Kenya in 1933. Around seventy years later I attended a ceremony at which a flag was raised in memory of that momentous event. I stayed in the home of the grandson of the late “King.” Yet, that particular “kingdom” is not remembered for having been particularly consequential on the world scene. Few know about King Elijah Oloo. Alfayo Odongo Mango, one of those involved in crowning him as king, has managed to achieve longer-lasting fame. He is said to have prophesied an end to colonial rule. It must have been hard in the 1930s to have imagined an East Africa free from colonial rule. Yet thirty years later in much of Africa, including Kenya, colonial rule did indeed come to an end.

Alfayo Odongo Mango’s father had been killed by mercenary soldiers in 1896 in an attack backed by the British. As a result of his death, Mango’s mother took her young son to refuge at her own home in Ulumbi in Gem. It was in Ulumbi that Mango first came across Christianity. He was later converted as a result of being healed from serious illness involving convulsions and epilepsy. Mango was in due course ordained as a deacon in the Anglican Church. Then in 1932 he left the Anglican Church and founded the church of Jo-Roho.

•A missions’ journal in the USA has expressed interest in publishing an article in Swahili. That’s a healthy challenge! Pray for insight, and for some local pastors to be able to help me out.

•Give thanks for 5 plus keen Swahili students from the Coptic church, who I’m giving 3 hours per week of instruction. I am also doing some translation for Coptic folks on the occasional evening.

•Pray for a young German man recently in Yala who I was able to assist with cultural issues, who has now gone to Uganda (at a difficult time politically in Uganda(!))

•Give thanks for an excellent church service this Sunday morning at one of the local Pentecostal churches in Yala, whose pastor is a very good friend.

•Pray for ministry opportunities with young medical doctors from the USA who regularly spend months at a hospital near my home.

•Give thanks for a very encouraging recent visit with a KIST graduate, who is talking about hosting a large evangelistic event at his home in August, to plant a new church.

•Pray for a close friend, recently gone to minister in Nigeria, coming up against very in-your-face witchcraft related issues.

•Pray for a colleague here in Yala who was recently heading up a church plant, but is now instead running a small café Sunday mornings trying to make some money.

•Give thanks that the draft I submitted to a publisher for my next (7th) book has been accepted in outline. This book is to be entitled: The Godless Delusion. Give thanks. (Anyone able to help proof reading please let me know!)

•Pray for one of my children, now a married woman, but very sick with TB.

•There have been some cholera outbreaks in the area. Pray for those to end, and for good health for folks around.

Jim

For information on my latest book see: here.