The Tate Family has served the Lord in Kitale, Kenya since January 2008. Their main ministry is indigenous church planting.

July 28, 2015

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

In many of my monthly reports I oftentimes ask you to pray for us and our ministry here in Kenya. This month I want to relate to you the items that I, myself, am fervently praying for concerning our Kenyan ministry. That way you can join me and send your prayers up with mine for the things we are working on here.

First and foremost (ie, the main priority of our ministering here in Kenya), is the starting and forming of new New Testament churches here in the city (town) of Kitale where we live. We are currently working with a new group that meets in the house of Kefa and Matilda and we have been working with this group for a few months. It has has its ebbs and flows, its many visitors who have come for a week or two and then left. The ones who have remained appear solid and seem like they want to really serve the Lord and see the work grow.  This is how I am praying for this group: That they might grow spiritually and know Jesus and follow Him on the same road He is walking, that they might reach out to their village with the love and gospel of Jesus Christ, that they might mature enough to be organized into a church, that they would stand on the Word of God instead of on the whims of man, that they would be the hands and feet of Jesus to the villages around them, that they would be led and strengthened in all things by the Holy Spirit, depending upon Him for all things, instead of the missionaries.

Roger and Blessed

For your enjoyment I have included a humorous picture of me and a little girl named Blessed who attends the meetings. Blessed is an orphaned girl who has been taken in by Kefa and Matilda (something which is very unusual in this culture) and I think she has taken a liking to me. Anyway, please don’t look at the picture and think that Roger has lost his mind. Let me explain. I have been teaching the last couple of weeks on the wise use of offerings and on how the early churches used the collections they took up. I showed them that most of the times the early churches in the NT took up collections, the money was used to help the poor and needy or to send missionaries along on their way. As an illustration, I decided that I would act out a conversation between a husband and wife on offerings and giving and how they would like to see a church utilizing the money they donated. To make the illustration memorable to my audience, I purchased some hair in town and whenever I was talking as “the wife” I put the hair on, moved to an adjacent seat and talked in a high, falsetto voice. Then, when I talked as “the husband”, I removed the hair, moved back to my seat and talked in my normal voice. The “conversation” proceeded in this way until my point was made. Blessed got a kick out of me wearing this hair and later put it on herself. Then I put the hair back on myself and snapped the picture you see. I think it’s funny and cute. Julie thinks I look like a hippie and a druggie.

The second item that I am fervently praying about is my ministry up in “the bush” with the Pokot people. I have been praying a lot about this but it seems that at the time God has put things on hold. I think God has things only on a temporary hold and I believe He will once again soon open things back up for me to be able to get back to some of these remote people and villages and spread the gospel and the kingdom of Christ there. The man I work with up there wants us to visit a very remote village behind the mountains where the people still wear animal skins for clothes and have never heard about Jesus before. I pray that we will be able to reach this village, that we will have boldness to preach about God’s love and salvation, that the village would trust in Jesus as Lord and Savior and that a congregation of Jesus would be started in that place.

The last ministry item that I am specifically and fervently praying about concerns a small, local Bible college located here in our town. I have been invited to teach a class at this college and have accepted the invitation. The class I will be teaching is hermeneutics (How to interpret the Bible). This is an extremely important subject in Kenya as many of the pastors, teachers and leaders in the churches know very little about properly interpreting the Bible and end up teaching anything and everything except what the Bible actually teaches. I am thrilled to be able to teach on this topic and hopefully help some of these local, Kenyan pastors teach their people from the Bible in a profitable way. I pray that God would lead me in my own study, that the students would grasp the concepts of Bible interpretation, that they would learn to love God’s Word and want to teach its life giving principles to others, and as a result that many people would hear God’s Word, that they would be saved, and grow to maturity as followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Until next month, beloved.
May God’s peace and joy be with you.

For the glory of God in East Africa,
Roger & Julie Tate (and Emily, Amy, Josiah & Chloe)

rojuta[at]gmail.com
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