Coming alongside the heroes in Africa

No oceans in Indiana? That didn’t stop Indiana native Mike Christian from finding a way to get an oceanography degree and joining the Coast Guard. No divinity degree as a retired military man? That was no obstacle for Christian from becoming a missionary. A plan to go on a ministry trip to Africa as planned in 2020?

Well, that one was a little more complicated. But two years and a pandemic later, and Christian has just returned from Kenya and Uganda with a whole new set of stories…and deeper relationships.

“Every time, you go over there thinking, ‘I’m going over to teach them,’” Christian said. “I learned so much more. You go over thinking, ‘I’m going to be a blessing;’ I was blessed so much more. And it always inspires me to be with them and to see their faith through persecution, hardship and obstacles, and to see that they want to have a church even though it’s difficult.”

Christian, who is the assistant to the CEO of Paraclete, got his start in international work with the Coast Guard. With a 27-year military career, he spent time in England, Japan, the Caribbean and the Pacific. His stint in the Caribbean included rescuing people at sea who clung to simple rafts fleeing their own countries, hoping to make it to American shores. He was working there in the mid-90s when some 35,000 people fled Cuba.

“I would stand out on the bridgewing of the ship with binoculars and in every direction you look, there were people on the water,” he said. “They’d be dehydrated, so we’d help them up the ladder or we’d have to hoist them. Some would be too weak to stand on their own, and they would have to lie down on blankets on deck. And the corpsman would be putting in IVs trying to save them and get them hydrated. Sometimes we’d even have to medevac them.”

Christian and the crew would sometimes spend days at sea with those they rescued, getting to know the families, often including children. Then they’d have to take them to wherever the U.S. Department of State determined they should go.

“You’d see all these guys, tears rolling down their cheeks, as they’re waving goodbye, wishing them the best,” Christian said.

When it came time to retire from the military, he believed his calling changed.

“I kept feeling this calling to basically transition from rescuing people out at sea to rescuing people spiritually,” Christian said.

Many of his fellow military retirees were getting government service jobs. He didn’t have a divinity degree to pursue ministry. But he found a way. After receiving training in a course called Foundations for Teaching the Bible, he was asked to go to South Asia and give the training. He got a 10-year visa for a south Asian country. And he got on a plane.

But he soon discovered that simply giving discipleship training at churches wasn’t keeping up with the exponential church growth he was seeing from the work of local pastors and church planters in South Asia. So, he trained local Asians to become trainers and go out and train others. He hoped to work himself out of a job.

“The idea is always to develop leaders and to develop people who can teach the course and take over teaching the course,” he said.

Two years later, he got detained, interrogated, held overnight, and then deported for his work there.

He continued the training of pastors and church planters in South Asia from the States—online. Christian’s ministry expanded to include training pastors in several other countries. Then one day, an African pastor contacted Christian’s church in the States asking for help. He and his wife had started a church in the slums of Nairobi.

“It’s a really rough area of Nairobi,” Christian said. “They started it in their home, but it quickly expanded. So, they started renting space outside their home. And as the church grew, Patrick and Perecy wanted to make sure they got some discipleship training for themselves and the emerging leaders.”

The couple and other church leaders met online with Christian, weekly, for years. In April 2020, Christian had tickets to visit Patrick’s church—to officially turn over the discipleship training to Patrick himself—but then the pandemic hit. Members of the church continued to meet with Christian over the past couple of years, and the church kept growing. Finally, in January and February of this year, Christian got to visit the church in Kenya and other church plants in Uganda.

He expanded his trip to train a group of Muslim-background Sudanese believers in Uganda. Those men were wrestling with very real matters, such as what to do with multiple wives married while Muslims. Christian encouraged them to search the scriptures for themselves for God’s heart toward caring well for their wives and their commitment to marriage.

“A lot of it was teaching them to research the Bible to find the answer in the Bible, not creating any dependency,” Christian said. “Probably the most important part of what we were doing there was teaching them to use a hermeneutic tool, giving them lots and lots of practice with it, and giving them homework with it and working with them on it. The goal was to enable them to use it on their own after I left so that they could research these questions and not be susceptible to false teaching. And they could find the truth in the Bible.”

The days were full. Some of the bus rides in between locations happened at night on dirt roads. He was required to take COVID tests to cross borders. But Christian got to worship with a variety of cultures and in multiple languages on his trip, from the upbeat dancing in Uganda, to the simpler Arabic music accompanied by bongos of the Sudanese tribes to the worship in Swahili in Kenya. And he stayed in the homes of pastors, sometimes in slums, seeing the realities of pollution, poverty, and child prostitution—but also the faith of the church leaders.

Patrick’s wife, Perecy, for instance, had polio, which left her with a permanent disability, making it painful for her to walk. But she gets up at 4:30 every morning to boil water for cleaning, makes breakfast, then gets ready to catch public transportation to the Christian school where she teaches on her feet all day. After work, she goes to the market for vegetables and meat, then home to make dinner and clean the dishes, all without modern conveniences. On the weekends, she does the laundry. Then on Sunday, she leads worship, runs the women’s ministry, and organizes the children’s ministry. On top of all that, she takes care of the church’s finances.

“She was an inspiration to me,” Christian said. “And to see that she’s doing all that, that it’s difficult and painful for her just to even stand up and walk; it’s amazing.”

For his part, Patrick is also a paramedic and holds medical clinics in their neighborhood. Together, this couple has managed to be successful in multiplying churches and leaders throughout the region.

By the end of the trip, Christian officially turned over the training to them.

“One time I read, ‘Success is finding out what God wants you to do and doing it,’” Christian said. “When I’m on the mission field, that’s what I feel like; it’s success.”