It has been a walk of faith since Share started ministry among the 1.4M Turkana people of Kenya in 1997. God has used His people to help us minister to thousands who were without hope of eternal life in Christ. By 2020, Share had reached at least 60% of the Turkana people with the Gospel! Through the 131 trained and supported indigenous missionaries, 20 staff, and Short-Term Outreach & Relief Mission (STORM) teams, a total of 549 villages had been reached, 411 churches planted, 80,981 saved, and 10,950 baptized.
Beginning 2017, SI’s primary ministry became that of making disciples who make disciples others, which is clearly accentuated in Scriptures through the Great Commission as the main calling and vocation of the Church of Jesus Christ (Matt. 28:18-20).
To accelerate that imperative, SI developed a contextualized, organic discipleship training methodology that is easy for the Turkana people to teach, model, reproduce, sustain, and replicate at the grassroots level. The methodology consists of four main components – 3-Walk, 3-Circles, 3-Stones, and MAWL/APEST. It places great emphasis on listening, hearing, and obeying God’s voice through His Word in cell-groups. With the majority of Turkana people being oral learners, SI has been purchasing and distributing as many solar-powered Audio Turkana language Bibles as possible in the villages to make sure the Word of God remains the foundation for spiritual and behavioral growth.
To facilitate the process and ensure leadership accountability, SI developed a Decentralization Strategy that divided Turkana County into 10 Zones, each with a leadership team of Supervisors, Coordinators, Monitors, Motivators, and Champions who model and oversee implementation of the methodology at the cell-group, or “Lighthouse” level where multiplication of disciples happens. The leadership team is committed to spiritual integrity, servant-leadership, accountability, prayer, transparency, unity, performance, and timely reporting.
Further, a plan was initiated to build a permanent center in each Zone – close to the masses – where the methodology would be taught to more and more Champions. These Champions are now being equipped with the necessary tools and unleashed to model and implement the methodology among believers in their respective villages.
By July 2020, construction of the sixth center (of the ten planned) will be completed! A Disciple-Making Movement (DMM) is now beginning to emerge and mushroom across Turkanaland. We hope to complete construction of the remaining centers by 2021.
Through the DMM methodology, believers in Turkanaland are becoming an epic movement of authentic and intentional followers and disciple-makers of Christ; “living stones…being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 2:5). They are “continuing in their faith, established and firm in the hope held out in the Gospel… that they have heard …” (Col. 1:23).
We request you to prayerfully consider giving toward greater outreach and making of more and more disciples of Jesus Christ. I encourage you to reach deep into the resources He has placed at our disposal, so we can finish the task of reaching the remaining Turkana population and launch to another unreached people-group in the near future. Your generous donation at this critical time will make it possible for us to continue to do “greater things than these” (Jn. 14:12-14).
Dr. Sammy Murimi
Director of Share International, Inc.
