Whether you know much about missions or you are starting to discover that ministry, Reverend Elijah Ng’ethe says that today few churches engage in mission work and their focus is largely on maintaining the church through generations, maintaining status quo and living in religious culture.
Mission is the church’s response to God’s command, to go into the whole world and preach the gospel. Through missions we see souls coming to Christ, being transformed to become new people with new hope in Christ. Unfortunately, the great commission has become a great omission.
Born again in 1971, baptized by the Holy Spirit in 1974 after which he got involved in preaching the gospel. In 1993 the Lord spoke to him about Pastoral ministry which prompted the start of Deliverance Church Ruai, where he has pastored for 29 years. Growing up in a religious family, Reverend Ng’ethe says he attended a denomination that did not teach salvation. When he first heard about salvation, he thought it belonged to other denominations and this caused him to resist getting born again. It took a drunkard for him to change his mind…
“In high school, there was a young man who was unruly, he would drink a lot during the weekend and he would come back and vomit in the dormitory, cause violence and smoke heavily. One day, there was a mission in our school and he got saved, after a while, his ways changed totally and he was transformed into a new person…And I thought there was something that comes into people when they get saved. I became curious.”
Reverend Elijah Ng’ethe craved to have that ‘thing’ that comes in people once they give their lives to Christ. During one of the missions in his school, he got born again. He says he wanted to receive this ‘Thing’ he had seen in the life of the ‘unruly’ young man. Today he wishes he marked the date, but he thanks God for the gift of salvation.
He is a ‘Mission minded’ man of God who is mobilizing born again Christians to go out to missions. According to Reverend Ngéthe, most of the money in the churches should be dedicated to mission work, instead, it has been diverted to building and paying salaries. Mission work signifies a purposeful movement, he says. “Being sent from one place to another for a purpose causes growth within the church. The apostles of Jesus were among the first to be sent out on a mission to share the gospel.”
What is remarkable about the call upon Reverend Ngéthe is that he targets the children and the youth in his mission work. He emphasizes on the importance of giving attention to these ‘disregarded’ congregation since they are the church of tomorrow. In his years of ministry, he says he delights in ministering to children and youth, and causing change in their lives, which he says has changed parents in the process.
“Sometimes the children start attending our mission services as disobedient and malicious but with time they change and become well behaved. This makes parents wonder what they were taught and in the process they become open to hear the gospel and they become part of the church.” Said Reverend Elijah Ngéthe.
The purpose of mission is to portray a loving God, who is a missionary God. In the Bible, we see God sending his only begotten son to the world to do mission work. In his parting shot, Reverend Elijah Ngéthe says that Mission work is about giving and not receiving, just like our God gave us his son, and just like Jesus gave his life for us all.