Lutheran Academy has always lacked a school building. Yet, through God´s continuous faithful guidance and grace and with the financial and manual help of many of you, we have been able to provide sufficient classrooms for Lutheran preschool and kindergarten and Lutheran Elementary school. However, our ministries are thriving, the programs are growing and we need more space. Continue reading
The process of creating the font (written form of the language), followed by the translation of the Bible, is taking place in a language group called “Omba.” (‘Omba’ is a pseudonym used to reduce the risk to the missionaries, Ed.). This area is situated near the Indian Ocean, near the border with Somalia. Somalia is dominated by terrorism, its government has failed, and 99% of the population is Muslim. Therefore it is almost unbelievable that in this, one of the poorest areas of Kenya, there is now a living community with five Christians. Director of Wycilife-Slovakia, Jaro Tomášovský, describes the situation encountered by Wycliffe missionaries there. “When we first arrived, the locals refused to have anything to do with us. God gave us a different strategy—these people are desperate for education and information; they want their children to go to school, and to be able to find jobs, so that they can help their country. When we said we wanted to build a school, they let us come.” Continue reading
“Education changes our lives because it opens us up to a world we’ve never known before. Access to information is life-changing. Ignorance, on the contrary, just makes you feel bad. Not having access to the Bible makes this even worse!” Brother Paul went on to tell a story that a missionary-of-white-skin shared with him. The missionary met a woman in an African village who kept staring at him until he came over to speak to her. She told him that when she was a little girl, white missionaries had come to her village and read to them out of a very thick book. As a little girl, she listened very carefully to the words and years later, she still remembered two biblical sentences! She asked the white man about the book and he handed her his Bible. She caressed it, kissed it, and held it so tenderly. She knew she was touching the Word of Life. “She had been just a small child, but she heard two sentences from the Bible, and remembered them all her life,” Paul Machira repeated. How great was the desire of this woman—and probably many more—to read the Bible in their own language! Continue reading
The fact that you are reading these lines means that you know the alphabet and someone taught you to read and understand the meaning of syllables, words, and sentence structure. However there are millions of people in the world who for various reasons cannot read or write. The problem is not their inability to learn … The problem is that some languages have not been broken down into a written form—they have no alphabet, therefore, writing and reading is simply not possible… Continue reading
Lutheran Elementary students participated in the project “Unsung Heroes” for the sixth time in 2014. They answered an invitation issued by the Institute of National Remembrance, the civic association “Unsung Heroes,” and the Confederation of Political Prisoners of Slovakia. These three organizations try to find people who “swam upstream against the current and paid a high price for it” during the communist regime. To date, this project has uncovered the stories of over a hundred unknown heroes in the fight against communism. Continue reading
It’s now been one week since I returned home from Slovakia and I wanted to post one final blog as I reflect upon my time away. This first week home has been challenged by extreme jetlag, and a real sense of discombobulation as I try to regroup to my home and community again, going back to former patterns of living, and just trying to adjust to “normal” once again. Continue reading
“Velvet Revolution,” or “Gentle Revolution,” is the name given to a period in 1989 during which Czechs and Slovaks rose up against communism, effectively ending 41 years of Communist rule in what was then Czechoslovakia. Beginning in November of that year, hundreds of thousands of citizens staged historic demonstrations in Bratislava and Prague, driving the non-violent transition of power to a parliamentary republic. Continue reading
Faculty of Religion Studies´s students attended a lecture of Dr. Debra Arfsten, PhD. how to become an ideal leader for other people. Dr. Arfsten presented six points of servant leadership.
