Thank you for your prayers! Dr. Carrie Miles and Donell Peck have returned safely from their trip to Africa. It was a very productive trip. Carrie said the energy and response to the team’s teaching was palpable. “We could tell as we talked that we were having an impact,” she said.
However, Carrie’s elderly mother took a fall two days before Carrie returned. Sadly, soon after they returned, her mother passed away. Nona Eyre Miles, passed peacefully at age 94 on October 1. Carrie was grateful to have had a chance to say goodbye.
We will post a full trip report soon, but in the meantime, here’s a quick story that shows how far your support has taken Empower in Africa.
Carrie and Pastor Frank Tweheyo, executive director of Empower/Africa, had an opportunity to preach at a church in Rwanda, where they’d first conducted an Empower seminar in 2011. Our team led trainings there again in 2012 and 2013, but due to the political situation, had not been back to that church since.
So for the first time in nearly a decade, Frank and Carrie had the opportunity to preach there. They began with the New Man, New Woman, New Life overview sermon to the congregation of around 200.
“I taught about the creation ideal and then started talking about the Fall,” Carrie writes. “I asked how many people believed that woman was cursed by God in Genesis 3. No one responded. This usually gets a big response, but—nothing. I tried again. My translator tried again. Frank tried.”
Carrie and Frank looked at each other and then light dawned as they realized that they were “preaching to the choir!” Of course no one believed this interpretation of Scripture. Our team had taught the seminar there 11 years ago—and one of the key teachings of that training is that neither man nor woman is cursed!
Afterward, Carrie spoke to the pastor, Francis Mutabezi, and asked him how 25 people in a seminar had become 200 people who no longer accepted this wide-spread belief.
Francis said, “I don’t know where people got the idea that they were cursed by God, but I teach that we are not cursed, we are blessed.”
Then he stopped, looked at Carrie and said, “Didn’t you teach me that?”
Carrie and Frank were encouraged, and you should be as well. George Ogina, a pastor who also helps with our printed materials, told us, “Many have testified how the teaching transformed their lives and family.”
The seeds we planted a decade ago are bearing wonderful fruit. Because that is our goal at Empower: people transforming their own cultures, believing they are loved by God, and not even remembering who “taught them that.”
