On Jul 26, 2018 you prayed for this request: “Pray for the Dorobo church at Songoroi on Mt Eburru that partially collapsed during recent heavy rains. Pray that the rebuilding project will galvanize the believers as they work together, raise funds together and complete their building. Pray they continue to be a light in this area.” And God answered: “Dorobo church is nearing completion!”

Pray for a planned visit this Saturday November 3rd to an area on the north coast of Kenya where a group of Boni people have been temporarily resettled by the Kenya Defense Forces. Pray that we can find the camp with the help of some AIC pastors. Pray that God would lead us to a ‘person of peace’ among the Boni Internally Displaced Peoples. And pray that God would raise up some Dorobo believers from central Kenya to reach out to this group of fellow hunter-gatherers, who follow the Islamic faith. Praise the Lord that the Dorobo, who twenty five years ago were unreached, now have a reproducing church that is interested in sending missionaries to reach other unreached tribes in Kenya!

Pray for the Dorobo church at Songoroi on Mt Eburru that partially collapsed during recent heavy rains. Pray that the rebuilding project will galvanize the believers as they work together, raise funds together and complete their building. Pray they continue to be a light in this area.

Pray for Pastor Joseph Mayagi as he follows up with a new Dorobo group in Ilkilorit on the Tanzania border in the Loita Hills. We did village visitation and outreach in Ilkilorit in November, speaking to many and showing the Jesus film at night. Joseph said he would follow up and start a church under a tree as interest grows.

Pray for our Dorobo church leaders to be able to organize a time in the next six months to visit the B people on the coast, a Muslim group of hunter gatherers. Pray that they will understand the importance of reaching out with their faith to other tribes. Pray that their similar backgrounds of hunting and gathering might open a door of understanding. Pray that God will touch the hearts and call one or two Dorobo church leaders/ pastors to minister cross-culturally to the B.

Please pray that the Holy Spirit will fill and control the Dorobo believers, enabling them to continue taking the gospel from village to village, hiking from one mountain ridge to another with the good news of Jesus Christ.

The Dorobo people continue to share Christ and establish new churches in villages where He is not yet known. Now they would like to have an outreach to the Boni people, who do not yet have the gospel. Pray for the Holy Spirit to enable them to be cross-cultural church planters.

Please pray that the Dorobo will continue to spread the gospel far and wide within their tribe. Some of them have also begun to have a concern to share the gospel with another tribe, the Boni. Please pray that the Dorobo church will continue to mature and begin to send out its own missionaries to other people groups who need Jesus Christ.

Please pray that the old men among the Dorobo will be protected and strengthened to resist the temptation to be drunk during the Christmas season. Instead, pray they will be filled with the Holy Spirit to lead others to faith in Christ.

Praise God for the Dorobo pastors and evangelists who are carrying the gospel to hard-to-reach parts of their tribe. Praise God for those who have a deep hunger for His Word, and who sing His songs. Pray for more and more Dorobo to come to faith in Jesus Christ.

“Lord, please deliver the Dorobo from addiction to honey wine, and instead let them be filled with the Holy Spirit.”

Pray for Pastor Silas Bargokwet as he oversees six church plants in the Keringet Forest. Pray for strength and wisdom to serve these scattered churches. Pray for young leaders he can disciple to be future church leaders.

Please pray that as the Dorobo churches continue to grow and multiply, the support and encouragement of western missionaries will speed the process. Praise the Lord for the godly men God has raised up to lead this movement to Christ. Pray for those who are still without Christ, especially older men who are addicted to honey wine. Pray that as they put their faith in Christ, He will deliver them from alcoholism.

The Dorobo traditionally brew a potent honey wine. At circumcision ceremonies where young people come of age, the old men and women get very drunk on honey wine. Pray that God would break through and create a thirst for His Word that his stronger than their craving for honey wine.

Please pray for the Dorobo churches and pastors to continue to spread the gospel throughout their whole tribe, and for the Lord Jesus Christ will be honoured, obeyed and faithfully followed by all who believe in Him.

Praise the Lord for two Dorobo pastors ordained in the Narok area at a big service on Easter Sunday. The two men, Jonathan Nang’ari and Jackson Ng’ayami, both accepted Christ in the late 1990s and attended the Enosotua Dorobo Centre for their basic foundational teaching. Since then they’ve gone on to Bible college and have been pastoring local churches in Dorobo areas. Their elevation to fully ordained ministers in the Africa Inland Church is a big step forward for them and the Dorobo people. Pray that Jonathan and Jackson would continue to serve their people with humility and that the Gospel would spread to other neighboring villages.

Lets pray with the Dorobo churches their breakthrough prayer: Set our elders free from their addiction to honey wine and let them be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Pray for our upcoming Dorobo prayer conference for pastors and elders of the Dorobo churches. We’ve had to reschedule the meeting one week later, so the new dates will be April 3-6. Pray that the men will be encouraged by the time to be together and pray for each other. Pray for the teaching that will be shared during this conference. At our last prayer conference a number of the men asked for prayer to break the stronghold of alcoholism among the older Dorobo. Their cultural view of drinking honey wine is to get drunk as fast as you can, and this has held many of the older men back from making a commitment to Christianity. Pray that God will break this stronghold and that the older generation of Dorobo will learn to follow Jesus and be filled with the Spirit of God.

On December 28 I met with Pastor Silas Bargokwet, who has been working with the Dorobo/Okiek in the Keringet area with us since 1993. Despite challenges, he gave a good report on what God has been doing in that area. They have planted about six churches and completed building a primary school and have started a secondary school. This is an area that serves both Dorobo/Okiek and Kipsigis people in a forested area. Pastor Bargokwet also has a heart for the children of the area, both orphans and children in single parent homes. The government has used him as the contact point to help these children and he’s visited over 300 homes to determine the needs and provide help. He believes God wants him to start an orphanage for these children. Continue to pray for Pastor Bargokwet that God would provide the support he needs for his missionary work. We have planned a meeting with the Dorobo/Okiek leaders for January 22, where we will survey what churches have been planted and how many have become believers. We hope this will help us to create a vision for what still needs to be accomplished.

Recently we bounced up to the village of Narianta behind a pickup hearse to bury the body of Pastor Reuben Sankok, who had died of spinal meningitis. Over 300 people attended the service. Despite the scratchy sound system, the community belted out Christian songs, children gave tribute to their father (Reuben left 11 children), I preached about our hope in the resurrection and a team of Dorobo pastors surrounded the casket and prayed as we laid Reuben’s body in the ground. There was grief and mourning, but there was an optimistic hope, brought on by their growing faith in Christ. Continue to pray for the family, for the children in school and for God to raise up other men to be leaders in the churches in the area.

Over ten years ago I helped a Dorobo mother, whose son Isaiah had crippled legs and could only crawl on all fours. I prayed for Isaiah at the time and told him he would one day play soccer. Eventually Isaiah went to a crippled children’s centre in Kajiado and after a year or two of calipers and treatment, he was able to walk and he’s now in his last year of high school. I’d almost forgotten the incident, but Pastor Musanga invited me to his house just before Christmas to meet Isaiah, who has become a vibrant Christian and spends his free time sharing his faith. He and Pastor Musanga had held a meeting at a nearby village at Christmas and after Isaiah preached, two people accepted Christ as their Savior. We had a cup of tea and Isaiah thanked us for helping him on his journey of physical healing as well as his spiritual journey following Christ. As we left, Isaiah, who is short and walks with a limp, told me God had answered my prayer for him and he did play soccer at his school. We asked him to pray for my knee (injured in a recent rugby game). It was humbling to hear him offer up a powerful prayer for God to heal my knee. Pray that God would use Isaiah in spreading the Gospel among the Dorobo.

Pray for the Sankok family and the churches at Narianta and Olosho Rongai. Pastor Reuben Sankok, who lived in Narianta and started the Olosho Rongai church passed away on Friday from acute spinal meningitis.  Do lift up the Dorobo churches. This is the second pastor to die in five months. Pray that God will comfort their grief and that He will raise up others to fill Reuben’s place in leading these young churches.

We preached in the church there on Sunday December 4 and then showed the Jesus film in the evening. More than 100 attended the show, crowding into the small church which had been started in the 1990s by Pastor Julius Ng’ayami, our pastor who died of leukemia in August. Most of the viewers were Christians and after the showing, there was a time of fervent prayer as the people said how much the movie had touched them and reminded them of what Jesus did for them on the cross. Pray that message will continue to be shared among the Dorobo.

Twenty-four Dorobo pastors and church leaders came to Naivasha for a three day prayer conference from October 3-6. Since some of them had moved to other church denominations, we hadn’t seen some of them for years. They all came together with one accord and we had two full afternoons of prayer as well as teaching each morning on the challenges of church leadership, taught by Pastor Godfrey Ng’ang’a of the AIC Naivasha. We gathered a lot of information on the growth in the different areas where we had started preaching points back in the 1990s. In some areas, more than 50% of the Dorobo are believers and attending church! Other places the growth has been slower, but even there most areas have at least 10% who are believers and attend church. All of them said the seed had been planted in the 1990s. I was amazed and humbled. At the retreat we planned a number of church visits to encourage the pastors and believers, and we will show the Jesus film at a number of these churches as part of our visits. The pastors asked prayers especially for the older men in many villages who are still bound to their old ways of heavy drinking. Pray also for the planning of another prayer conference, scheduled for mid-March 2017.

Please pray for a Dorobo pastors and leaders prayer conference being held in Naivasha from October 3-6. This will be a get together of the pastors and leaders who have come to Christ since 1994 and have been pastoring or acting as elders in churches among the Dorobo people. As we pray together, we will also be looking to see if there are any ‘regions beyond’ where churches still need to be planted. Pray for effective prayer together. Pray for a time of refreshment for these leaders. And pray for inspiration to carry on with the task of evangelizing the Dorobo people.

Pastor Julius Ng’ayami passed away this evening, August 21, 2016, after a battle with leukemia. In June he did make the trip to the Loita Hills with us for a ten day evangelism trip. God gave him the strength. He really wanted to visit a Dorobo village at Olterkessy. We made it there and after sharing the Gospel, two Dorobo in that place accepted Christ. Julius also wanted to visit a very traditional group of Dorobo still living in the forest near Entasekera. He also fulfilled that wish and told me, “Shel, you still have a lot of work to do in this area to share Christ with this group of Dorobo.” After we returned from the Loita Hills in early July, Julius’ health took a turn for the worse. He was hospitalized, then released after some blood transfusions and some more chemotherapy. Then he was hospitalize about two weeks ago. We visited him in hospital several times. Last week he got pneumonia and had difficulty breathing .We made a final visit on Friday. I held Julius by the hand and then prayed with him. He nodded and said yes and amen. I was up in the Dorobo village of Songoroi today with Pastor Musanga Omerae doing a baby dedication service for over 20 young children. On arrival home this evening I got a phone message that Julius had passed away. His suffering is over and he’s in his Savior’s arms. Pray for God to comfort his family and pray for God to raise up other Dorobo men to carry on the task of sharing the Gospel with this group of hunter gatherers in Kenya.

Here’s an update on Pastor Julius Ng’ayami. I took him to visit his doctor at St Mary’s hospital on Thursday, June 2. They checked his blood and his white blood count was in normal levels. The doctor was amazed and said he would not give him a second dose of IV chemo. Instead, they gave him four units of blood (the previous chemo had made him anemic, I guess) and sent him home to rest and eat well. Julius was so excited. He stayed in hospital two nights while they gave him the four units of whole blood. I met him Saturday on his way home and he said he felt so much stronger. He really wants to travel to Loita with a mission team from June 25 to July 4. He said he wants to keep serving the Lord until his last breath, and this change in health was really encouraging to him. Unless he experiences complications, he’ll probably come with us, though he is still much weaker than last year. He’ll visit the hospital again on the June 23rd, right before we head out to Loita, and if he’s feeling strong enough, he’ll travel with us.

Pastor Julius spent three days in hospital. I went to visit him and talked with his doctor from the US who confirmed Julius did have chronic leukemia and it was now entering the acute stage. The doctor said Julius would have a ‘rough patch’ ahead of him. And he gave him some IV chemotherapy in addition the an earlier form of chemo by pills. We got Julius released from hospital on Friday May 6 and Julius and his brother Jackson spent the night with me in Naivasha. Julius was feeling nauseated and we prayed for him that night. On Saturday May 7 Julius attended a men’s Bible study from our Naivasha International Fellowship and we laid hands on him and prayed for him again for healing. Then it took most of my day to slog through the mud on the road up to his house. By God’s grace we delivered him to his family and manage to slither out again. I felt down having left him. But I continued to pray and ask God to show us his will for Julius to guide our prayers. After reading Acts 3 it certainly seemed we should pray for his strength to be returned. I called a day or two later and Julius said he was feeling good and much stronger. God is answers, but please continue to pray. He has a followup appointment for June 2nd for the doctors to check his blood levels.

Here’s an update on Pastor Julius Ng’ayami. I took him to visit his doctor at St Mary’s hospital on Thursday, June 2. They checked his blood and his white blood count was in normal levels. The doctor was amazed and said he would not give him a second dose of IV chemo. Instead, they gave him a four units of blood (the previous chemo had made him anemic, I guess) and send him home to rest and eat well. Julius was so excited. He stayed in hospital two nights while they gave him four units of whole blood. I met him Saturday on his way home and he said he felt so much stronger. He really wants to travel to Loita with a mission team from June 25 to July 4. He said he wants to keep serving the Lord until his last breath, and this change in health was really encouraging to him. Unless he experiences complications, he’ll probably come with us, though he is still much weaker than last year. He’ll visit the hospital again on the June 23r, right before we head out to Loita, and if he’s feeling strong enough, he’ll travel with us.

Pastor Julius spent three days in hospital. I went to visit him and talked with his doctor from the US who confirmed Julius did have chronic leukemia and it was now entering the acute stage. The doctor said Julius would have a ‘rough patch’ ahead of him. And he gave him some IV chemotherapy in addition the an earlier form of chemo by pills. We got Julius released from hospital on Friday May 6 and Julius and his brother Jackson spent the night with me in Naivasha. Julius was feeling nauseated and we prayed for him that night. On Saturday May 7 Julius attended a men’s Bible study from our Naivasha International Fellowship and we laid hands on him and prayed for him again for healing. Then it took most of my day to slog through the mud on the road up to his house. By God’s grace we delivered him to his family and manage to slither out again. I felt down having left him. But I continued to pray and ask God to show us his will for Julius to guide our prayers. After reading Acts 3 it certainly seemed we should pray for his strength to be returned. I called a day or two later and Julius said he was feeling good and much stronger. God is answers, but please continue to pray. He has a followup appointment for June 2nd for the doctors to check his blood levels.

Be in prayer for Pastor Julius Ngayami. His teenage son Solomon died last week following some severe headaches. They sought medical help and even had an MRI, but Solomon died in his sleep. Since then Julius has been feeling extremely weak. Doctors said it is just the stress. But today he felt so week that he was taken by ambulance to St Mary’s Hospital in Elelementeita where he’s been admitted. I talked to him on the phone and he seems very tired and down. He’ll see his doctor tomorrow and we’ll know if it’s related to his feeling low after losing his son or whether his blood disorder is gaining an upper hand on his health. Pray for strength and healing in both his body and his spirit. Julius has served as a catalyst for much of our Dorobo outreach, encouraging others and preaching and sharing his faith.

We made our first survey of the Dorobo people in 1991, found they were about 20,000 strong, spread through Kenya’s highland forests and only a handful had heard the name of Jesus. It’s 25 years later and we plan to do another survey to see how God’s Word has spread through this group of traditional hunter gatherers. We know we have started about 25 AIC churches, but we also know others have joined other church groups or moved away and started small house churches. We know we’ve sent about 28 men to Bible college. Some are pastoring, others are working with NGOs, others have changed denominations. Pray for me, Shel Arensen, and for Julius Ng’ayami as we meet with pastors, ask questions, fill out survey forms and try to get a reasonable count of how much still needs to be done in planting Christ-centered churches among the Dorobo people of Kenya.

Shel Arensen is visiting the Eburru forest today. He has helped a group of Dorobo men start a group to preserve and plant trees in their traditional home which was devastated by charcoal burners some years ago. The group is being helped to start an indigenous tree nursery and to replant a section of the forest. Today is a visit with some of the donors sponsoring the project. Many of the older hunters from the Eburru area have joined this group as they are keen to protect their forest. The project will also give them some new beehives for collecting honey. Most of the men in the group are not believers. Pray that this shared interest in the forest will draw these men into a relationship with the creator of the forests.

After a church service at AIC Oloika in the Moidapi area near Lake Naivasha, Simon Lempapa, the lead elder of the church, asked me to continue to pray for Zakayo, a young man who has been troubled by demonic attack. A few years ago, he’d run away from home and sleep out in the open in an attempt to escape the spiritual attack. We went and prayed some spiritual warfare type of prayers and since then, he has been much better. But Lempapa said Zakayo is still afflicted with many fears, causing him to lack employment, even though he has gotten an education. He often moves to different people’s homes, hoping for relief, staying there for weeks at a time. Lempapa told me that Zakayo’s father, who has since passed away, had been attracted to witchcraft as a way of solving problems, but now Zakayo and several siblings continue to be afflicted by demonic attack. Pray for Zakayo and his family. Pray that the root of witchcraft would be cut in the name of Jesus. Pray that Zakayo and his siblings would turn fully to Jesus for salvation and complete healing from these demonic attacks.

Pray for Pastor Julius Ng’ayami. He has been a lead pastor with a passion to share Christ with others in the Dorobo community. For the past year he’s been struggling with a blood disorder. Pray for complete healing so he can continue to reach and encourage the Dorobo in their faith.

Message

On a recent trip, we met up with a young Dorobo man, Daniel, who is a believer and helping run some small churches in the area. He is full of humility and faith, and desires to go to Bible school. Some funds were promised to sponsor him to Bible college along with another Dorobo man Joseph and a Maasai man from the Loibon’s family named George. All three will start college in September. Pray with us that God would provide their Bible college tuition costs for three years. The church and local pastors will handle their transport to school and their room and board at the school. Pray to the Lord to make a way possible for these three men to receive the training they desire and further their ability to share Jesus with those unreached in the areas they live.