THE SEVENTH CHURCH
Photo by Tom Lloyd
BY DICK DUERKSEN
Adventist churches speckle the hills of Malawi like spots on a leopard. Most congregations meet beneath trees or inside slowly-rising mud and brick walls. Few have roofs to protect them from the weather, yet more than 600,000 people meet for worship every Sabbath. One of 1,300 congregations who need buildings is in the hillside community of Mpasa. The road to Mpasa begins as a congested asphalt thoroughfare in the city of Blantryre and quickly transforms into a pot-holed ribbon winding through hills covered with thousand-acre tea plantations. After a couple hours you’ll come to a dusty turn-off that looks like the “end of the road.” Thirty bouncy minutes and four
small villages later, you’re in Mpasa. There’s no sign, but turn right just beyond the Grocery, drive 20 meters into a maize field, and you’re at church. I was dumbfounded with what I saw behind the store. The new steel church was rising right beside what looked to be a perfectly-good red brick church. “Why build here?” I asked Elmer Barbosa, leader of the Maranatha building team.
“The congregation’s been building on this for years,” he replied, “using local sun-dried bricks and mortar made from river sand. Even though the walls are high enough they don’t have money for trusses or roof – so the rains erode the bricks and the walls break down.” I ran my hands along the bricks and watched as dust dropped from them like rusty snow. The building looked good, but the new steel One-Day Church looked far better. Next door, church member
4 | T H E V O L U N T EER SUMMER 2010
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