ministry
From Addict On The Streets To Peacebuilder across the world
Neighbors used to murmur that Mother Roman would have a happier life if her 26-year-old son would just go ahead and die. Solomon Telahun (Ketsela) had been self-destructing for 14 years at that point: chewing chat to get high, smoking marijuana, and getting blind-drunk on alcohol, plus making three outright suicide attempts. Solomon stole money from his mother to feed his addictions. Roman grieved for her son's lostness. But she never stopped praying for him. She never refused him a place to sleep when he entered her doorway after being gone for weeks, living as a filthy homeless man on the streets of the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. Solomon started down the path of destruction at age 14 – a teenager’s reaction, he believes, to his parents’ divorce when he was age 7. His mother had been trained as a “dresser” (nurses’ assistant) at Nazareth Dresser Bible School, and his father had been one of the first Ethiopian employees at Nazareth Hospital. But by the time Solomon was growing up, his father had left Mennonite circles. Solomon felt torn. One August day in 1989, then-28-year-old Solomon agreed to accompany his mother and eldest sister to a MKC worship event. He refused to enter the church, though. Instead he tucked his dirty body, topped by a huge mound of matted hair, under an outside table. He could hear and feel the “outpouring of the spirit” from the building. He cried out in tears, “Oh, my Lord and redeemer, help me to give my life to you! Come into my heart and give me eternal life. Change me, because I am tired of myself!” That did it. “In less than a month’s time, a complete U-turn took place in my life, to the amazement of thousands of people around town,” Solomon told Crossroads in the spring of 2010. Though his native language is Amharic and he had not stepped foot in a classroom since high school, Solomon pleaded to be admitted in 1991 to Evangelical Theological College, a highly respected institution run in English. After admission, “I nailed myself to a chair in the library. In two or three semesters, I brought up my grade point average to 3.7.” (He completed his BTh degree in 1997.) In prayer meetings -- Solomon spent evenings, sometimes all night, at these -- he found the woman who became his wife after a two-year engagement. Today, Solomon and Muli are the parents of a son and a daughter. Muli works full-time as the children's minister in their 2,000-member church in Addis Ababa, where Solomon is an elder. Solomon has managed to find time to earn a master of theology, write four books, and hold teaching and administrative positions at Pentecostal Theological College, Evangelical Theo-
Solomon Telahun on the eve of graduation from EMU
logical College, and Meserete Kristos College. Solomon does not take credit for all this: “God heals. Jesus performs miracles. The fact that I am sitting here today is proof of that.” In the spring of 2010, Solomon was in fact sitting mostly at Eastern Mennonite University, finishing a master’s degree (his second) in conflict transformation. He looked forward to reuniting that summer with his beloved wife and children in Ethiopia, where he hopes to be a “voice from the church to larger society, and a voice within the church to the church itself, on matters of peace and justice.”
www.emu.edu | crossroads | 35