Forging Friendships

by Kristin Huffman, Associate Director with Light of Hope Ministry Ethiopia Leaders + Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church (TX) Leaders

During this 40th Anniversary Year, we recall countless stories of God using Frontier Fellowship to advocate for least-reached peoples and activate the Church to engage in making the Good News of Jesus known. It is our privilege to serve as a link between indigenous partners and Western Christians, seeing the blessings God brings when partnerships form and flourish.

In this issue of The Frontier Journal, Associate Director Kristin Huffman reflects on the ways God drew Frontier Fellowship, Light of Hope Ministry Ethiopia and Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church (TX) into a relationship, resulting in a partnership that is bringing Gospel access to the Arsi Oromo people of southern Ethiopia.

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Kristin, an ordained pastor, has served Presbyterian churches for over 33 years. Prior to joining Frontier Fellowship’s staff, she spent 19 years at Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church in Houston, Texas—first as the Christian Education pastor, then as the Associate Pastor for Outreach.

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I’ll never forget my first visit to Ethiopia in 2007. Just months earlier, while attending a gathering of the Association of Presbyterian Mission Pastors, I’d overheard Rev. Jim Milley (then the mission pastor at La Cañada Presbyterian Church, CA) talking about an upcoming vision trip he was leading. Something stirred in me, and I asked if I could join the team. One of my colleagues from Memorial Drive joined me; we both felt that God was calling our congregation to Ethiopia and something new in ministry.

We landed in Addis Ababa in the wee hours of the morning. The distinct, unfamiliar sights and smells of Ethiopia instantly overwhelmed me. Yet strangely, I felt like I was home. Urgessa Biru, founder and director of Light of Hope Ministry Ethiopia, was at the airport to welcome us. From the moment we met him, Urgessa opened his heart to us—sharing his story, his faith and his dreams. His deep passion for Jesus, joy in serving God and commitment to ministry inspired us.

At one of the churches we visited during that vision trip, Urgessa asked the team to come forward so he could pray for us. We couldn’t understand a word he prayed, but I began weeping. The Holy Spirit’s presence was so palpable. I knew then that God would use Light of Hope to forever change my heart, my life and my church.

A VISION BORN FROM PRAYER

Light of Hope is a holistic ministry serving the more than 10 million predominantly Muslim Arsi Oromo people of Ethiopia. They provide access to the Gospel through community development and spiritual formation in culturally honoring ways. With school construction, education, healthcare, vocational and pastoral training, church planting, Bible translation and pioneering efforts in contextualization, Light of Hope is creating opportunities for people to encounter the Good News of Jesus in their own language and culture for the first time.

Light of Hope was founded 20 years ago, born from years of prayer and the common vision God cultivated in the hearts of three strangers who became friends. Urgessa told me the story of its beginning:

In 2001, I preached at a gathering of evangelical leaders in Ethiopia and shared the vision God had given me for reaching Arsi and other Muslim people groups. Kes Iteffa, a leader in the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus, approached me afterwards and asked to talk more. He shared that he and Harold Kurtz, whom he knew from Bible school, had been praying together for over 20 years that God would raise up somebody to reach the Muslim peoples in southern Ethiopia with the Gospel in a contextualized way. I met Harold and his daughter, Caroline, a few months later when they were in Ethiopia. Kes Iteffa introduced me to them and said, ‘This is the guy we’ve been praying for!’

He shared about how he and I met, about the calling God had given me and about how he longed for the Ethiopian Church to embrace this vision. He said to Harold, ‘This is your baby. This is why Frontier Fellowship came into being. If there's anything you can do, help this man.' We talked and shared together for a while, then Harold came and knelt beside me. He put his hand on my shoulder and started crying, so moved by what God was doing. We prayed and prayed, then exchanged addresses. Harold sent an email to the board, proposing that they include the Arsi people as one of Frontier Fellowship’s people group focuses. Greg Roth, then chair of the board, responded and said, ‘Harold, you never give up on challenging us more.’ God used Harold as a tool to bring Light of Hope to the Frontier Fellowship family.”

THE FRONTIER MISSION VISION GROWS

Coming home from that first vision trip, I began to share the story of my experience in Ethiopia with anyone who would listen. I was convinced that this was where God was leading our church to engage with an unreached people group. Since its founding in 1955, Memorial Drive had always had a deep ethos of generosity—congregants gave extravagantly of their time, talents and finances. What had been missing, however, was an understanding of how a congregation like ours could engage from Houston, Texas, with people all over the world who had never heard the Gospel.

Frontier Fellowship, already a known and respected partner of ours, had been helping us learn about least-reached people groups, but the Arsi Oromo were the first ones I'd met in person. What had once been a concept was becoming a reality.

People slowly began opening to the idea of a ministry partnership in Ethiopia. We walked alongside Light of Hope for several months, taking time to pray together and get to know each other. Urgessa came to Memorial Drive to share his story with our church leaders. A year later, I participated in another vision trip to Ethiopia. Shortly after that, Memorial Drive really caught the vision and our engagement with Light of Hope grew deeper.

We began giving regular financial gifts and, for the next several years, sent numerous people on vision trips and to serve in the ESL summer program for Light of Hope teachers. We were delighted to participate with a ministry that truly revealed Jesus as the “Light of Hope,” and our affection for them and the Arsi people grew. Urgessa visited numerous times. So did Taliilee, a young woman who coordinated Light of Hope’s outreach to women and had since joined Frontier Fellowship’s team as an associate director mobilizing Oromo diaspora churches and Western Christians in the US. The relationship bore fruit and grew in a steady, God-determined way.

A PARTNERSHIP BUILT ON FRIENDSHIP

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul describes the Church as a body with many members, each dependent on the others for the flourishing of the whole. When I think of the partnership between Light of Hope and Memorial Drive—and how Frontier Fellowship helped nurture it—I'm so humbled to see the ways God wove our stories together. It wasn't merely a "successful partnership." It was also a deep, emotional, faithful growing together in Christ.

I left Memorial Drive’s staff in 2016 (to join Frontier Fellowship’s team!), but the congregation’s partnership with Light of Hope is still flourishing. I recently visited with Urgessa and Taliilee, who are now married, as well as leaders from Memorial Drive’s outreach ministry, to reflect on the impact this partnership has had on each of us.

Amy Delgado, Memorial Drive’s Outreach Director, shared:

Frontier Fellowship helped take us from the perspective of being a supporter of mission to actually being engaged in mission. Partnering with Light of Hope opened our minds to think of mission in a much different way. Beyond relief and caring for the marginalized in reached societies, we also began to embrace the larger task of reaching the whole world for Jesus.

Our relationship and friendship with Light of Hope has deepened, resulting in several opportunities for us to participate in projects with them, such as Bible translation and building schools, that have made a huge impact on the Arsi Oromo people. Even through the recent civil unrest, it has been a privilege to pray for Light of Hope and the friends we have made in Ethiopia. When they hurt, we hurt. We feel a deep connection from the years of partnership and praise God for the incredible impact they continue to have bringing Jesus, the true light of hope, to the Arsi people.

Kelsi McCormack, Memorial Drive’s Global Outreach Director, added:

Light of Hope is more than one of our global partners; Urgessa and Taliilee have become dear friends to us. We’ve seen the transformational impact they’re having among the Arsi Oromo community. We’ve also had the opportunity to worship alongside them in an Arsi Oromo church. It was a small glimpse of heaven.

Urgessa and Taliilee both pointed to Frontier Fellowship’s unique approach to partnership, and the resulting friendships they have gained over the years, as a significant impact on their lives and Light of Hope’s ministry.

“With Frontier Fellowship,” Urgessa shared, “partnership has never been primarily about the funding. It’s about the relationship. Frontier Fellowship is a bridge, a link, to friendship with others. You don’t find many Christian organizations based on this kind of model. They helped connect Light of Hope and Memorial Drive in a two-way partnership and, because of that, a lot of things happened. Because of people like Kristin, Amy and Kelsi, Memorial Drive became a part of the vision.”

Remembering the first time he met Harold, Urgessa added:

He would tell people, ‘Urgessa is our guy. His vision is our vision.’ I didn’t grow up in the church, and had always worked in the professional world, so I wasn’t sure about asking people for support to do the work God had called me to do. Harold helped me understand that God's work cannot be done by one individual alone. He brought me onto the Frontier Fellowship staff and I felt at home with like-minded people.

The Church in Ethiopia was resisting at that time the vision God had given me to contextualize the Gospel for Arsi people. Frontier Fellowship’s vision—for every people an indigenous church; for every church a mission vision—fit what God already put in my heart. It was the first place I found a family to join. God added me to their body for a purpose, not only to encourage and support me, but to also help enlarge their vision.

Taliilee shared words of deep gratitude for the ways God has used this partnership to transform her life:

I am the person I am today because God used Frontier Fellowship to help me grow in my ministry and my studies, and to open more doors to churches all over the US. I’ve been empowered in a way I never imagined or dreamed in my life. It’s so wonderful to have friends who believe in you and trust you. When you are in ministry, there are often challenges. Friends like these come alongside us to pray with us, encourage us and help us carry out the vision God has given us.

Just look at the impact Light of Hope has had—the schools built, the churches planted, the leaders trained. We couldn’t have done those things if God hadn’t used Frontier Fellowship to connect us to churches and friends like Memorial Drive. More than we have advocated for ourselves, these friends have advocated on our behalf. It's a wonderful, encouraging, powerful and inspiring partnership.

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There’s a very intentional reason the word fellowship is part of our organization’s name. Frontier Fellowship is passionate about drawing people who care about the frontier into friendship. We believe that facilitating relationship-driven partnerships between Western Christians and global partners in least-reached places benefits everyone involved.

By God’s grace, the partnership between Light of Hope and Memorial Drive is a beautiful example of that—a relationship between people who truly love Jesus and each other, and whose friendship and work together is helping least-reached peoples in southern Ethiopia encounter the Good News of God’s Kingdom for the first time.