The first students graduated from groundbreaking St Frumentius’ Anglican College, in Gambella, western Ethiopia in the summer.
For these students, the road to graduation has been especially challenging: two of the seven graduates are refugees and the others are from two different ethnic groups that have a history of conflict.
Rapidly growing church
The church is growing rapidly in Ethiopia, largely through the migration of South Sudanese Christian refugees to the area. Pastors say that while they know how to plant churches and bring people to Christ, they don’t know the Bible and they don’t know how to make disciples.
Chris Wilson, who oversees the teaching programme at the college, said: ‘We are seeing local people coming to faith, communities changed and tribal tensions addressed. The students had been away from Gambella for ten weeks of field education and in that time one student, Pastor Isaac, planted a church and baptised 54 people.’
Church among refugees
Another student, a Sudanese refugee, helped build a church in a refugee camp. Christians living in the camp made round trips of two and a half hours into the mountains to bring bamboo to build a new church. Other graduates from the course started discipling young people in the Gambella region through sport and Bible teaching. One said that before he came to the college he hated people from other ethnic groups – some of them had killed relatives of his – but now he sees them as other children of God.
