Nathan Nocchi had the pleasure of connecting with Mike Congrove, David Kaya, and Matt Jones of Empower One. In addition to the stories told and information provided in this interview, you can learn more about Empower One by visiting empower-one.org.
Nathan Nocchi (NN): Mike, David, and Matt, it is a great privilege indeed to speak with you about the importance of missions, and more particularly, the impact of Empower One. To begin, can you tell us who and what Empower One is? How was it founded? What is the organization’s chief task?
Mike Congrove: David and I met almost twenty years ago. He and I co-founded Empower One because we felt the burden of reaching unreached people. For context, if you combine Sudan and South Sudan, there are just under fifty million people who are unreached with the gospel of Jesus Christ, according to Joshua Project. Empower One exists to put as big a dent in that number as we can, and our primary means are finding, educating, training, and deploying church planters to plant healthy churches that multiply.
Back in December 2005, I had just turned in my laptop and security badge at what is now AT&T, and two days later, I boarded a plane headed to Kigali, Rwanda. I had raised about 80 percent of my support to join e3 Partners Ministry, and I was trying to discern where God wanted me to serve. I had never been to Africa. This was my first time on the continent. E3 was fairly new in Africa, and they had gathered their local country directors together. Here’s an excerpt from the book that I recently completed, capturing Empower One’s vision and history, called Eating with God’s Fork. In this excerpt, I describe how I met our other co-founder, David Kaya, at a conference of e3 country directors reporting on the previous year’s ministry results:
David was the last speaker at the conference, which had featured leaders from multiple East African countries, all extolling how well their church-planting work was going. Baby-faced and thin, David was in his early thirties, though he looked much younger. He represented Sudan. E3 had recently promoted him to country director.
He spoke bluntly, and his speech was different from what had preceded him. “I don’t have anything like these other testimonies. Four months ago, a twenty-three-year civil war ended in my country. I recently preached in a city in Sudan, and two people died while I was preaching. They carried two people on mats, and they died of malaria at the conference where I preached. We have no paved roads, no running water, no electricity. I have managed to plant eight new churches. I feel totally stuck. I have been publicly humiliated in my hometown. Other church leaders who do not preach the real gospel even slapped my face in town.” The atmosphere in the room changed. I was locked in on David and his testimony. Everyone in the room was moved by the challenges he faced. I spent the rest of the conference getting to know him. We clicked.
David and I started working together the next year. It became immediately apparent that there was an enormous deficit of trained church leaders. After a twenty-three-year civil war, the people were either dead, had been raised in refugee camps, or had been raised in the bush as cattle keepers. David’s solution was to start the North East Africa Theological Seminary (NEATS). He said, “If we can’t find leaders, we will build them from scratch.” In addition to rigorous Scripture study and theology, David ensured the school would lean heavily on practicums. Students routinely go out to share the gospel, they are in discipleship groups, and each student must participate in a church plant in order to graduate.
To continue meeting needs, we started primary and secondary schools, incubated a microfinance sister ministry now called Seed Effect, started a vocational school, and facilitated a 12-step recovery group. Many of the programs were out of scope for e3 and caused operational tension. In 2012, David and I spun out from e3 and launched Empower One.
Today, Empower One’s mission is to train and support local church leaders to plant churches in the hard places of Africa. Our focus since 2006 has been the countries of South Sudan and Sudan. However, primarily because of NEATS, we’ve bled over into the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, and the refugee camps in northern Uganda.
NN: Mike, thank you for sharing this brief but illuminating history. David, if I may turn to you, can you provide our readership with a glimpse of Empower One’s approach to discipleship and how that is foundational to your work in Africa?
David Kaya: The major focus is on the hard-to-reach areas where previous evangelistic efforts were unsuccessful for generations: Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Horn of Africa. Empower One’s missional approach is based on indigenous empowerment; we train the local church leaders to reach their own population with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Our evangelism is based on the local church multiplying itself through discipleship. We mobilize the local churches into God’s field to raise a harvest for the Lord. Out of the harvest we disciple the new believers following the principle of 2 Timothy 2:2, “And the things that you have heard from me among many witnesses, commit these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.” This approach has been wildly successful.
We planted the first church in Kajo Keji in 2002. Out of this one church using the 2 Timothy 2:2 discipleship model, four additional churches were planted within the first year. These faithful men and women continue in discipleship through small groups in homes and other public places. We believe that the Scriptures provide everything that we need for ministry; therefore, the word of God is central to all that we do. Leaders and churches centered on the word are prepared to run the race with perseverance.
As the gospel went out in unreached and difficult places, the enemy started to persecute the leaders and church members. Many church leaders were denied job
opportunities. Some Muslim background believers even lost their families. The father-in-law came and removed the wives and children. Many were denied medical
treatment, their children were removed from the schools, and access to the market within the community was cut off due to their faith in Christ Jesus. The word of God prepared them for these trials.
In our discipleship model, new believers are fed spiritual milk, but they are expected to mature quickly. Spiritual maturity prepares them to face any trial. Our discipleship is never based on theories. The church involves the new believers in the process of joining the rest of the church members in evangelism programs and other church activities. This practicum-based discipleship through active ministry gives the new believer an experience of and a precedent for their new life in Christ. The new believers who quickly demonstrate spiritual growth are encouraged to tell their testimonies in our fellowships. This practice allows them to become comfortable speaking about their faith and provides a testimony of their new life in Christ to the community.
As discipleship continues, we pair these new believers with a strong leader and send them into a new area to plant a church. The leader keeps on training these young disciples in all aspects of the church. Many of these disciples are sent to NEATS to strengthen them further. This method helped us, as Empower One, to plant more than 600 churches in five countries in Africa.
Empower One operates solely through the indigenous church members. Empower One US helps by trying to remove any barriers or obstacles that can impede the expansion of the gospel. The US team does this by mobilizing resources and bringing American Christians to come on short-term trips to fellowship, encourage, and teach alongside our African field partners. We praise the Lord for this approach, which Empower One uses.
Let me give you an example of how our indigenous discipleship model is effective. In 2013, civil war broke out in South Sudan, where we had planted several churches in many states. The war quickly spread throughout the country. Most of the foreign missionaries left to return to their home countries. We praise God for our trained indigenous leaders. They had no place to flee. They stayed with their congregations while the foreign missionaries packed their bags and left. The shepherds did not abandon their sheep. They continued with the mission of preaching and discipleship. They scattered with their people and remained faithful in teaching the word, whether in internally displaced settlements or in refugee camps in foreign countries. Most of the churches that were planted by the foreign missionaries who left lacked leadership, and the churches did not continue.
`When the war in South Sudan pushed all the population to Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia, the African church experienced serious growth. The hopes placed on government faded. The Lord became the only One to be trusted by most of the refugees. United Nations staff in Uganda asked some of the newly registered refugees
what services they needed to overcome the trauma they experienced as they fled the fighting. They answered that they needed food and church leaders to start churches immediately in the camps. The church was in the hands of the Lord, moving strongly, and thousands of refugees accepted the Lord Jesus as their Savior.
Our most extreme example of a shepherd never leaving his sheep is one of our pastors in Darfur. When the war in Sudan started on April 15, 2023, he promised the leadership of Empower One Africa that he would never leave his church due to the war. We tried to ask him to vacate to South Sudan. He rejected our advice. Up to this day, he has remained embedded in the midst of fighting even after his home was hit with an RPG. The church there is looking to him for spiritual care. The church body where he serves has grown by 100 percent as they face suffering and death daily. The church has a history of growing healthier in the face of hardship, such as war and famine. Let us pray for this pastor and his leaders who are serving daily in the face of death and pain.
NN: Amen, David. For the Christian who lives to pray, serve, and revel in the goodness of God, hard providences often bring about strengthened commitments to the
truth of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ—and for those called to ministry, the building up of his church. Being that Scripture is the only infallible ground upon which the Christian life is to be framed, it ought to be the foundation upon which all ministerial formation and training occur. Matt, can you discuss the function and role of Scripture in the Bible School? As a Westminster student, how has your training shaped and formed you for this great work?
Matt Jones: Great question. I would say that the existence of North East Africa Theological Seminary and Empower One as a whole represents this well. First, let me add more detail to what Mike and Kaya have already said of Empower One’s history to get a better context of what I mean. When Mike and Kaya met, the war that just ended claimed approximately four million lives. Additionally, 70 percent of the adult population was illiterate. Pastors serving in South Sudan were doing their best to pastor churches in challenging circumstances, but there were very few trained pastors. Their knowledge of the word was minimal, and many times cultural/traditional elements polluted the teaching. Polygamist pastor were (and still are) common. For this reason, North East Africa Theological Seminary was born. Kaya and two fellow seminary graduates gathered seventeen students under three trees to train them in biblical doctrine. From these seventeen students, Empower One has now trained 9,000 leaders planting over 600 churches across South Sudan, Sudan, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in the Ugandan refugee camps. We don’t claim to be innovative or master strategists. We are simply running the play that Jesus laid out in the Great Commission.
As the ministry of Empower One grows so does the training, and Westminster plays a vital role in helping to strengthen the curriculum of NEATS. Since becoming a student at Westminster, I have been able to introduce some of Westminster’s teaching into NEATS curriculum. Introducing redemptive-historical hermeneutics and biblical
and systematic theology has unlocked the treasure field within Scripture. Our students are better prepared to point to Christ from any passage of Scripture. When I have been able to bring people from Westminster to NEATS to train our faculty and students, the response is overwhelming. They want us to stay longer and come more often. Westminster is indirectly preparing pastors to serve in some of the darkest and most difficult areas of Africa.
NN: The Scriptures do indeed testify to our Lord Jesus Christ. It is immensely difficult, if at all possible, to overstate the interconnectedness of the Scriptures, and to see the grand plan of redemption woven throughout the tapestry of the Old and New Testaments. As we think about this revelation, especially as we now reflect on the 500th Anniversary of William Tyndale’s English Bible, in your work in Africa, how important is it to explain the Scriptures in the vernacular, utilizing the customs and language of the people there? Why is the spirit of Tyndale’s work important?
Matt: I can’t overstate the effect of hearing the word of God in the mother tongue, and Tyndale was a champion of that. Empower One works in areas where people feel unvalued and forgotten. When they hear the truth of Scripture in their local language, it changes everything.
Let me briefly tell you Amacha’s story. He was raised as a nominal Catholic in South Sudan. When he heard of “born again” Christians coming to his area, he would actively pursue them to harass them and run them off. Furthermore, he was a soldier in the South Sudanese military. He used his military-issued gun to taunt and harass the Protestant Christians as they worshiped.
After he retired from the military, he went home and worked his crops. When Protestant evangelists came to minister in his area, he told his wife that he would confront them on their false teaching. If they couldn’t show evidence for their beliefs in Scripture, he would “chase them away.” Not only were they able to answer his questions, but they did so respectfully and gently. They showed him in Scripture where the answers were and expounded on the teaching more than he had previously known, connecting their answers in Scripture to other Scriptures. For Amacha, it was like the Road to Emmaus experience. He didn’t want to leave. He stayed with them all day, sitting under their teaching. When the team of evangelists left, they invited Amacha to a showing of The Jesus Film later that night.
Amacha would find out later that these evangelists were a part of Empower One’s Mobile Evangelism Team (MET). The MET team has since been disbanded because we want missional outreach to come from the local churches rather than a parachurch organization. The MET team was largely made up of NEATS students and graduates. MET’s strategy was to target an area where there were few to no biblically sound churches. The goal was to have a small discipleship group or church established by the time they left. MET would pack all the supplies needed (food, tents, sound systems, video projectors) into a lorry truck and set out for weeks at a time. They would canvas the area by doing outreach. At the end of each day, they would show The Jesus Film in the local dialect.
Amacha talked about his experience of seeing The Jesus Film, an adaptation of the Gospel of Luke. He had never seen a film in his local language, let alone a book of
the Bible. Amacha was intrigued by what he had heard in his discussions with members of MET, but he still had doubts. It wasn’t until he heard the gospel in his mother
tongue that he understood the depth of his depravity and the humility and love of Christ’s voluntary condescension to take on the sins of the world. “I see what kind of love is this…someone who is sinless can come and offer his life on my behalf. That one touched my heart so much. That really makes me understand the whole passage
that was preached before I heard The Jesus Film.”
After surrendering his life to Christ, he became a student at NEATS. Now, he is pastoring a church in his home village—The same village where he intended to chase away the Protestant “false teachers.”
There are more stories like Amacha’s. That’s why Empower One’s field partners are working with Bible translators to target people groups who still don’t have the Bible in their dialect. Many of our faculty and students work on committees that are translating the Bible into their mother tongue. In a very real way, this embodies the spirit of both Jerome and Tyndale.
Empower One has adopted seven unreached people groups to target in Sudan. The Keiga are one of them. Some friends of ours at an organization called Spoken
are working on translating the Bible into the Keiga language. The Keiga people are located in Sudan, where one of Empower One’s church planters and NEATS graduates is ministering. The Joshua Project records the Keiga people as 94.6 percent Muslim and only 1.4 percent evangelical Christian. Even in the face of persecution, harsh climate, and relatively no infrastructure, he planted six churches throughout the Nuba Mountains. Currently, he’s discipling a group of Keiga youth. Let’s remember
these men and women in our prayers. May God protect them and soften the hearts of those who don’t yet know him.
NN: Amen, brother. Mike, David, and Matt, thank you for taking the time to discuss your work with us. Matt, if we may conclude our time with you, how can our readership
get involved? How can they support Empower One? How can we pray for you?
Matt: The possibilities are abundant. I’d say that the easiest on-ramp to get involved would be to sign up to follow us on social media. We are on Facebook, Instagram,
YouTube, and X. You can always visit our website at Empower-One.org to learn more and sign up to receive our monthly email newsletter and other updates from the
field. I don’t feel like we have even scratched the surface in this interview. But, as I have already alluded to, the best way to understand what we do is to put your feet
in the African soil and sit with these men and women. Considering all that they have endured, they are some of the most resilient and amazing people I have ever known.
I’m honored to work with them.
And of course, you can financially partner with Empower One. Eighty-five cents of every dollar donated goes directly to the field, and we are looking to increase that number to ninety cents. Our big North Star is a ten-year project that we believe will provide financial self-sustainability for our African brothers and sisters. They have already proven to be spiritually self-sustaining, but the final frontier of missions is to empower them financially as well. It’s an audacious strategy, but one that we believe in. The goal is to plant 750 churches in difficult and unreached locations in South Sudan, Sudan, and DR Congo. There are more details to this project than we can discuss here, but I encourage you to go to Empower-One.org to learn our plan to dignify the African church through self-sustainability. These church plants will be equipped to meet the spiritual, educational, and physical needs of people who are in desperate need of such care. These church communities will be a refuge that will incorporate schools, clean water, radio stations, pharmacies, and seminary training for future church plants. We are already seeing this ministry model work in Kajo Keji where David Kaya is serving. We plan to duplicate it fourteen more times to saturate these areas with the hope of Christ.
Nathan, thank you so much for your time and allowing me to share what God is doing through Empower One. You know that I love Westminster and how much of a blessing it has been to so many.