I live in a very under-resourced area in Nairobi, Kenya. The average income for a household here is about $150 a month, and a large percentage of that has to go toward housing, so there’s not much left for food or anything else. A lot of my neighbors run small shops to make a living. As a mom myself, I connect regularly with other moms in the neighborhood. Many of them are single moms with 4–6 kids, who either don’t have jobs or wash laundry or clean houses for about $5. It’s very difficult to make ends meet.
So when Covid hit, all the restrictions on movement and gathering had a big economic impact on my neighbors. Because there’s so little financial margin, when people lost jobs, had fewer work hours, or had less business in their small shops, it had a dramatic effect. Many people living in the largest slum in our area had to leave the city; they packed up and returned to their ancestral homes in other parts of the country in an attempt to survive.
The Novo/InnerCHANGE Kenya ministry team I’ve been part of as a local leader for about three years now was hit hard by Covid also. We had to completely change what we were doing. All our ministries in the community were oriented around gathering people together—specifically, through sports—and that got taken away from us pretty quickly during Covid. We needed to find new ways to minister in our community, and wanted to discover a way to practically serve people. Looking at the financial distress of our neighbors, distributing food was the most obvious place to start.
But before we launched our first distribution, our team leader asked us to brainstorm how we could creatively share the good news through it. What would it look like to not just hand out food, but really be the hands and feet of Jesus in our communities?
Our first answer was prayer; we began to bathe each distribution time in prayer and it really enlivened our distributions. We did seven or eight total, and there were several where we really felt the need for that pre-work of prayer—praying that God would go before us and show us how this food distribution might help us connect to people in a deeper way and see his activity in their lives in ways we could partner with. The second idea we came up with was to give out scriptures of hope along with the food. So before every distribution, we printed a new scripture for each family.
I had already identified some of the families with the greatest need in my neighborhood through my daily interactions with them. On distribution day I would arrange the food and then call families in small groups to come pick it up, because it was prohibited to come in a large group. I also gave them the scripture and asked them to write down where they were struggling and how we could pray for them on another piece of paper.
After each distribution in my neighborhood, I did follow-up visits with each family and asked them about the scripture I’d handed out: “How did that scripture bless you?” Families would respond with things like, “God was telling me ____ through the scripture. Thank you. Please pray for these things for me.”
As people continued to share their prayer needs with me during the follow-up visits, I started to involve them in praying for others in the neighborhood as well. “We’ve had this other prayer request,” I would say. “Now, can you pray for each other? Mary has this need for her family, would you pray for her?”
“Yes, we can pray for her!” Then I would move on to another house and tell them about a different person’s request.
Eventually people were asking, “Can we have a meeting, maybe once a week, and pray together?” It was so easy to arrange a group of 3–5 people, and they were happy to meet and pray.
Each time we got together I would ask, “Who’s willing to share a scripture next time we meet?”
“Oh, I’ll share, I’ll share!” In this way, we began a few different Discovery Bible Studies (DBSs) in my neighborhood.
For most of my life I thought that the only way to follow God was to go to a church service, and I was so uncomfortable there. I could never have imagined before that we could form a church anywhere—just in our homes, for example—to honor God, pray, and worship. People in my community generally know about God, and even know God personally, but there’s so much happening here that makes them isolate from him. Many actually feel like the church has made them lose hope, because they have to pay to attend services and they can’t afford to go. They’ll say, “I came here for hope. I came here to be prayed for. But the church is demanding so much. I’ll just stay home.” So while people know God, opportunities to engage with God through scripture and sharing together is lacking. These small gatherings to read scripture and pray together met such a big need in my community. It was a great experience!
Eventually, I told the DBS groups, “This is not only for us. Let’s do it for our neighbors also! If you have a friend, or a cousin who is close to you, start this with them, so we can keep the word of God moving and reaching many.” And so we started even more groups in the community.
At first the food distributions were kind of a knee-jerk reaction to the great need we saw from Covid. But as we paused to pray and think more intentionally about it, getting curious about what God might do if we offered ourselves and these activities to his larger purposes, he used our efforts to not just meet real physical needs, but spiritual and relational needs as well.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
This story comes to us from Lydiah Aswani, who lives in the Githurai neighborhood of Nairobi, Kenya. Three years ago she joined an intentional leadership development and ministry mentoring program called Deep Coaching, facilitated by Novo’s InnerCHANGE Kenya team, She is now one of the main ministry leaders on the team.