- (Left Page) At top, center, Arlene Krieder changes a tire (circa 1979). Bottom, Paul T. Yoder with an Afar patient (circa 1975). Photos courtesy of Peg Engle and the Yoders. (Right Page) Center, Paul T. Yoder’s mobile “examining room” in a Toyota land cruiser in 1975. Bottom left, a former patient, Laoda, serves as a cultural and linguisitc bridge. Photos courtesy of the Yoders.
Christians facing oppression today ought to hear what happened to Ethiopia’s Mennonites. Reduced to five words, God did not forsake them.
From 1948 to 1982, the Mennonite church in Ethiopia – called Meserete Kristos Church (MKC) – grew from zero to 5,000 members in 14 congregations. Despite the anti-Christian bias of a Marxist group that came to power in a coup in 1974, MKC was able to continue worshipping openly during the late 1970s and early 1980s. On January 24, 1982, a total of 1,500 people worshiped at three Mennonite services in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.
Then, the Marxist regime (known as the Derg) brought the hammer down on evangelical Christians, including Mennonites. For a decade, matters were grim for followers of Jesus in Ethiopia.
Expatriate Mennonites were told to leave Ethiopia, and almost all of them did. Public gatherings of Ethiopian-born Mennonites were banned. Five top MKC leaders – Kelifa Ali, Kiros Bihon (father of five), Abebe Gorfe (father of eight), Negash Kebede (current president of Meserete Kristos College), and Shamsudin Abdo – were imprisoned for four years. Tilahun Beyene was imprisoned for one year. Prison conditions were horrific.
In his book on the first 50 years of MKC, Beyond Our Prayers, Nathan B. Hege ’49 describes what Shamsudin faced:
Shamsudin was pushed into a crowded dark room less than thirteen feet square with thirty-five other prisoners. Here they sat, ate, and slept on the floor. At night they were crowded tightly against each other, alternating head to feet. They could turn from one side to the other only when they could get permission of the whole row to turn at the same time.
Arlene Kreider ’62 was living in Addis Ababa at that time. She had been in Ethiopia for 15 years, teaching elementary school and staffing the Menno Bookstore in the capital city. She had also worked with Peg Groff (now Engle), a 1968 graduate of Eastern Mennonite’s nursing program. For several years they had operated a mobile health clinic, helped refugees plant gardens, and taught nutrition. The women had traveled alone across hundreds of miles in the outback, themselves maintaining their Toyota Land Cruiser.
On the evening of January 24, 1982, Kreider was the hostess at the guesthouse beside the Bole church (now called Kebena). Armed men surrounded Kreider and one of them announced: “As of this moment, this building, the car, everything on this compound – they all belong to the government.” Kreider’s reaction? She offered her guards tea.
By 1983, Mennonites in Ethiopia were reduced to secretly gathering in homes in groups of five to seven each week to study the Bible. Baptisms took place under the cover of night. These groups functioned independently, mostly led by Ethiopian women relying almost entirely upon the Scriptures for guidance.
In 1991, after the fall of the Derg, these house fellowships emerged into public light. To the amazement of all, the number of church followers had increased tenfold. Worshipping openly for the first time in decades, 50,000 people crowded into a stadium. By 1997, MKC reported having 114,000 people in 180 congregations in 15 regions across the country. MKC was growing 20% per year.
Having learned self-reliance under the Marxist regime, the Ethiopian Mennonites had evolved a style of worshipping different from most American and Canadian Mennonite congregations. Typically gathering for many hours, the Ethiopians sang songs they had created, listened to passionate messages, joyfully celebrated the Lord’s supper, and engaged in faith healing, casting out of demons, and speaking in tongues. They shared their material goods freely, as early Christians did. They taught and lived that love was all important, regardless of someone’s tribe or religion or political persuasion.
In Beyond Our Prayers (from which the writer of this article gratefully draws most of her information), Hege credits the Meserete Kristos Church for being “an authentic New Testament church intent on faithfulness to the Lord.”
The First Mennonites
After the Second World War, Emperor Haile Selassie I provisionally welcomed missionaries. He wanted them to be “holistic in their approach and not just to focus on evangelism,” writes Hege. Selassie welcomed health clinics and hospitals, schools and literacy programs, agriculture and community development.In 1945, the Mennonite Relief Committee and Mennonite Central Committee sent a shipment of clothing and food. They next provided short-term personnel to open a hospital in Nazareth, 60 miles east of Addis Ababa. The hospital was established in a former cotton gin building, with 80 beds and a bare-bones operating room.
In 1949, Chester ’36 and Sara Jane ’42 Wenger – along with their three elementary-age daughters (Betty ’67, Margaret ’69 and Jewel ’69) – moved to Ethiopia from the Tidewater area of Virginia to do mission work. They spent much of their first year in the country functioning within the orbit of the Nazareth Hospital, while trying to master the complexities of the Amharic language. The medical director of the hospital was D. Rohrer Eshleman ’45, who was pleased that Wenger was willing to tend to the educational and spiritual development of his staff since he himself was fully occupied with caring for the sick.
According to Hege, Wenger found that “many of those [Ethiopians] being trained in the hospital seemed to lack an essential ethical foundation for serving the sick with integrity. Hospital supplies and medicines were frequently stolen. At one point, the whole staff went on strike for higher wages and presented false claims of promises made by a previous administration.”
Wenger felt that the “dressers” (the term used for nurses’ assistants) needed to learn to serve patients selflessly and to “know the love of Christ as expressed in Christian brotherhood.” In 1952, Wenger opened the Nazareth Dresser Bible School, with instruction in Bible, world religions, English, carpentry, and personal development.
- (Left Page) Top left, James Payne ’58, with a translator, leads devotionals at Deder in the early 1950s. Center, volleyball game at Deder with Mennonite-built school in background. Right, Payne preparing wood for construction. Photos, circa 1953, courtesy of James Payne. (Right Page) Top left, in January 2002 MKC members pack a church to celebrate the 50th anniversary of MKC. Top Right, Meserete Kristos College students in their cafeteria. Bottom left, four graduates from Eastern Mennonite Seminary (L. to R.): Gemechu Gebre, Kebede Bekere, Bedru Hussein, and Hailu Cheneret. Bottom Right, main all-purpose building, the first on the Meserete Kristos College campus. Photos courtesy of Peg Engle.
Coercion Rejected
Yet patients received the same quality of care, regardless of their beliefs. “Rohrer [Eshleman] counseled evangelists not to take advantage of sick people by pressuring them into making a commitment to Christ,” writes Hege.
Other schools and clinics begun by Mennonites during the early 1950s were: a school for the blind in Addis Ababa; a school in Bedeno, 350 miles east of Addis Ababa; and, in Deder 250 miles to southeast, a boys’ day school, a girls’ boarding school, a hospital that grew to 35 beds, and a clinic that served people suffering from leprosy.
The earliest Mennonite missionaries in pastoral Deder met a bright child named Tilahun Beyene, who spent his days watching the family’s cattle. Years later Beyene was treasurer of Meserete Kristos Church when he was arrested and imprisoned by the Marxist regime for a year.
James Payne ’58 arrived in Ethiopia in 1952 as a 21-year-old tasked with building housing for mission personnel. Practical skills were in high demand. One afternoon when he was crossing a roof, the wood gave way and he crashed to the ground, striking his head and lying unconscious “for no one knows how long,” he recalls. Though Payne went on to become a professor (and a major donor to EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding), he has experienced excruciating, sometimes debilitating, headaches for almost 60 years as a result of this incident.
The physician assigned to Deder, Walter Schlabach ’43 and his wife, Mae (a ’43 nursing graduate), “brought the first modern medicine and surgery to this highland center for 20,000 people,” Hege writes.
Ingida Asfaw ’62 was a lab tech at Deder before leaving his homeland to enroll in EMU. He is now an acclaimed cardiologist in Detroit.
Breaking Barriers
In 1956, Paul “P.T.” Yoder ’50 headed to Ethiopia as a freshly credentialed physician. P.T. and his wife Daisy ’52 cast aside lingering cultural and racial barriers by taking their meals with students training to be dressers and opening their home to overnight guests from all walks of society.
(Mamo Dula, father of Andy Dula ’91, chair-elect of EMU’s board of trustees, and of Peter Dula ’92, chair of the Bible and religion department, was an extended guest of the Yoders, living with them for two successive summers. In fact, when Mamo and Mary Ellen Groff ’67, an American-Mennonite nurse, were contemplating marriage, they turned to P.T. for counsel — interracial marriage was rare then. P.T. approved of the match: “Mamo was like a son to us.”)
One day in the 1970s a man and his son both came to the hospital in Nazareth for hernia repairs. During post-surgery recovery, P.T. noticed that his dressers avoided the beds of these two. “Why are you acting this way?” P.T. asked the staff.
P.T. was told: “They are not people.”
P.T. replied: “They look like people to me.”
The man and boy had walked about 75 miles to get to the hospital. They were the Afar nomadic tribe in the Awash Valley. This tribe considered it an honor and a necessity for their men to kill and eviscerate men from other tribes, in addition to rustling their cattle. “When the men died, stones were lined up by their graves – one per person killed,” P.T. told Crossroads in a recent interview. “One time I counted 70 stones before a single grave.”
P.T. decided that the Afars, who barely subsisted off their camels, goats, sheep and cows, needed his attention more than any group he knew. So, in 1974, he and Daisy acquired two four-wheel drive vehicles – a Toyota Land Cruiser from Bread for the World and a Land Rover from Oxfam. Using one of the vehicles as a mobile clinic/pharmacy and the other as a mover of people and camping gear, “we would go out on Monday, find sick Afars to treat, sleep in tents we brought, and move to another village until we returned to our home on Friday.” Each day began with devotions.
The four Yoder children were away from their parents in boarding school, except for monthly visits and holiday periods. Most children of missionaries serving in remote areas of Africa were enrolled in boarding school. This arrangement is one thing the Yoders would do differently, if they were able to repeat their 21 years in Ethiopia. “I wish we spent more time with our children,” P.T. says now. “I think they needed us too.”
Of the 194 Mennonite service or mission workers in Ethiopia from 1949 to 1998, more than 50% (98) were alumni of Eastern Mennonite College (later University). Joining Chester and Sara Jane Wenger as educators from the 1960s into the 1970s, were these alumni: Henry ’52 and Pearl ’49 Gamber; Calvin and Marie Shenk, both ’53 graduates; Nathan ’49 and Arlene ’46 Hege; Paul and Ann Gingrich, both class of ’52; and Nevin and Blanche Horst, ’53 graduates.
Their teaching stints in Ethiopian schools were remarkably long, from 14 to 24 years, with the couples averaging 18 years in Ethiopia. As in the case of the Yoders, this means they raised their children in Ethiopia. The Wengers, for instance, grew to be a family of six children. Two of them – Sara ’75 and Phil ’82 – were born in Ethiopia. (Mark ’79 was born while the Wengers were in Virginia on home leave.)
Some of the students who came through the Mennonite-sponsored schools stepped into the leadership of the Meserete Kristos Church in the 1960s. As a young boy, Million Belete, for example, began his relationship with Anabaptism by walking 14 miles roundtrip each day from his home to attend the Mennonite mission school at Deder. He topped off his education by attending EMU in 1961.
A few years later, with the North American missionaries happy to hand off leadership to Ethiopian believers, Belete was named the first Ethiopian chair of MKC and the first ordained Ethiopian pastor in that church.
In the 1970s, a few EMU alumni focused on helping Ethiopians to earn their living in a sustainable manner. Carl Hansen ’65, who had grown up on an Alberta farm and studied at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in 1967, collaborated with Henry Gamber ’52 to import Swiss dairy goats to improve milk and cheese production at Deder. As Hege describes the effort:
At Bedeno, Carl set up a small demonstration farm with a five-cow dairy herd, 75 leghorn hens to produce hatching eggs, a wool-sheep breeding program, and a beekeeping project. A farm supply center made new tools, seeds, fertilizers and chemicals available to farmers.
The goal was to reverse the trend of rural-dwellers abandoning the countryside and crowding into cities where decent jobs were scarce. The Mennonite service workers were trying to enable farmers to support their families from their land, without destroying the small pockets of remaining forestry. Hege says tree coverage had shrunk from 60% to 10% of Ethiopia from 1960 to 1980.
(Hansen and his wife, Vera ’65, worked in Ethiopia from 1967 to 1975, then returned in 1996. In the spring of 2010, they were both working at Meserete Kristos College.)
Just before MKC was outlawed in 1982, it planned to plant 1,200 acres of fast-growing trees each year for five years in a reforestation effort. It was also working to reduce Ethiopians’ dependence on wood for cooking and for building houses.
Peg Groff Engle ’67, sister to Mary Ellen (the nurse who married Mamo Dula), was one of the longest-serving alumni in Ethiopia, with 22 years there (1968-1990). She even managed to remain through the period of Marxist persecution of evangelical Christians.
Engle now lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, with Jim Engle, the seminary professor she married as a middle-aged woman. She recently became an ordained pastor and is active in Lindale Mennonite Church. But she sorely misses Ethiopia, especially the warm hospitality, heartfelt faith, generous love, and impeccable manners of its people. She knows that Ethiopians wonder if their brothers and sisters in North America are at risk of being deaf to the call of the Holy Spirit amid their affluence and materialism. She wonders too.
Two-Way Road Now
This magazine has touched on just a fraction of the 98 alumni listed in the back of Hege’s book as Mennonite missionaries from 1948 to 1998. Dozens more EMU-linked people have gone to Ethiopia since 1998.
Yet the road is now two-way. With their inspiringly passionate relationship to the Holy Spirit – and experience of emerging stronger from decades of oppression – Ethiopian church leaders are being asked to serve in mission agencies outside of their home country.
Million Belete (class of ’61) has been secretary of the Bible Society for Africa and president of Mennonite World Conference. Bedru Hussein, MDiv ’00, has been vice president of Mennonite World Conference (and has sent two sons to EMU, Selam ’04 and Beniam, class of ’05).
In addition to Bekere and Hussein, these six MKC members have earned master’s degrees at Eastern Mennonite Seminary: Hailu Cherenet, MDiv ’99; Gemechu Gebre (Telila), MAR ’02; Kebede Bekere (Tuli), MAPC ’01; Senait Abebe, MAPC ’00; Kenna Dula, MAL ’02; Selamawit Stifanos, MDiv ’08. Two others have earned master’s degrees in conflict transformation at EMU: Simon Badi (Kefachew) in 2001 and Solomon Telahun (Ketsela) in 2010.
Today a visitor to government offices in Ethiopia is likely to encounter a surprising number of officials educated at Mennonite-sponsored schools. If that visitor needs a hospital, she or he will likely be receiving care from someone trained at a Mennonite-founded clinic or hospital. If circulating through any large-sized town or city, visitors probably will pass by a place where MKC congregations worship on Sundays.
Meserete Kristos College, founded as a Bible institute in 1994, now offers education at levels up to a four-year bachelor’s degree in Bible and Christian ministry. It has about 400 alumni.
The college is directed by Ethiopian-born Mennonites, but receives continued support in the form of prayer, finances, and volunteer or low-paid service from North American Mennonites.
A four-year liberal arts degree is in the works. The college has formal links with Eastern Mennonite Seminary for those who wish to pursue a master’s degree. EMU professors teach three graduate-level courses to Ethiopian pastors each summer.
In 2007, the college inaugurated a new multi-purpose building, the first of many buildings on the drawing board for its 15-acre campus at Debre Zeit on the outskirts of Addis Ababa.
Prior to World War II, there were no members of Mennonite-type churches in Ethiopia. Some 60 years later, in 2009, there were 172,306 members, according to the latest report posted online by Mennonite World Conference. This represents the third-highest national concentration of Anabaptists in the world, after the United States (387,103 in 2009) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (220,444). MKC is currently growing faster than 10% per year.
Such a trajectory toward the Light, despite hardships (or perhaps because of hardships), is a model for the world. In Calvin Shenk’s words, it shows “God’s faithfulness, with surprises beyond our prayers.”
