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When Port City Community Church first partnered with Pastor Jackson Mwangi and the Victorious Gospel Community Church in Nakuru, Kenya, we had no idea the magnitude and the breadth of that which God had in store for us all. What we did know was that the need was great, an opportunity was presented—and we serve an almighty God.

One of the many unmistakable examples of God’s movement at work among the body of PC3 has been made evident in the form of this partnership through our HOPE 127 program. “HOPE” stands for “Helping Other People Everywhere.” The “127” refers to James 1:27, which says, “Pure and lasting religion in the sight of God our Father means that we must care for orphans and widows in their troubles, and refuse to let the world corrupt us.” This initiative was created to connect our local church body to people around the world. Its first project is the Kenya Project.

The HOPE 127-Kenya Project (hope127.org) is just three years old, yet it has produced great fruit both here and in Africa. From Pastor Jackson’s eager, unexpected arrival at our doorsteps to the 80 children now living at Mama Hellen’s Rehabilitation Center in Nakuru, one act of faith spurred countless others and has led to the currently unfolding reality of vital care for orphans and destitute children in Kenya. These are children who were once living on the streets due to violence, disease and poverty. Now, they have a secure place to live, basic physical and emotional needs met, and, most of all, a new-found identity in Christ. They are children like 10-year-old Gilbert, who had dropped out of school and was living with his aunt at the city dump before being rescued and taken to the center; he now plans to become a doctor when he grows up. Or James, one of the first boys to be taken in off the streets—where he lived for three years due to poverty and abuse—whose second chance at life has now taken him from Mama Hellen’s to his current enrollment in PEMA Academy. (PEMA, which means “a good place,” is the secondary school now being operated on site at Mama Hellen’s.) Some of the children’s parents have died of AIDS. Some lived on the streets for five years, others just a few weeks. But no matter their circumstances or conditions, they are each a sheep in His fold.

PC3 feels unspeakably honored to have partnered with Pastor Jackson, his wife, Peninah (”Mama Hellen”), and Victorious Gospel in their collective vision to rescue, rehabilitate and care for Nakuru’s children in need. Since Mama Hellen’s Rehabilitation Center was built and first opened its doors in the fall of 2005, God has worked through this project to show the children His love for them and to transform them as His own. In faithful obedience and love, Pastor Jackson and Peninah have guided the children morally and spiritually, reintegrated them into the Kenyan school system, and have kept them well fed—with nutritious meals as well as the nourishing Word of God.

Through our HOPE 127 sponsorship program, committed sponsors have the incredible opportunity to pray for these children and provide for their needs, as well as to participate in encouraging correspondence through periodic letter-writing. The idea is for each child to have three sponsors who will aid in the continual process of their renewal and care. Now that the children have a home at Mama Hellen’s, they are each joyous pictures of God’s redemption. We feel enormously privileged to be used by God to help welcome these new brothers and sisters into the body of Christ and to help continually disciple them through missions to Kenya. The call for us to reach God’s world in need has been affirmed unrelentingly with each relationship formed.

Right now the HOPE 127-Kenya Project is at a very exciting yet pivotal threshold along its journey. Recently, 30 new children have been accepted into the center, and as the project continues to grow, so does its need for support. Here are just a few ways you can get involved with HOPE 127:

• Currently, we have a need for over 100 new sponsors for these boys and girls, as well as general donations to the HOPE 127 fund. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, please email us (hope127 (at) portcitychurch.org) or stop by the Missions center on Sunday.
• If going to Kenya on a mission is something God has laid on your heart, the application deadline for the August Kenya mission has been extended to March 21st.
• There is also a group that meets to pray for Kenya in the PC3 café at 6:30 p.m. on the third Monday of every month, open to anyone.

We encourage you to prayerfully consider your place in God’s powerful story of the Kenya Project.

“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’” —Matthew 25:40

Going to Kenya was a long-awaited, life-changing experience for me.  My heart has longed for Africa since I was in high school; it was hard to believe I was actually there when we landed in Nairobi.  It was like finally getting something that your heart had longed for for over 10 years.

One of the best but most difficult experiences of the trip was when Pastor Jackson took us to a landfill (where people actually live) to bring each family a loaf of bread and a bag of milk.  The people of Kenya are extremely grateful and happy, although they have next to nothing.  It was a humbling experience, one that made me aware of how truly blessed we are in America to have an abundance of food, clothing and shelter, and a government that ensures everyone has basic necessities.

While at the dump, I picked up a little boy who looked about 2 or 3 years old.  His nose was runny, and he had a cough.  Although he never smiled, I could actually feel how happy he was to be held.  It was like he never got the chance to just relax in someone’s arms.  I know for a fact that if I would have taken him with me that day, no one would have stopped me. Putting him down was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

At Mama Hellen’s Rehabilitation Center, a PC3-supported home for street children, I was able to get to know some orphaned children.  Two in particular are Chir Chir and Alex.  I am now sponsoring Chir Chir through PC3’s HOPE 127 program so that he can continue to live at the center and get a good education.  Chir Chir lived on the streets for four years before being rescued by Pastor Jackson.  Many Kenya children still live in the streets, and they often succumb to a life of drugs and theft.  Their drug of choice (because it is so cheap) is a shoemaker’s glue that they sniff throughout the day.  A former street kid who now lives at the center said that he used to sniff glue so that he wouldn’t have to “feel cold, hungry or lonely.”

God has broken my heart for the children of Kenya.  They are so unselfish.  They have one or two outfits and eat very small portions of food each day.  We brought them candy and sodas on the last day of our trip, and they were elated.  It was like Christmas. One thing that really shocked me was that they didn’t say, “I don’t like this flavor”—which happens every time I give out candy in my classroom here in America.  They never complain about the heat, the flies, their situations.  In fact, the entire time I was with them I didn’t hear a single complaint. We took prayer requests one day, and Alex’s prayer request was for the needy.  He said, “There are a lot of people suffering in Kenya.”  This prayer request was given by a child with no parents, who lives in an orphanage and shares a room with about 15 other boys. All of his belongings fit into one grocery bag that lies at the bottom of his bunk bed. It is amazing that even though they have very little, these boys think of themselves as lucky.

Life is simple in Kenya.  They just have the basic necessities.  Sometimes I think maybe it’s better that way.

—Submitted by Shelly Long

I have the tremendous privilege of volunteering with the birth-preK ministry, Grow Zone, here at PC3.  Its mission: “To come alongside families as we teach our littlest ones the basic truths of who God is, confident His image will make a lasting impression.”  Through play, worship songs, Bible stories, crafts, snack and even small-group discussions (all amazingly coordinated to fit inside an hour’s time), there are four main principles the staff and volunteers strive to teach the kids week after week, in hopes they will be ingrained in their minds and received in their hearts.  These principles are: 1. God made me; 2. God loves me; 3. Jesus wants to be my friend forever; 4. The Bible is God’s story, and everything in it is true.

On any given Sunday, a walk through the Grow-Zone halls is like entering a 3-D, colorful honeycomb, bustling with giant butterflies, smiling volunteers sporting trademark play-dough pants and Crayola-stained fingers, and the luminous trails of beautiful, laughing children.  Grow Zone gives all-new meaning to the term “organized chaos”—emphasis on the organized, of course.  It is fun and exciting, but it is also very intentional about what is being presented to these children.  In other words, this is not just childcare, and we are not babysitters.  That is absolutely my favorite part about this ministry.  It amazes me sometimes when I stop to think that, alongside their families, we are actually helping teach these little people the very first concepts they will ever learn about God.  To think that by investing in them like this they will develop a heart for Jesus and get to know Him so early on in their lives is just incredible…

My personal story as a Grow-Zone volunteer doesn’t begin at Vision Drive or even back at Roland-Grise.  It begins in a balmy, bare-walled building with one room, half a world away in Kenya.  It was there on a PC3 mission trip in August 2008 that I found myself in front of a large group of joyful African children, acting out the story of Moses with help from two other team members.  (The three of us, in charades-like fashion, quite efficiently and I’m sure somewhat humorously found a way to demonstrate the parting of the Red Sea.)  We had played and studied the Bible with the boys at Mama Hellen’s Rehabilitation Center all week previously, and the love, enthusiasm, passion for the Lord and His Word, and pure jubilation that radiated within them was reflected back to us as though from a mirror in God’s own hand.  It was awe-inspiring, contagious, spirit-filling and… humbling.  Standing there at Victorious Gospel Community Church in Nakuru, equipped with extremely limited materials, we quickly learned we had only ourselves to offer these children for a three-hour session of Sunday School.  And so offer ourselves we did, in the form of singing songs, acting out Bible stories, asking the children questions about the Bible, playing games, practically any and everything we could come up with outside the realm of modern technology and teaching tools—for that matter, outside the realm of our comfort zones and into the limitless expanse of God’s kingdom.  The look in the eyes of those children as they craved to learn more, hear more, discover more about a God they never for one second took for granted rocked the boxed-in faith I had carried over with me on the plane.  Knowing about Grow Zone back home—of a different place and capacity entirely, yet just as hands-on and intentional about teaching young people about God—I signed up to volunteer as soon as I got home.  It became not only an invaluable way to cope with my re-entry experience and apply what I was processing, but also an excellent and fitting place for me to plug in at PC3 and continue to serve.

Over the past year, Grow Zone has become a place where I can especially and continually see living proof that when we draw near to God, He draws near to us.  Just last week, upon discussing with the 4-year-olds in our room that we can pray at any time whatsoever, one little girl piped up from among the tangled cluster of children sitting “criss-cross applesauce,” who were, as always, eager to contribute: “You can even pray if you wake up in the middle of the night, because God stays awake in case we need Him!”  It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard a child say.  That is, only to be rivaled by yet another one of many memorable Bible-story moments within my experience in Grow Zone, when the teacher I was serving with asked the kids to share some reasons why they are thankful for God.  You might expect a bunch of 4-year-olds to say because He gave me this and He gave me that.  But one little girl said it best when she simply said, “Because He loves us.”

Oh how He loves us.

—Submitted by Emily Rea

A team of 20 from PC3 spent the last part of their Christmas holidays and the first few days of 2009 helping lead a youth conference for about 250 Kenyan youth – including the boys at Mama Hellen’s Rehabilitation Center.  One of the team members, David Sapp, provided the following blog about their time there.

Months after a trip, the memories in our minds begin to fade like old photographs; not fully capturing the moment in its full splendor, but sparking the memories that have somehow seeped deeper into who we are and who we have become in reaction to the experience.  In that way, Kenya will always be a part of who I am.  The following are the things that have now become a part of me as a result of Port City’s trip to Kenya in December.  The goal of our trip seemed simple enough, put on a youth conference for upwards of 200 Kenyan youth; however, the reality of engaging young people cross-culturally, as well as spiritually is much greater a task.

God is good though, to use us in spite of our deficiencies and weaknesses.  Our team set out the day after Christmas to Nakuru, Kenya, to Mama Hellen’s Rehabilitation Center, which would be the setting for our three day conference.

Kenya is a beautiful land rich with not only wildlife and possibly the bluest sky one has ever seen, but also rich with a timeless culture that has sunken deep into this now developing country.  We saw this reflected in each child we interacted with in Kenya – a keen  awareness of God’s creation around them and a tension of being firmly established in their culture while grasping for the new.  Our goal was to focus their grasps towards Christ and the pursuit of all He is.  This took the formal shape of a conference consisting of large group meetings and breakouts into small groups of around 15 young people each.

While the teaching of this time was invaluable for the spiritual growth of these youth, the moments in between were the ones that will mean all the more for years to come.  The smiles shared, games played, stories heard, and most importantly the time shared, were the moments in which we modeled Christ to these kids.  The one moment that still to this day, five months later, hits me to the very core of my being happened in the smallest of moments of my time in Kenya.  After a full day of talks, conversations, and games, we began walking back up the hill from playing soccer in the fields and a small boy grabs me by the hand and slowly walks beside me up the hill.  As we walk he just stares at me and smiles as I smile back at him, no words were exchanged but I knew it that was a moment that would shape me for the rest of my life, and I pray it will for him as well.  This is the essence of missions for me, not the well thought out plan of a conference full of activities and moments meant to engage these youth in the reality of the gospel, but the moments between the moments where we simply get to walk up a hill holding hands with a young boy.  As many have experienced, well thought out events can flop, schedules can be confused and things can fall apart; however, God is great enough to use the smallest of moments that we never plan, to mean the greatest for His glory. It is in these moment were I believe we are the fragrance of Christ drawing others to Him through our expressions of His love.  So to me, the trip to Kenya was worth every second just for that one hand held.  It is in this that I encourage you.  If God’s calling you to go and you feel like you have little to offer, offer that little bit to him and allow him to use it.  He can use even the smallest things to influence another life on the other side of the world…..as well as your own.

—Submitted by David Sapp