We are grateful to God for the opportunity He has given us to be part of his workmanship. We’ve been inspired by the life of our Lord Jesus Christ. He spent a lot of time teaching His disciples and equipping them to go out and spread the good news of our salvation. For the past 10 years we feel that God has pointed us back to that model and brought around us young people who needed discipleship.
In Nairobi, our house was always full of young people, at the beginning we thought that they just needed us to be their friends, but with time God showed us that their biggest need was to know who they belonged to, thus began our journey into discipleship.
When we started we were just learning and trying to serve where we could. We had no idea how the journey would look. As time went by, we noticed a recurring theme: we were always surrounded by recent high school graduates with no job prospects in sight. They were often desperate, sometimes hungry and without a place to sleep. Most of them were hungry for the word of God but also hungry for physical food and a source of livelihood.
A discipleship program was born, we called it “New Beginnings”. It was an opportunity for recent high school graduates to grow in faith and community, discover and develop their talents and gifts, engage in mission, and explore opportunities to work.
It was new for them to have such a structure of just sitting down to learn deeper what our faith entailed. Some of them had not accepted Jesus as their Savior. It was new for us since we had not anticipated what God had in mind. It was a new beginning for all of us, a place where both the trainees and the trainers got shaped and immersed deeper into the word of God.
After five seasons of the discipleship program and more than 30 Alumnus later we were faced with another question, “where do we go from here?” This seemingly simple question had no simple answer. It was both economical and moral. Should we send them home and and tell them that God will bless them? Once more God had given us an opportunity to respond, this time it had to be practical. Thus began Inspiring Hope Group, a network of young people committed to saving and working to create a brighter future.
