$100K campaign extended to also help pay pastors
Greater New Jersey churches, members and others have generously given about $60,000 so far in GNJ’s For Tanzania campaign—enough to build a new United Methodist church in that African country’s largest city Dar es Salaam. Funds raised in just the past four months will soon be transferred so that land can be purchased and prepared, and building can begin, said GNJ Connectional Ministries Director Eric Drew.
Now $40,000 more is needed to help the Tanzania Conference pay its dedicated but under-compensated pastors a year’s salary. And GNJ church leaders have expressed a desire to continue giving. So, the For Tanzania mission fundraising campaign is being extended to help reach both important goals in time for the 2024 Tanzania Annual Conference session, May 26-28.
As in 2023, a team of GNJ conference and local church leaders is expected to attend the Annual Conference and then teach at the ensuing Pastors School May 29-31, while joining in the celebration of the newly built church. The team that visited and taught there in June 2023 was inspired by the love, commitment and promise they saw among the pastors, as well as their eagerness to learn and serve their growing churches.
Bishop Mande Muyombo (right), who leads United Methodists in the North Katanga (DRC*) Episcopal Area, including Tanzania, has invited Bishop John Schol and other GNJ leaders to return and fulfill a key commitment of our resourcing partnership with the Tanzania Annual Conference.
But first, GNJ will welcome a return visit in mid-February from the Rev. Mutwale Ntambo Wa Mushidi who serves in Tanzania as a UMC Global Ministries missionary and as Bishop Muyombo’s district superintendent and representative.
Mushidi, who is GNJ’s For Tanzania campaign contact there, will itinerate with his wife and fellow missionary Kabaka Ndala Alphonsine, among GNJ churches and among Eastern PA churches afterward. (The two missionaries have a covenant relationship with both conferences.) No doubt Mushidi will extol GNJ’s For Tanzania campaign and share the hopes and dreams, challenges and accomplishments, and certainly the gratitude of the pastors and churches he supervises. Read about their 2017 visit to GNJ in “Connecting in Mission: From Tanzania to Greater New Jersey.”
* Democratic Republic of the Congo