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African National Ministries

 

The African National Ministries office of the ELCA strategically works on planting new African immigrant churches, renewing and expanding African national ministries, developing leaders, offering stewardship and economic empowerment trainings, developing and distributing ministry resources and enhancing global connections of African national churches.

The African National Ministries office is grounded in scripture, theology of missional hospitality and intentional mission design and works with regions, synods, conferences, clusters and congregations across the ELCA in conjunction with mission directors. Based on the theology of missional hospitality, African national ministries consult with congregations working with Africans national immigrants on how to deal with reactive welcoming and proactive inviting as the two essential aspects of missional hospitality.

Currently we have trained leaders to deal with cultural, regional, traditional and linguistic diversity of African national immigrants across the country. Therefore most of our initial contacts and ground work preparations are done through our consultants and national representatives working as an African National Advisory Team.

Our vision is to see thriving African national ministries reaching African nationals to share the grace and love of God. It is our goal to start additional African national ministries with a mission of reaching their targeted missional territory which is African immigrants then expanding their outreach to the wider community. Though we start as chaplains to ethnic specific communities, our objectives are to grow our missions to move from chaplaincy to missionary mode.

African national ministries through its national advisory team works on identifying potential sites for new mission starts. Once sites are identified and contacts are identified the new starts team of the African national advisory team starts to work with Synods, Mission directors, community leaders, EOCM colleagues and national consultants on the possibility of starting new missions.