Grace News is Anglican Aid’s quarterly newsletter, through which we share encouragement and updates from our project partners. Below our feature story about Tanzania, you will find updates from our work in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and more.

“In one of our newly planted churches, our mission team baptised 680 adults in a day,” said Bishop Stanley Hotay of Mt Kilimanjaro Diocese in Tanzania. “You should come on one of our missions. You’ll be amazed and you could help with baptising. It gets tiring with so many!”.

I had just touched down at Mt Kilimanjaro Airport and Bishop Hotay was giving me an update about his diocese. Between 2019 and 2021, their teams had reached 2,232 households with the gospel, with 12,855 people giving their lives to Jesus, 3,501 baptised and 402 churches planted. They had also given food aid to 3,000 poor families.

In May, I returned from meeting with 23 Anglican bishops and a dozen Bible college principals across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan and Tanzania. As we travelled from diocese to diocese across these countries – three of the poorest on earth – this was the story again and again: bishops for whom ‘go and make disciples’ is their natural impulse, and leading their people in evangelism is as obvious to them as reading the Bible is to us.

 “Prayer is key.”

Prayer is key. Archbishop Samuel Peni Enosa from South Sudan, mentioned to me in passing that their church has a 24/7 prayer cycle and on the first Friday of the month they fast, then eat dinner together and pray through the night. “This is the power behind the success we have,” he said. I later found out he has been doing this for the last 14 years.

The bishops I met thanked Anglican Aid supporters like you for supporting the Bible training of their church leaders. With so many new churches being planted, training is vital. Anglican Aid supporters are sponsoring over 500 full-time Bible college students in these three countries alone, and we want this to expand. What a privilege to be in partnership with such people, and to know that by our sponsorship of Bible training in Africa, mission is going forward.