Tim and Beth Heiney Special Gift

Our missionaries, Tim and Beth Heiney are seeking to buy some property for a permanent church in Conakry, Guinea. Please read their words of explanation and prayerfully consider how you can help support this effort with a special gift. Please make your check payable to "Lord of Life Lutheran Church". We will collect all money and then send one check to the Kansas District LCMS which is helping Tim and Beth make this land purchase.
 
“Having a place to worship in Conakry has been a big problem for the Guinea church. For the most part, the churches in Guinea have been village based. So up to now when we wanted to open a church, the village would just donate some free land and the people would build a mud structure. But when the church began to work in Conakry, we saw that this was not going to be possible. We began with house churches, but we soon found out that almost all land in Conakry is owned by Muslims. The first house church grew quickly to over thirty members, but the owner of the building was a Muslim and he quickly threatened to evict our members who lived there if worship continued. This story has been repeated many times as our churches have multiplied. We had up to eight worshiping groups at one time, but as the groups lost their places of worship over and over, some have dispersed. Most churches that are functioning have found schools run by non-Muslims, but these are tenuous and non-permanent places as school leadership could change at any time. Another problem is that there is a feeling among Africans that churches that have no buildings are just fly-by-night organizations that are not permanent. So people that have been reached by evangelism often start quickly looking for a more stable appearing church. This tendency frustrates me, but I have seen it at work again and again. If you want to grow to any size you must have some permanent structure to point to.

Buildings and even land in Conakry are very expensive by African standards. The cost is way beyond anything our church would be able to hope to pay for. Most we have looked at were near a hundred thousand dollars. But recently a compound became available for a little over fifty thousand. It has two buildings, each divided into two apartments. It could easily be converted to a worship area and still have a pastor's residence, an office, and rooms for basing LCMS World Relief and Human Care Projects. It is a dream come true for the church. All of the churches say that if there is one permanent building owned by the church, they will have something permanent to point to and their churches will all be greatly encouraged, and it will be much easier for them to grow. The church will also have a place for training leaders, for large multi-church gatherings, for relief projects, for offices, and for other programs that go beyond the local congregation that will base there.”