Tuesday, May 15, 2001
The white Lufthansa 747 lifted off from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport at 4:30 p.m.. My watch is set for
Frankfurt, Germany – 11:30 p.m.
On this trip I’ll visit East Africa – specifically Ethiopia and Tanzania. Economically, both nations are poor, yet both
are rich in history and tradition. Our plan is to use video to tell stories about church growth and Aids. We want to
show both sides of the African coin. Americans tend to see, hear and read only bad things about Africa. We want to
show what African’s are doing to help themselves, and see how Americans can learn from Africans and stand with
them.
There are three of us on the production team. Jim Quattrocki, Kevin Jacobson and myself. Kevin is a pastor with
the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. (ELCA) and former missionary. Kevin and I have worked together on
television documentaries in Papua New Guinea, Madagascar, Palestine and now East Africa. Jim Quattrocki is a
videographer/director. Jim and I have been working together for a decade shooting stories from Cape Cod to Alaska,
Jerusalem and beyond. We have made video’s about everything from gambling casino’s to the Blue’s at BB King’s
bar in Memphis.
Kevin and Jim left Chicago a week ahead of me to record portions of this video in Senegal, a country in West
Africa. The plan is for them to meet me in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where we will continue the shoot.
Church growth is a hot topic in American churches today. African churches like the Mekane Yesus Church in
Ethiopia and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania are bursting at the seams. Our job is to find out why
they are growing so fast, and what Americans can learn from them. The second phase of our trip is to see how these
rapidly growing African churches are coping with the Aids crisis.
Christianity is certainly not new to Ethiopia. The book of Acts records an encounter with an Ethiopian and Philip, a
disciple of Jesus. About 40 percent of Ethiopians are Christian. What’s new is an estimated 3.1 million Lutherans.
While the Mekane Yesus church is growing fast, the Ethiopian Orthodox Union church is still the main player.
The Orthodox story goes like this. The Queen of Shiba (and Ethiopian) became one of Solomon’s 2,000 wives.
When Solomon went off his rocker, the Queen and some of the priests took off with the Ark of the Covenant. The
ark is a box containing stone tablets God gave to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Queen is said to have carried the Ark
back to Aksum, Ethiopia.
Centuries later, the Ethiopian town of Aksum converted to Christianity, following the ecclesiastical lead of the
Egyptian Orthodox Church. For the next thousand years or so, while the European church did its thing, the
Ethiopian Church developed on its own. By the time Jesuit missionaries arrived in 1557, the Catholic’s could barely
recognize the theology of their distant Christian cousins. Of course, the missionaries tried to “convert” Ethiopia
back to Roman theology without much success.
Ethiopia’s independent spirit spills into politics, too. While every other part of Africa
was arbitrarily divided and colonized by Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries,
Ethiopia stood alone as the only independent kingdom on the continent. Except for a
brief and very bloody period of Italian rule in the 1930’s, Ethiopians have run their own
country.
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