Where the church is small and under pressure, CMS partners are helping to design relevant training for church leaders who have never been able to access it before.

By Chris and Suzy Wilson who have served with CMS for 10 years in Ethiopia

“When I came here, it was not clear to me that Jesus is my God. But I understand that he’s the one who brought me from darkness to light.”

These are the words of an Ethiopian man, a refugee who is from an ethnic minority group, after being given the opportunity to take part in intensive theology training. His quote shows the difference that this kind of training can make for people who have the potential to become Christian leaders, but who have had their lives upended by violent conflict.

Learning, interrupted

Ethiopia hosts one of the largest refugee populations in Africa. In the western areas of the country, refugee camps accommodate women, men and families displaced by conflict from South Sudan, Sudan, the Great Lakes region and beyond.

Remarkably, churches have rapidly emerged and grown within these camps, yet they face many challenges, as many of these refugees originate from contexts where access to theological education and leadership training has been severely limited and/or suddenly disrupted. 

Faith growing in fragile contexts

This rapid expansion of the church in refugee settings is not new in the church’s history. Time and again, Christian faith has taken root and flourished through persecution, migration and displacement. The book of Acts recounts how, following Stephen’s martyrdom and the scattering of believers, the gospel spread from Jerusalem throughout the Roman Empire. Church history demonstrates how God often works through displacement: Christianity took hold in Ethiopia through Frumentius’ shipwreck, in Ireland through Patrick’s kidnapping and in Georgia through Nino’s captivity.

Even today, God continues to work powerfully in disrupted and fragile contexts, as evidenced by the rapid growth of Christianity among South Sudanese refugee populations over the past 50 years.

As churches expand in refugee camps and many people spend several decades there, a clear need has arisen for theological training that is faithful, accessible and contextually grounded. Additionally, since many refugee camps are geographically remote and language barriers are significant, local Ethiopian churches have limited capacity to invest in these refugee congregations. Therefore, there is a genuine need for theological educators with strong English or Arabic skills (languages commonly spoken) who can collaborate with church leaders from refugee communities.

Responding to refugees

After we returned to Ethiopia following COVID-19, Chris taught at St Frumentius’ Seminary in Gambella to help students catch up on classes they had missed during the lockdown. Due to conflict and instability, several refugees were unable to travel to Gambella, so Chris made two teaching trips to deliver these classes in a refugee camp. While there, many church leaders requested that he return to provide training to help them with their preaching.

Since 2022, we’ve been responding to this request. Over many trips, conversations and thinking on the go, we’ve designed a course for preachers in refugee camps with no prior theological training. The course integrates biblical studies, Christian doctrine, homiletics and discipleship, all delivered with space for discussion and reflection on their relevance to camp life.

During this period, we have run this course for leaders from more than 10 ethnic groups across several refugee camps in western Ethiopia. God has blessed us with a small but great teaching team, including both international and local theological educators. In particular, we’ve been working closely with a man who was one of Chris’s students in Gambella, and it’s been a profound encouragement to see him develop as he has served as a course coordinator, translator, and, more recently, a co-teacher. He’s been invaluable both in helping us develop the course and in delivering it to church leaders in their mother tongue.

Transformation through training

In January 2026, we conducted a new initiative. With generous support from SIM Ethiopia and one of our link churches in the UK, we organised two weeks’ intensive training for a group of leaders from a small ethnic group that has only five Christian churches. God truly blessed this effort, with both instructors and trainees noticing a marked improvement in the quality of preaching. One of the instructors, Dr Simon Harrison, said, “It was amazing to see the clear impact of the training on the participants over the two weeks. Some went from never having preached before and being unsure of the gospel and who Christ is, to being able to preach a Christ-centred sermon that clearly presented the gospel.”

At the end of the training, interviews with the trainees reflected a similar story. One trainee said, “I learned so many things in that training – one of them is I found out Jesus is my Saviour. The second thing is – when I came here, it was not clear to me that Jesus is my God. But I understand that he’s the one who brought me from darkness to light.” Another added, “When I came from there, I didn’t know how to preach at all, but now I have learned to preach.”

It was a real joy to spend time with and invest in young leaders from a community where following Jesus is fraught with difficulties. Given the very positive response to this training, we hope to run more intensive training courses for leaders in places where the church is small and under pressure.

Pray together

Please join us in praying for our brothers and sisters who are displaced, for refugees leading church communities in extremely challenging situations and for wisdom for our team as we partner with them.

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Ethiopia: fuel crisis hits hard

Mission partners Chris and Suzy Wilson report that the fuel crisis in Ethiopia is still serious and it is very hard for many people reliant on diesel to earn money. It’s not unusual to find queues of vehicles waiting for fuel in many parts of the city Addis Ababa that stretch for over a kilometre. Please do pray for a way for the situation to be resolved as soon as possible.

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Ethiopia: refugees leading churches

Chris and Suzy Wilson work to equip churches to actively pursue peace across ethnic divides. Chris also trains church leaders in refugee camps. They write, “Please join us in praying for our brothers and sisters who are displaced, for refugees leading church communities in extremely challenging situations and for wisdom for our team as we partner with them.”

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Ethiopia: successful training

Recently, partners Chris and Suzy Wilson, who work with Christian leaders in peacebuilding, asked for prayer for an upcoming training course for Christian leaders in refugee camps.

Chris and Simon were due to spend two weeks investing in a group of Christian leaders all from Simon’s ethnic group, teaching in their own language.

Now having completed the training, Chris writes, “It was, by some distance, the most impactful training course we have been involved in during our time in Ethiopia. All three instructors observed a clear change in the sermons the trainees preached during the course.”

Praise God that the training was such a great success, and please pray for these church leaders as they serve their congregations through volatile times. 

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Ethiopia: training in their own language

Mission partners Chris and Suzy Wilson work with Christian leaders to build peace across Ethiopia.

Over the next couple of weeks, Chris and his colleague Simon will be training young preachers from every church in Simon’s ethnic group, delivering the training in their mother tongue.

Please pray for the young men receiving training to encounter God as they preach, worship and pray together.

Pray for fruitful partnerships to form and for the teaching team to remain strong and healthy throughout the two weeks of training.

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Ethiopia: new teaching role, residence IDs

Mission partners Chris and Suzy Wilson work in reconciliation and peacebuilding with Christian leaders. Chris recently started a part-time role at the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology (EGST), teaching an MA course in systematics. Please pray for Chris’s sessions to be helpful to the students. Pray, too, for Chris and Suzy’s residence IDs to be renewed quickly without any issues.

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Ethiopia: training for church leaders in refugee camps

Chris and Suzy Wilson are based in Addis Ababa, and work in reconciliation and peacebuilding with local Christian leaders, including through training church leaders in a refugee camp. Chris is hoping to travel to the camp at some point over the next few weeks to offer more teaching. Please pray that plans for such a trip will come together – for the memorandum of understanding with the government to be finalised, and for Chris’s colleague Simon to recover from sickness and be able to travel and teach alongside Chris.

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Ethiopia: preparing for adoption

Mission partners Chris and Suzy Wilson are based in Addis Ababa and work in reconciliation and peacebuilding with local Christian leaders. They have also been fostering a baby over the past few months, helping him to recover from malnourishment and prepare to be adopted by an Ethiopian family. Praise God that this little boy is thriving: walking, running and starting to say a few words. Pray for him to continue to make progress and for God to prepare a family to adopt him.

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Caught between two worlds, our people in mission are often faced with the stark realities of privilege and poverty. Mission partner Suzy Wilson takes us for a walk…

By Suzy Wilson

Almost every day I walk along the road outside our compound. There is a quiet kind of vibrancy there that I relish; I greet Alem, who sells coffee under her tarpaulin at the side of the road, and crouch down to buy potatoes from one of the ladies who piles them up just nearby.

I visit the fruit store, its shelves heavy with colour and laden with produce – watermelons, bananas, papayas. I walk past the line of older teenage boys who are chatting and laughing, apparently unconcerned whether or not they gain much business shining shoes. I stop by the souk next to the lively bus station, where tuk tuks and minibuses compete for customers and space to manoeuvre.

Feeling the weight

Soon my rucksack is heavy with dark green avocados, those green-yellow local oranges that the kids love, and milk, eggs and meat. That was the easy part. Then I turn and begin the short walk back to our house. I feel the weight in my bag as I pass the girl with a seriously scarred face, the lady leaning heavily on her stick with only one leg, and the mum and her baby, who is learning to crawl at the side of the road.

I give them some fruit or bread which they receive gratefully, and has cost me almost nothing, and I mutter a prayer on my way into the compound as I knock loudly on the high grey gate with tangled barbed wire along the top, waiting for the guard who will let me in.

I am painfully aware that my feeble offering is far from enough, practically laughable in the face of their extreme circumstances; in comparison my life is unimaginably luxurious, I walk and operate in a world designed around ease and safety.

I am caught up in the embarrassment and guilt, and a troubling self-realisation of my struggle, unwilling and unable to act as I believe I should.

It would be so much easier…

As I walk towards my home, a place of peace and predictability with lilies and white roses in a flowerbed bordering the outside, I am left merely with a faltering cry of Come Lord Jesus, but words spoken with a full stomach and from a feeling of security are unable to anchor; such a desperate prayer does not belong to me.

It would be so much easier not to see them every day, to create structures and rhythms that allow me to live in a false reality that denies the existence of wretchedness and misery.

It would be easier to not to look at their faces when I give them something, or to not ask their name – anything to create a more of a distance. It would be easier to forget them.

Because the girl with the badly burnt face still sits on the street day after day, with one eye that I’m not sure she can even close, staring at me as I bend down with a gift of a banana and – just for a whisper of a second – step into her desolation.

And now that baby has learnt to crawl, and he is working on his next milestone which almost certainly he too will conquer on this busy stretch of road where lorries pump out black smoke as they rev their ailing engines to accelerate up the hill.

A cry goes up

Today I walked to the bus, and so many more were lining the pavement, individuals and entire families whose lives are transient – they come and go and this morning sat huddled in the cold and wet under flimsy umbrellas with white cloths laid out to collect coins, while the clouds squeezed out their final remnants of rain to make way for sunshine and with it the possibility of at last warming up.

How long O Lord?

They are not my words to speak, but I voice them because I have seen and heard the desperate cries and the lonely lament from those whose fear and loss of hope is tangible every single day, and who long only to breathe deeply and freely.

These words are spoken for them as I remember the mother whose breasts are sore and full as they grieve the loss of their young baby, again.

I speak them because there are those who can’t eat, whose animals are dying and whose well has dried up – who are watching their children starve.

I plead with the Almighty as I read of the unimaginable horror and listen to friends tell me of massacres of women and children, and poor farmers.

A cry has gone out, her wailing is carried on the wind and you need only to be still to hear it.

Let justice roll

Dark clouds gather over the afternoon, the world becoming prematurely dark. The pressure builds and then at last, the clouds erupt and thick heavy drops of water begin to fall. It soon turns into hail, which jumps and dances off tin roofs. A familiar landscape is transformed into a watery chaos as streams are birthed and rush forth and pools emerge from the now sodden ground. And then, the storm draws to a close, and amid the stillness that settles, a vivid splendour bathes creation. 

Come Lord Jesus.

Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream. Shower, O heavens, from above, and let the skies rain down righteousness, let the earth open, that salvation may spring up.

Sing and rejoice O daughter of Zion! For lo, I will come and dwell in your midst.

Amos 5:24 (NIV); Isaiah 45:8 (NRSV); Zechariah 2:10 (NRSV)

How long O Lord?

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More stories of Jesus empowering people at the edges

The post Chris and Suzy Wilson, Ethiopia appeared first on Church Mission Society (CMS).

By Suzy Wilson

They lined up behind the wooden and splintered cross, priests from all over the Gambella region and further still, among them those who have understood first hand the meaning of the symbol they walked behind – their lives entwined with the brokenness and beauty that comes as Christ followers, knowing they must walk the narrow way. And as they processed they sang a song of praise, low and loud.

It was the day of the Covid-delayed graduation of the third-year students from St Frumentius’ Theological College in Gambella, Ethiopia. What a gift to at last stand among their family and friends and celebrate them.

During the ceremony I quietly wept as I listened to a much loved Anuak student describe the significance of his experience at the college – of walking with his Nuer brother and sisters across town to ensure them safe passage when for those long, tedious months tensions had been high. He spoke of his mind transformed as these other students of different ethnic groups became his friends; in a region too often marked by animosity and suspicion, it’s hard to comprehend just how significant this is.

I listened to my husband telling these graduates that he was proud of them and loved them, and exhorting them to continue to love each other.

There is almost nothing here in the eyes of the world, only these six students in a remote area of Africa. But in a place scarred by generations of ethnic conflict and deadly expectations of loyalty, they are choosing Jesus first; the seeds are scattered, and that is everything.

I didn’t know we had fallen in love

Watching the graduation, reuniting with friends and students, and clearing out our house was a little more like closure than I had anticipated, and it wasn’t easy – I didn’t prepare myself that it was actually going to feel quite hard. I grieved.

I didn’t know we had fallen in love with this hot and dusty place.

I didn’t know until we arrived and sat outside our house with our Anuak family chatting, laughing, and drinking coffee while the kids dashed around quickly covering themselves in Gambella sand.

I didn’t know until sweet Grace, who had been a new-born baby last time I held her, wandered in and out of our house just as though it was her own.

I didn’t know until we drove through the town and there was vibrancy and life and colour, and as we passed over the mighty Baro river, which in its distinctively lazy yet compelling way dominates the landscape whilst town folk bathe and wash cars and play in its sluggish murky depths.

I didn’t know, because the water here often runs out, and for the week we were there ran brown out of taps.

I wouldn’t have known because it is often difficult and malarial and hot, and there are no easy playmates for our children. But as our visit there drew to an end the kids didn’t want to leave, my daughter suggesting we use the little money she had gathered from the tooth-fairy and various chores to make it possible to stay in Gambella.

Hardship and dying, life and beauty

But we had to go, of course we did; tears fell, carving a way through the dust that had gathered on her face as we drove away from those who had congregated to wish us well, and we made our way back to the airport, back to Addis.

Perhaps she is discovering this secret too, because as I walk and age on this earth I am learning there are no short cuts to beauty, and it looks to me that at its most authentic it can only be appreciated and understood in the fragility of living and the reality of suffering.

Gambella is profoundly marked with hardship and dying, and daily toil. This is true, and it matters. Gambella is also compelling and beautiful, it teems with life and beauty – when I am there it wakes me up, and I see and move and live in a way I don’t experience anywhere else. It draws me in, and I find a freedom.

We now live in Addis, and we are happy here. We live in a compound with space and families, with flowers and trees. If you’re going to live in a huge African city then this is a great way to do so, and we are very grateful.

We are learning Amharic and slowly we’re enjoying meeting others in the neighbourhood that live and work here. The kids and I spend our days homeschooling, reading, playing sport, sitting in little food souks and falteringly trying out our new language. But Gambella is never far from our minds, and will always be a part of our lives. Our time and experience there is imprinted on us, it has moulded us. We want to continue walking with those students who have become friends, we want to continue sitting with our friends who have become family.

The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places, indeed I have a beautiful inheritance.

Psalm 16:6

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