Sunday School - a matter of life and death

In impoverished towns ravaged by violence, poverty and suicide, Elim missionary Janine Stellatos is working to bring help, hope and the gospel.

Eleven-year-old Limsey was a happy girl, well-fed and supported as a sponsor child of Metro World Child Kenya.

But soon after the charity’s team spent time with her, Limsey, her mother and her sister were beaten and burned to death in their home.

This is the brutal reality of everyday life in Kenya’s tough, underprivileged urban areas. But Elim missionary Janine Stellatos has dedicated the past decade to bringing hope, practical aid and the gospel to the country’s children.

Janine heads up Metro World Child’s Kenya operation. The charity, she explains, runs a series of gospel-centred programmes designed to break the cycle of poverty and offer vulnerable children hope, basic necessities and a positive future.

During ten years of work, Janine has seen God help her grow the operation from working with 12 schools to 175 every week. The charity now reaches more than 160,000 children with the gospel each week and feeds over 5,500 every day.

But the deprivation, violence and soaring suicide rates in the country make these programmes ever more urgent.

“A week before I heard about Limsey’s death, I had to speak at the funeral of a ten-year-old girl called Rahema. She hanged herself because of the battles she was facing – with no food and her parents struggling to keep her in school,” says Janine.

“I face this every day, so the programmes we run aren’t just cute Sunday school sessions. They’re a matter of life and death because we don’t know whether these children will be with us next week.”

Metro World Child Kenya’s work continues to expand rapidly, and Janine is constantly amazed at what God does.

She was recently moved to begin a new work in Shamata in central Kenya, for example, after seeing a BBC documentary about suicide rates in the region.

“The programme was called ‘Are Kenya’s men in crisis?’ and it started with the piercing scream of a mother whose grown-up son had just committed suicide. “Seventy-five men had committed suicide in Shamata in one year, and the documentary followed the stories of people
struggling to survive.

“It pierced my spirit, and I knew we had to do something. Children are being left fatherless, and families can’t support themselves.”

New Team

Shamata is more than two hours from Janine’s office, so she envisioned creating a new team in the town. She and her team visited but arrived on a day when the schools were shut, the chief’s office was shut, and they knew no one to speak to.

But she knew God hadn’t allowed them to travel all that way for nothing and, it seems, God had bigger plans.

“We came across a secondary school that was open and met with the deputy headteacher who happened to be a Christian. He said he could take us to meet the very families who had featured in the BBC documentary,” says Janine.

“We went to the home of the woman who had screamed at losing her son. We gave her food, then her family gathered, and we led her grandson to the Lord.

“They took us to other families who had been bereaved in the same manner, and we led another young woman to the Lord, the daughter of a father who had just died.”

Knowing long-term help was needed, Janine told the deputy head, “If we’re going to do something, I need to find people here who have a passion to reach these children and who want to see Shamata’s reputation change from a place of death to a place of life.”

At that moment, a pastor arrived who happened to be the pastor of Churches Together for the whole area. He could help identify and connect the group with people from the churches who had a passion to reach children with the gospel.

“I thought, ‘God, you’ve done it again!’ Since then, we have already trained a team and are trusting to begin operations there soon.”

The work continues to grow in other areas of Africa too. In May 2022, Metro World Child expanded into the Busia region of Kenya and is now reaching more than 14,000 children there every week.

This article first appeared in the October 2022 edition of Direction Magazine. For further details, please click here.

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