God’s Commission and Pastor Paul’s Mission
What would cause Paul Ndungu, a Kenyan born into the Kikuyu tribe, to dedicate his life to the welfare and salvation of the Massai people?
The two tribes have feuded for more than a millennium, yet Ndungu, known affectionately as “Pastor Paul,” has seen a multitude of people from tribes in Kenya come to Christ since he gave Jesus his heart as a young man. His ministry also extends into nearby Uganda and as far as India.
Speaking at a recent Love Worth Finding staff and devotional meeting, Pastor Paul said he had no intention of becoming a believer when Christians first came to his village in the 1980s.
“They would share the Word of God and ask if we wanted to become Christians. The elder of my tribe would look at me and I would say ‘no, no.’ “
Humble Beginnings
“But one day, I knelt down and gave my life to Jesus.”
From that quiet start, Pastor Paul followed Jesus’ call to the ministry, completing his training in 1987 at Pwani International Christian College in Mombasa, Kenya.
“At a Christian conference I attended in Mumbai (December 1987), they were praying to God to get someone to commit himself to the Massai. The more I prayed, the more God said, ‘It’s you. It’s you!’”
With anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 languages, Africa is home to approximately one-third of the world's languages.* Pastor Paul learned the predominant and very precise language of the Massai. “There are 42 dialects in Kenya,” he explained. “One word might have five different meanings.”
Pastor Paul began visiting Massai villages to share God’s Word.
“I had to follow tribal protocol. If I wanted to share, I had to speak to the chief or to his representative. Sometimes the answer was, ‘No, thank you, you may not share today.’ The first six months, visiting three villages, I did not have a single convert.”
Then one day, he said, a man close to the chief asked, “’Would you mind to go with me to my village?’ He might have wanted to kill me, but I went, and he sat with me by the fire all night asking questions about God. He later gave his heart to Jesus.”
Over the ensuing three decades, God has been faithful to introduce Himself to thousands through Pastor Paul. And God has supplied every need, even when Paul and his family were poisoned because of their beliefs.
A New Partner
When Pastor Paul met Ken Rowland in 1995, Paul wanted to build a church in Kenya. Intrigued by the history of the area, Ken, a member of Central Church in Collierville, TN, went with Paul along with a group of 10 men led by David Olford.
Pastor Paul jokes that it was really Ken’s fascination with Tarzan movies that prompted Ken to leave the Memphis, TN, area and make the trip.
In any case, Ken became team leader on his second trip has returned 20 times with mission teams in the last three decades to assist Paul with church building and other work. Ken describes two of the most surprising things related to his work with Pastor Paul.
Surprise number one is God’s sense of humor.
“On my first trip with Pastor Paul in 1995, I was working on a roof alongside a Massai man who spoke no English. At the top of the roof, I began beating my chest like Tarzan. The man looked at me and I said, ‘Tarzan.’ He said ‘Tyson.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘Tarzan.’ ‘Tyson,’ he said back.” Ken was imitating a man in a jungle and his Massai brother was referring to American boxer Mike Tyson, who was popular in Africa and who, at that time, owned a white Bengal Tiger named “Kenya.” Providentially, 27 years later, on one of Ken’s trips, he reunited with the same brother in Christ, who goes by the biblical name, Noah, and serves as a caretaker in Pastor Paul’s home church.
Surprise number two is God’s rescue plan for a small, seemingly insignificant, group of people:
“One of the tribes we serve is the Pokot people who live on a mountain north of Lake Baringo in Kenya. I’ve never seen people that poor. The first time we met them, they were mixing alcohol to give to the children to help them sleep on empty bellies. We provided them with a thousand pounds of beans and a thousand pounds of rice.” The mission team brought spiritual food as well. Pastor Paul’s ministry to the Pokot people now includes 1,302 believers in 24 local churches, one physical church building, 26 trained pastors, and a well that supplies water to the community.
Ken, now 77, is planning a mission trip to Kenya from his home church in June 2025, to mark his 30-year partnership with Pastor Paul in service to believers in Africa.
God’s Work; Not Mine
Pastor Paul emphasized with the LWF staff the nature of God’s call:
“Here in Memphis, in Kenya, throughout Africa, God is at work. I do not work for God; God works through me. God is changing lives for His glory. He is using you and He is using me.”
Pastor Paul began his ministry with one man from a tribe that once believed “God drops cows and sheep and goats to them alone straight out of the sky.” He now collaborates with believers in more than 400 churches God has used him to plant in Kenya, Uganda, and India. “We have gone from 0 to 89,000 converts,” he said, speaking of Kenya. There are more than 100,000 Christians who have come to faith through his ministry. Again, he emphasizes, “this is by God’s hand alone.”
Each church he plants has a “Ministry Identification Department,” to make sure every new believer is discipled to become a witness of Jesus Christ. Each believer identifies at least one person to bring to church each year; many bring four, five, or six people, Pastor Paul said. In this way, congregations double in size annually.
“The numbers don’t count,” Pastor Paul said. “It’s how faithful I am, we are, to Christ. It’s the Holy Spirit’s job to save people.”
Pastor Paul said he was blessed to meet Pastor Adrian Rogers many years ago, and that the work LWF does—sharing biblical truth throughout the world—is more important than we may realize.
“We have the same problems in Africa you have here. The false gospel, the prosperity gospel, is choking the truth out in Kenya today. They’re not preaching the Word. They’re entertaining people.”
Love Worth Finding’s mission and Pastor Paul’s mission converge at the point of biblical truth. LWF has translated its core messages and materials into 13 languages, some of them the world’s most-spoken languages—that’s plain-spoken truth straight from God’s Word with the potential to reach 70% of the world’s population.
“When God says go, you go,” Pastor Paul said passionately. “When you get there, God is gonna take care of anything else. We must continue to focus on God’s Word alone. Let’s serve our Christ with all that is in us. And keep serving until He comes.”
