Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Frederick Mudasia is on the other side of the world from home, but he’s here in Sweet Home to learn new ways.
Mudasia, 40, of Nairobi, Kenya, is beginning a six-month internship at Community Chapel, where he expects to get experience and gain ideas for ministering to his people.
Trained as an accountant, he is also a professional musician, primarily playing lead guitar and bass, who has performed in Europe and around Africa.
“You have to be able to play more than one instrument in Nairobi to make it as a professional musician,” he said. “I couldn’t specialize.”
Mudasia was born in west Kenya, in a town called Margoli, the son of a hematologist and a teacher. He moved to Nairobi with his family in 1969, at age 3, and grew up there. After graduating from high school in 1983, he went to college for a year to study accounting, then had to quit to get a job to help pay for his siblings’ education.
“Education is very important in Kenya,” he said.
While working 200 miles from Nairobi, he earned a certified public accountant degree by doing independent study. But, partly due to the lack of educational opportunties in the hinterlands, he returned in 1994 to Nairobi, where he got work as an assistant accountant at a firm in the city.
“I could not see myself growing up, no college, no school, no education 200 miles away from Nairobi,” he said.
He also pursued his musical career, playing rock, jazz, Afro-jazz and Latin salsa music in local gigs and then, eventually, in Europe.
“The competition is tight,” he said of the musical scene. “You have to be well-versed in many styles. We have traditional music called “Benga” and that’s the predominant style in Kenya, with drums and traditional instruments.”
It was through his music that he got into ministry. He was playing at a social gathering in Nairobi one day in the mid-1990s when he met a director for Youth for Christ, a Christian organization that ministers to young people worldwide.
“He was pretty impressed by what I was doing and he asked me if I wanted to be part of a team that was going to the United States in 1997 to raise support for Youth for Christ,” Mudasia recalled. “He mentioned to me he was in the process of recruiting an accountant.”
He spent 12 months in the U.S. from 1997 to 1998, visiting 44 states and five Canadian provinces and playing music.
“I got quite good support,” he said, noting that Youth for Christ does not pay its staffers, who are supported by individuals and church congregations. While he was in the United States he visited Sweet Home, where he met Mark McCartin, pastor at Community Chapel.
“I told Pastor Mark I’d love to come and do some missionary work,” he said.
Mudasia said he and McCartin came up with a plan for Mudasia to visit Sweet Home in 1998, but an August 1998 bomb blast in the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi prohibited him from traveling to the United States.
He continued working for Youth for Christ until 1999, then began attending the East Africa School of Theology in 2000.
“After working for Youth for Christ, I felt I needed to sharpen my calling in ministry,” he said. “I felt this (the theological school) was the best place God had opened for me.”
He earned a diploma in 2002, continued performing as a musician, doing a “lot of session music and playing at festivals in Europe,” and did accounting for a local church while he interned in a ministry in the Karura community of Nairobi.
Last September Mudasia went back to school to pursue a graduate degree in theology, which he is presently pursuing through independent study. Also, last year, he traveled to Los Angeles for the Azusa Centennial Conference at Azusa Pacific University. He contacted McCartin and they agreed to give the internship another shot.
Mudasia, who is single, said his two sons, Dave, 10, and Jeff, 8, are staying with his mother in Kenya. He arrived in Sweet Home in early September and has been acclimating himself to the community and the church, where he plans to participate in all the ministries he can.
“I will do almost every ministry the church is involved in,” he said. “I just want to see how the church is organized and take ideas back to Kenya. I’m an apprentice. It’s a learning process.”
He said America offers “lots of resources – schools, materials, communication.
“I’d like to take advantage of these things for the betterment of the people I will be serving in my country,” Mudasia said.
He said education is more valuable to people than giving them food or other supplies “because when you educate someone, you are actually giving them life. You can give education to a whole village. Like the Chinese say, it is better to teach someone to fish than giving him fish.”
He said he will be looking into options to further his own education while he is in the United States.
“If I can go to school and further my education, I will jump at it,” he said.
Rather than return to Nairobi to start a church, he wants to work with a children’s home and start an organization that will offer services to the community such as a gym, a swimming pool and a hostel.
“I want a place where the community can come together to talk about issues – a medium to spread the gospel,” he said. “Nairobi has a lot of churches.”
He said that in his travels he’s noticed that churches, particularly in Europe, are “becoming museums.”
“I don’t see church as an effective tool to bring people to Christ,” he said. “We need to change our tactic of fishing. You cannot have the same style all the time. I’d like to be in the forefront of an organization to reach out to people in a different way.”