Keflen Lugaila's story is one-of-a-kind. The pastor and church planter was put on the spot when her lovely husband died. She and her husband planted their first church together in Katunguru, Sengerema in 1981. She worked closely with her husband while he was alive and the church was doing great.

When Keflen’s husband died, she was lost. Things became very tough and she felt she had no reason to keep moving forward. However, as the Word of God says in Psalm 34, “The righteous person may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers him from them all.” In the midst of her sorrow, God spoke to Keflen that she should take heart because He had chosen her to carry on where her husband left off.

Even though Keflen felt the Lord wanted her to pastor their church, she faced challenges. “A good number of people left the church. Some of them claimed I could not pastor a church because of my age. But more significantly, my gender was the problem. For them, a woman is not qualified to pastor a church.”

Keflen went through many trials but the Lord was on her side and delivered her from all of that. When she was introduced to Multiplication Network Ministries (MNM) in 2018, she was thrilled to take the church planting course knowing she needed help to strengthen her church. When she started implementing the MNM tools, she saw great progress in a very short period of time.

"I thought my church had a problem but I could not see it. But when I started taking the training, I discovered a serious problem. We really didn’t care about doing evangelism as we did not know the importance of it. In the process of receiving the training from MNM, I realized that evangelism is one of the powerful tools that can eventually help our church to grow. We have the mandate to reaching people with the gospel and not just sit, pray, and wait for them to come," says Keflen.

Keflen has completed her training and shares how the training she received helped her church to grow both numerically and spiritually.  

"The training has helped me tremendously," she says. The church is doing well and God has been so faithful. More importantly, they have made great progress in their efforts to evangelize and the church is growing because of it.