By the time this note reaches your inbox, Denise and I will be in Liberia with a small team from Edenton Street. We’re traveling with Zoe Empowers to visit the children and youth our church has walked alongside for years, and I want you to know why this trip matters so much to me, and why I believe it matters to all of us.
It starts with the name. Zoe is the Greek word for life. It’s the word Jesus uses in John 10:10: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” Zoe Empowers works with orphaned and vulnerable children in extreme poverty, many of them teenagers raising younger siblings with no adult in the home. It isn’t an orphanage, and it isn’t a handout. Young people come together in groups of 60 to 100 and walk a three-year journey, guided by local Liberian leaders. They learn to secure food and housing, receive business training and small start-up grants, and are wrapped in a community of faith. By the third year, many are paying their siblings’ school fees from their own businesses. Children who were invisible in their villages become leaders, and whole communities begin to flourish.
This is where you come in. Edenton Street currently sponsors two Zoe empowerment groups—the Freedom Group and the Mercy Group. This past Lent, you adopted the second group and fully funded it for all three years. Since 2016, our church has sponsored a total of 10 empowerment groups in Liberia, journeying with more than 835 children and youth.This week we’ll meet some of these young people face to face and hear their stories: graduates who have completed the journey and now stand on their own, youth in the middle of it who are building something new, and children just beginning, taking their first steps out of extreme poverty. Somewhere in Liberia right now, a young woman is running a business, feeding her siblings, and keeping them in school, and your generosity is part of her story.
We aren’t the first from Edenton Street to make this journey. If you’ve walked into our sanctuary, you’ve passed a marker out front. Most of us never stop to read it. It honors Melville B. Cox, appointed to Edenton Street in 1831. He was already sick with tuberculosis and left our pulpit after two months. Two years later he sailed for Liberia, arrived in Monrovia, and wrote in his journal, “Thank God, I am now at Liberia.” He became the first American Methodist missionary to Africa and died within five months. His words are on that marker: “Let a thousand fall before Africa be given up.”
But that isn’t the whole story. Cox didn’t bring the gospel to Liberia. When he arrived, Liberian Methodists had been keeping the flame alive for more than a decade. He joined what God was already doing. That’s how we journey today: as partners in ministry, ready to receive as much as we give. Nearly two hundred years later, we’re still taking faithful steps alongside our Liberian siblings toward communities where children and families can flourish.
So as we take these steps, will you pray with us? Pray for safe travel and good health for our team. Pray for the young people of our Zoe Empowers groups (you can pray for them by name here), the Liberian leaders who walk beside them, and Bishop Samuel Quire and the United Methodist Church in Liberia. Pray that our hearts stay open to be changed. And pray for the church at home while we’re away. I’ll send notes from the road as I’m able, so you can walk with us too. Watch our church social media and website blog for stories and photos. If this ministry stirs something in you, talk with Renae Newmiller, our Director of Local and Global Engagement, about how you can support our Zoe Empowers partnership.