MWC leader was raised Muslim, found Christ

Bedru Hussein of Ethiopia, now in his fourth year as vice-president of Mennonite World Conference, was raised Muslim but received an education at a Christian school.

“My parents were ardent Muslims,” he explains, adding they “were very pious and held monthly religious meetings in our home.”

Believing that their son was securely fixed in their Muslim faith, Bedru’s parents sent him at the age of five to an Orthodox priests’ school so he would have a better education. “There I was introduced to the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments.” Somewhere between his Muslim upbringing and his brush with Christianity, Bedru remembers that “there was a voice that I heard, urging me to keep the Ten Commandments.”

At the age of 13, he began to wonder who Jesus was. Despite the displeasure of his family, Bedru continued his curiosity about Christianity through his teen years and while studying at university. He accepted Christ in 1966 at age 18 through a Billy Graham film and the University Christian Students’ Fellowship.

From the beginning of his involvement with the church, Bedru realized that the work of the church could not be left primarily in the hands of a few select leaders. Christian teachers were not only needed on university campuses where interest in a new approach to life was at a peak but were also in demand throughout the country where the church was growing.

In 1976, Bedru was hired to teach in a Mennonite high school and joined the Meserete Kristos Church. Not only was he an instructor in biology for six years in that school, but he also taught apologetics.

Bedru, who acknowledges that his own abilities and experience lie in administration and teaching, helped to hatch the methods for involving everyone in particular responsibilities within the church. After 13 years as a biology teacher in one church school and two government schools, Bedru spent seven years as executive secretary of the MKC. The experience as a church executive made him face the Ethiopian Mennonites’ desperate need for trained pastors and leaders.

In 1994, the Meserete Kristos College opened about 25 miles outside Addis Ababa. The College offers a variety of biblical and theological courses and has plans to develop a liberal arts program, offering degrees in science, business administration, computer technology, nursing and pharmacology.

The formation of the College prompted Bedru to head back to school, this time in North America. In the fall of 1997, he said goodbye to his wife Kelemework Belete and his four half-grown children and enrolled in a three-year master of divinity program at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Harrisonburg, Va. “I wanted to be introduced to the tools of theology and to add a level to what I had already experienced in the church.”

Bedru, who is now back in Ethiopia, is associate principal of Meserete Kristos College and teaches courses in leadership, administration and missions. He speaks softly but with firm conviction about what he believes are appropriate ways for the church to accomplish its tasks. “I think the Lord has given people to the church – and each has a gift – they are all needed. A pastor can’t have them all. A pastor can mobilize these gifts. The pastor’s task is to mobilize.”

Bedru is keen on training the next generation as leaders. “If churches want to grow, they need to mentor young people from their congregations, visit them when they go away to school or work, bond with them, call them back to leadership.”

The strategy appears to be working. “The majority of our members are young people. We attract a lot of college students. We have a minister in Addis Ababa who cares for members who are in college. Every year we have 30 to 40 college students who become church leaders.”

Bedru dreams about the international Anabaptist–Mennonite community having intentional and meaningful interchange. He would like to see a place where church leaders from the northern and southern hemispheres could come together to work at practical theology – “living, working, playing, studying and doing research. It would help focus our identity.”

He says, “We need the north, and the north needs the south. We can talk to each other when we get together in big meetings, but doing together brings changes of attitude; it strengthens the bond in all directions.”

—adapted from a news release