Kenny Lake Community Chapel of tiny Copper Center, Alaska, is one small church making a huge difference in Zambia's Kabeleka community. In southern Zambia, Kabeleka residents struggle to survive on whatever they can eek from overworked soil and watch as each year more of the community's children are orphaned as parents die from HIV/AIDS.
Yet what links the hearts of rural Copper Valley and arid Kabeleka goes beyond location or lifestyle. The bond that ties these two communities is faith, hope and love—faith that God is at work, hope for a better future and love for one another.
Even though Kenny Lake Community Chapel attracts no more than 100 adults and children, the congregation was ready to make a difference halfway around the world. Inspired by the accounts Pastor Knies shared when he returned home, church members soon were sponsoring dozens of children and funding a community partnership in Kabeleka.
In 2005, the congregation raised $10,000 to help Kabeleka improve food production and understand HIV/AIDS and malaria to reduce the spread of both diseases. They also helped build a footbridge over a stream that flooded each rainy season and kept children from attending school on the other side. And they provided farmers with high-yield, drought-resistant crop seeds, as well as materials and training for village residents to construct more sanitary pit latrines.
After more than eight years serving nondenominational Kenny Lake Community Chapel's congregation, Pastor Knies resigned in the fall of 2004. Yet the momentum for this partnership never slowed. Even while the church was without a pastor for a year, the congregation's commitment to the people of Kabeleka didn't waver. Last month, on the day the congregation was called together to make next year's commitment to Kabeleka, the Rev. Knies meets his sponsored child, Joseph. temperature in Copper Valley had dropped to nearly 40 below zero — so bitterly cold that many residents normally wouldn't venture out of their homes. Yet they flocked to the church, and went beyond their $10,000 commitment to raise $16,000 for their beloved Zambian friends whom they have never met.
