Publications
Stories from the field, told by the people living them.
How a Flawed Guy Backed Into Starting Churches in South Sudan, Sudan, and East Africa
Mike traces twenty years from corporate meetings in Texas to planting churches in South Sudan, his story and David Kaya’s woven together. He kept the failures in alongside the God Stories, on purpose. If you’ve ever felt unqualified for what God might be calling you to, this one was written for you.
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New
A Holy Undoing That Makes You Whole
Jodi serves as Chief of Staff and Women’s Ministry Director at Empower One, and this is the story underneath that work. Written on morning walks to a half-bare tree in a West Texas cotton field, it is a book for the woman who has been faithful and capable for so long that she has lost track of herself in the middle of it. The road out of her own undoing ran straight through South Sudan, and some of the voices you know from this site are in these pages.
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The Story Behind the Book
Ali, my wife, had suggested I write a book for a long time. In the early 2000s, an E3 Partners Ministry board member stopped me in a hallway and suggested I turn the email newsletter I was writing into a book.
In May of 2022, the Empower One team gathered at Church at the Cross in Grapevine, Texas for a planning meeting. The team wrote out our 10 year goals. I mostly kept silent through that exercise. The last bullet point was for me to write a book.
In the fall of 2022, I had an extra day waiting for my flight in Entebbe, Uganda. I sat on the front porch of the Anderita hotel, ordered a spicy African tea, and started typing. A year and a half and two editors later, I present to you, Eating with God’s Fork.
You can read the plucky description Streamline Books helped me write for the back cover. But here’s a little more of what I hope the book represents. What got me over the hump were my kids. I wanted them to have a record of my story, which is Empower One’s and David Kaya’s combined. Second, I hope at least one person takes a leap of faith with God, inspired by this story and the God Stories I included. And third, I want all our amazing donors, prayer partners, trip goers, and staff members to see behind the scenes. But more than that, I hope they get a fuller picture of how much God has used them in Africa, particularly South Sudan and Sudan.
I only pushed back on my editors in two or three places. One was the subtitle. I felt a strong conviction to use the phrase, “… a flawed guy.” I intentionally included multiple areas where I fell short or flat-out failed in the book. My hope is you’ll be encouraged if you don’t feel fully equipped or up to snuff to jump in with God. Spoiler, you’re not equipped, but the gospel is why you are.
If you walk with a spiritual limp or feel unqualified, this is for you. I share those feelings, but I hope you’ll see how a life fully submitted to God can be fun, exciting, and full of adventure. God’s Kingdom is already here, jump in.
The Story Behind the Book
For most of my adult life I was the capable one. I could carry a lot, drop very little, and keep most of the people around me okay. I believed that was what faithfulness looked like. Then, after years on a church staff I loved, I came apart. It was not dramatic from the outside. From the inside, I could no longer tell where my usefulness ended and I began.
Most mornings during that stretch, I walked out to a half-bare tree in the middle of a cotton field near our house. I prayed out loud. I argued with God some. I stacked a small pile of rocks at the base of the tree, and the pile is still sitting there today. What I found in that field was that God was never asking me to be the load-bearing wall of every room I stood in. He was undoing the knots so He could make me whole. This book is what happened out there, and the people who taught me to understand it.
It was written for the woman who loves God and has been faithful and responsible for so long that she has lost herself somewhere in the middle of it. It is built on ten Hebrew words that gave me language for what fear, shame, and unbelief had been doing underneath my competence for years, and it points toward a gentler and truer way to live your faith in freedom.
The reason it lives on this website is that my unraveling led me here. I came to Empower One raw, and the pastors and women’s leaders in South Sudan, Sudan, and DR Congo showed me what faith looks like when there is nothing left to hold it up but Jesus. David Kaya, Annet, and Mike are in these pages because their stories kept mine honest. A woman in the Upper Nile walked seven hours with five small children to one of our gatherings, and she taught me more about hunger for God than any book on my shelf. You cannot write about coming undone and leave them out.
My mentor Linda has walked with me for thirty years, and the book ends with her commission to pass it on. That is my hope for it. That it reaches one woman who thought the exhaustion was devotion, and that she sees what I saw: the undoing was never the point. Jesus was. And if it also brings a few new people across the bridge to the work God is doing in Northeast Africa, I would count that as the field doing exactly what it has always done for me.
Prefer to listen? The podcast carries these stories out loud.