Living in God’s glory
47-year-old Alick Phiri, pastor of Pentecostal Revival Church chairs 22-member Kachere Pastors Fraternal in Malawi.
As a pastor, Phiri’s pleasure dwelt in staying in church house and seeing subjects pour in offerings which he believed could keep him.
“All I thought was, as a pastor, the church had to provide all my needs as my duty was simply to lead the church while the subjects looked after me,” he says.
Anytime the father of four encountered financial challenges, he looked up to offerings as his main source of income. Sometimes, he had to wait for a well-wisher to bail him out.
However, when World Vision partnered the fraternal in his community, the members received capacity building on child protection, channels of hope, celebrating families as well as the famous mind-set change training, the Biblical Empowered World View (BEWV) training.
The five-day training got Phiri shaking his head if he really was fit to lead his subjects.
On second thought, Phiri felt that waiting for the church to provide for the pastor was in a way a burden towards the members.
“So what if we pastors are able to make own money, buy what we want, and may be support other needy Christians,” that is how Phiri reasoned after the training in 2019.
Having saved over MK 80,000 from the allowance he received from the training, he invested it in a timber-selling business.
Got home, and shared the tenets of BEWV to his wife and children. Today Phiri’s home is no longer the same.
His wife, 40 year Salomy is now a trained tailor. Phiri sent his wife to a tailoring school.
“After the raining, I told my wife that we needed to diversify our income sources, so she went to do tailoring and she is now a tailor,” adds Phiri.
Salomy now has four sewing machines, one of which is electric.
“From my tailoring, I can make some money. For example, when I am full-time doing tailoring, I can make between Mk 20,000 ($11.7) to Mk 30,000($17.6) a day, I am so happy about it. I want to supplement my husband’s income,” she says.
Because of diversified income sources, the couple has accumulated some properties. So far the family has a car, Nissan Note bought for k 2,700,000($1588) in 2022 as well as a six-bedroom house on which over eight million kwacha ($4705) has been spent.
Phiri praises World Vision for changing his mind-set to improve his economic status. He says the tenets of the BEWV training will also help churches run better as pastors will no longer be a burden to the subjects financially.
“After the training, I ceased to burden the church with financial contributions to support me as I can support myself. I bought my first car in 2022 and I have just built a big house, that is how transformed we men of God should be so we can inspire our subjects,” says Phiri.
Phiri is also currently supporting his children in universities as the second born is currently at Natural Resources College, while another is in secondary school.