Sunday 8th April marked the official opening of the church in Dar Es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania. Many disciples traveled for over 18 hours by road from Nairobi, Kenya to be part of this historical church planting in a city highly regarded as one of the must-visit places in the world.

The Sunday service was powerful and the 75 people in attendance ecstatic.

After the service, the disciples traveled to the beach together with the visitors and simply had a whale of a time! The disciples who live in Dar Es Salaam (often referred to as Dar) had organized a surprise party that played a significant role in creating an opportunity for both locals and visiting disciples to have an in-depth time of fellowship.

7 disciples currently make up Dar Es Salaam church, having moved there from outside Tanzania. Two of them are South African nationals while the rest are Tanzanians educated abroad. Over a period of time, they all moved to Dar Es salaam and have since been having both Sunday and midweek services. The church has been operating for some time now with few disciples and the main objective of this auspicious planting was to encourage them to realize that they are a full-fledged church now with expectations from God to grow the church and ultimately be a pillar for future churches in Tanzania to anchor on.

The Dar church is made up of visionary disciples who are motivated to grow the church at all costs. They are all in cognition of the fact that the future prospects of planting churches in Tanzania will largely depend on the spiritual stability of the Dar Es Salaam church. This is mainly because Dar Es Salaam (Arabic word meaning “Abode of Peace”) and formerly known as Mzizima, is the largest city in Tanzania. A sea port city with a population estimated at 2,500,000, it is also the country’s richest city and a regionally important economic centre.

One of the crowning facts about this newly launched church is its financial base. As it stands now, the church is financially capable of shouldering almost all its expenses. Ceteris paribus Dar Es Salaam church could be the first church to be financially self supporting in East Africa.

Tanzania was the first of the East African countries to gain independence from colonial rule, and now many Tanzanians will have the opportunity to gain spiritual independence from Satan’s rule.

The planting of the church in Dar Es Salaam brings to two the number of congregations that we have in Tanzania, alongside the church in Arusha, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary.

Previous leaders of the church in Arusha had dreamt of the day when Tanzania’s largest city would have a church of disciples. Wycliffe Mbimwa shares, “I had been praying for this since 1998, therefore I was very ready to travel from Nairobi and be present to witness the planting at whatever cost. The occasion was a dream come true. When I had started praying for the church to be planted in Dar it seemed impossible because the church was not yet registered in Tanzania, there wasn’t a single disciple in Dar, and the one church in Tanzania at the time, in Arusha, was very far from the city of Dar Es Salaam.”

Frida Mcharo and George Khisa weren’t able to travel from Nairobi to be at the event, but that didn’t dull their excitement. Says Frida, who led the women in Arusha from September 2000 to January 2003, “When I was in Arusha we dreamt of planting the church in Dar but had no idea how it would happen. God has made the dream come true in his own way. He has allowed the church to start, and now what remains is to do the work.”

George led the Arusha church from September 2000 to October 2003. He shares his vision for the country of Tanzania. “We will have great churches in the major towns and cities like Mwanza, Dodoma, Morogoro and eventually in all Tanzania.”

Let us pray that the celebration that marked the planting of the church in Dar will be surpassed only by the joy of thousands upon thousands of men and women baptized in the years ahead.