By James E. Copple Human-trafficking lives in the shadows of our global urban centers.  “Shadows.” That’s her word, and she is a 15-year-old Eritrean girl sold by her parents and trafficked via container-truck to Nairobi, where she lives in a small shack. And hers isn’t an uncommon story in East Africa, where famine and drought […]

by James E. Copple That first sermon, I will never forget it. Less than four months after I found myself kneeling at an alter and accepting Jesus Christ as my personal savior, I was now preaching.  My conversion was radical. I mean, I went from a hell-raising 15 year-old to a Bible carrying evangelist overnight. […]

She walked nearly 300 miles to get herself and her two children to a refugee camp in a not too distant land that merely tolerates her presence. On the journey she was raped and she witnessed the murder of her husband by Al-Shabaab – the terrorist organization threatening the region known as the Horn of Africa. When I […]

We are all familiar with the clichés of “show me the money” or in investigations related to property crime or corruption, “follow the money.” The point of these phrases is that there is an object that defines our behavior or actions. I must confess I am an unashamed and unabashed pursuer of money. Over the […]

I often go to slums and work in urban environments that are horrific in poverty, disease and crime. But this morning was different. I walked the narrow walkways between corrugated huts interviewing the youth leaders. The smells were so bad that three times I had to fight the gag reflex…

The post election violence in Kenya that captured the world’s attention in 2007 and 2008 found its way to the slums of Kibera and Korogocho but nowhere was the violence more intense, more tribal and more…

Blue Cross Kenya sponsors a group of moms and their children living in the Korogocho Slums in Nairobi who have given up distilling home brew alcohol and abusing their own product. Recovering moms and their children live in the worse poverty in all of Africa. Yet, part of their work and ministry is called Hope Raisers and in […]

I had the good fortune of working for and studying with the late Timothy L. Smith, Professor of Religious History at The Johns Hopkins University. I was his Associate Pastor when he was Pastor of the Wollaston Church of the Nazarene in Boston and I was his doctoral student in American Religious History at Hopkins. […]