Come! Let us live worthy of the Gospel of Christ.

A Calling That Began in Childhood

Bizuayehu Gebeyehu is from Konso, in southern Ethiopia. She first heard God's voice when she was seven years old. Gravely ill with cholera, she lay while her family prayed over her — and a different voice, gentle, and not one of theirs, called her name and told her: "You will not die. You will serve me."

That voice stayed with her. In grade one, joining her church choir required good academic grades, so she prayed and studied hard — not for the grades themselves, but so she could serve God through the choir. Her performance that year was strong enough that she became one of the top students in her class, and she was welcomed into the choir the following year.

On one early morning, she missed the choir program and instead set out with friends to gather wild grass to sell, hoping to earn enough to buy her own school books. Crossing the river, the others made it safely across; she did not, and no one noticed her fall. Struggling in the water, she remembered what her Sunday school teacher had always taught — to call on the name of Jesus whenever they were in trouble — and she did.

A voice answered her: "Where are you going? Are you serving another god?" It was the Holy Spirit, and the question named something true — she had first pursued her studies to serve God through the choir, but had quietly begun to love academic education itself, and that morning she was walking toward money for books, not toward God. He was telling her, in that moment, that He provides so that His people can serve Him — not so they can chase something else instead.

"I will serve you all my life, my Lord," she answered. It became the covenant of her life. An elderly man appeared, pulled her from the water, and set her down on the road opposite the one she had originally been walking. She kept turning back to look at him as he walked away — and the second time she turned, he was simply gone. From that day, serving God became her mission.

A Love for the Word of God

Bizuayehu's love for the Word of God began when she was just a little girl. She read a borrowed Bible in secret, hidden beneath her schoolbooks, and saved until she could buy one of her own for 13 birr. She still remembers the day she finally held her own Bible — kissing it, hugging it, overcome with joy. Today, whenever she hands someone a Bible of their own, she says she feels that very same joy she felt as a young girl.

A Test of Obedience

Later, God guided her to study Agriculture at Alagi TVT College. She did, and afterward moved to Ziway to work at an NGO-run flower farm, eventually becoming a manager there. It was never her calling, and she wasn't happy in the work — but she stayed, because God told her to stay.

While there, Bizuayehu opened a small restaurant on the side, teaching Scripture to customers after their meals. She also began bringing Moringa — a plant from the rural area where she grew up — to sell, giving 70% of the profit toward supporting ministers. All the while, she carried a great hunger for souls being lost to darkness, and she cried over it often.

Standing Firm in the Workplace

At the flower farm, she was the only woman among the managers, and she refused to allow the corruption many employees wanted to practice — living instead in righteousness, faithful before God rather than before people. Because of it, there were employees who grew unhappy with her, since she wouldn't let them take advantage of the company, and they troubled her often. One of them, the son of a local witch doctor, began openly bragging that he would kill her; the whole company was afraid of him, and he told her coworkers exactly which day he meant to do it — though none of them ever warned her, since he had threatened to kill anyone who did.

A Night of Divine Protection

That evening, most of her friends left work early without telling her why. She finished alone and set off home by bicycle around 7:30 PM. Along the way, the Holy Spirit told her to stop and go into a church. "But Lord, I have so many things to do at home," she said — yet the prompting didn't let up, so she obeyed, turning aside into Mulu Wengel Church, a Protestant congregation nearby, and sitting quietly at the back. The moment she sat down, the pastor began shouting, "One life escaped today! One life escaped today!" — praising God, though she had no idea yet why. The service usually ended by 8:00 PM; that night the preaching ran long, finishing instead at 9:00 PM.

She went home, and the next morning went to work as usual. Her coworkers stared at her. "You came to work? Nothing happened to you?" they asked, clearly shaken. The man himself never showed up to work that day. Once she had finished her own work and arrived back home, he came to her door and knelt at her feet, begging her forgiveness.

Confused, she asked why. He finally told her the truth: he had been following her the evening before, from the moment she left work and started heading home, intending to kill her along the way. "You disappeared on me," he told her. "Where did you go?" "I went inside a church," she answered. He had waited for her at a hidden spot along her route until 9:00 PM, and when she never came, he finally gave up and went home — where he fell suddenly and seriously ill. His father, himself a witch doctor, panicked along with everyone around them, until an evil spirit spoke to the father directly: "He tried to touch a power that is above us — it is her God doing this to you." His father told him there would be no healing unless he went and asked her forgiveness.

So he came and begged her forgiveness, and promised he would protect her from the other employees — the corrupt ones who were always trying to disturb her, among whom he himself had been one. She preached the Gospel to him, telling him how God protects His children, and that it was her own God who had protected her all along. She asked him to take her to his father, so she could preach the Gospel to him too — but he refused. Still, she gave him her word that she forgave him, fed him the word of God, and sent him home in peace.

"Our precious Jesus is faithful," she says, speaking of this part of her life. "He is a true friend. He protects me even when I'm not aware of the situation."

Three months before she was due to leave for a posting in Poland, God spoke to her plainly: "I have tested you enough in the secular world. Now go to school." She obeyed completely — leaving the NGO job, giving up the move abroad, sending her belongings back to her family, and arriving in Addis Ababa with a single suitcase to enroll at a mission school called Youth With A Mission (YWAM).

The Vision for the Ministry

When the course ended, her classmates returned to their home countries. She had nowhere else to go, so she stayed — waiting for whatever God would tell her next. The campus emptied out, foreigners and all, until she was completely alone with nothing to eat but roasted chickpeas. When hunger came, she would go outside, lie in the grass, and let the sunlight stand in for a meal she didn't have.

It was there He gave her the vision that would become this ministry:

For three months, no one came. Her phone did not work, and it felt as though everyone had simply forgotten she existed — it was just her and God. Looking back, she says that silence was God building her: it was there she learned to kill the flesh and align herself fully with Him.

It was in that same season that a beggar knocked on her door. The mission school had always been a place where food was freely given, so he expected the same when he asked. When she told him she had none, he was confused. "What do you mean?" he asked her. "There's always food here." "I'm sorry," she told him, "not this time." "Then what are you eating?" he pressed. "I eat this," she replied — and told him about Jesus instead. He accepted Christ that day, and she sent him to a nearby church. Only after he left did she remember two bites of injera still in the fridge; she ran to catch him and give it to him. He told her he had already eaten the greater food — the Word of God.

She went back inside and worshipped, overjoyed that a soul had been saved — recognizing in that moment what Jesus meant in John 4:34, that His food was to do the will of the Father and finish His work. While she was still worshipping, someone knocked at her door: a woman arrived with food, supplies, and other provisions, having felt God's prompting to come and care for her.

When the three months of fasting ended, God spoke to her once more, in a dream: He showed her 100 kilograms of teff, though only a small portion of it was placed in her own hands. When she asked why only so little of what she had been shown was actually given to her, He told her the whole 100 kilograms was hers — she simply could not manage it yet — and instructed her to grind and prepare the small portion she had been given, then carry it to the servants of God who were starving: "Hurry, and go give it to them."

Learning to Give and Provide

Around this same time, God told her she would work next as a timekeeper, in Addis Ababa. She carried roasted chickpeas in her lunchbox each day — and because they rattled loudly whenever she ran, she never ran at work, embarrassed that others might realize how little she had to eat. Her salary, when it finally came, was 465 birr. She sent 200 of it to support a missionary — marking the official beginning of her mission, in June 2012 G.C. She still laughs telling this part: "How wonderful is our God."

Even this was the Holy Spirit's own teaching: that she needed to learn to give, and to provide, from the very beginning — since the road ahead of her would be long, and because souls are what matter most to God. She obeyed, not out of obligation but out of love for Jesus, who said, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light" (Matthew 11:30), and, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23). As He said in another verse, "Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching" (John 14:23). Everything Bizuayehu has given up since has been given willingly, by the grace of God and out of love for Christ — a sacrifice made for love of Jesus, and for the souls He died to save.

A Vision Beyond Ethiopia

The long-term vision God gave her is to reach Sudan, Somalia, India, and Buddhist regions of Asia — and for a season, missionaries from within the Somali community itself were being prepared to reach their own people in their own language, an effort paused when funding ran out but not forgotten. Within Ethiopia, the priority has always been the places least wanted by anyone else: minority tribes many consider not worth reaching, and Muslim-majority regions. Together with her husband, she also continues to go into areas shaped by heavy witchcraft — confronting it directly and preaching the Gospel to the witches themselves, just as she once did at fifteen. She carries all of this with a heart that weeps before the Lord for souls being lost — it is love, not obligation, that moves the mission forward.

The ministry itself was launched alongside two partners, Ermias Wolde and Shawel Lema, while Bizuayehu was searching for someone to send to reach a Muslim community in Alaba. As she searched, she heard the Lord ask, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" (Isaiah 6:8). Unable to find a person to send, God told her to rise up and go herself.

Planting a Church Where Few Would Go

One of the hardest assignments in those early years was planting a church in an area of Addis Ababa thick with witchcraft, where no church existed at all. Reaching it meant hiking over two mountains — and clearing that climb only brought the next challenge: open spiritual warfare with witchcraft deeply entrenched in the community. Because the people there spoke Oromiffa, she tried repeatedly to recruit local preachers to go in her place, but almost no one was willing to take on a task that hard; most wouldn't even answer her calls once they understood what the assignment involved.

So she went herself, and served there for two years. It bore fruit — a church was planted — and it was there, in the middle of that difficult season, that she met the man who would become her husband. The grace of God was evidently heavy on her life throughout.

Walking Through the Darkness

One evening, during those same two years — before she was ever pregnant — it grew late and dark while she was still climbing the first mountain. Back at the church, the congregation grew anxious when she didn't arrive; they knew she would never miss a service unless something was wrong. With no phone signal where they stood, they hiked to a spot where a signal could reach and called her, moved, she believes, by the Holy Spirit itself. She picked up and told them she was still on her way.

She calls it, to this day, the most frightening path she has ever walked. Looking back, she still wonders whether it was really her at all — her own character was never one to face down the sound of screaming hyenas, let alone total darkness. She believes now it was the Holy Spirit who carried her through it. She had no lantern, no torch — only the small flashlight on her phone, which was itself about to die, its battery nearly gone — and she walked the whole way praying in the name of Jesus. It taught her that Jesus never abandons His children: "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you" (Hebrews 13:5), and, "Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age" (Matthew 28:20). "Ohhh, how amazing is our God," she says.

Once the church called her and realized she was still out there in the darkness, climbing the mountain alone to reach them, they stood up, gathered a group of men, and went out searching for her — carrying hand torches, and sticks to fend off the hyenas if they attacked. It was the Holy Spirit, she believes, who sent that rescue. She had set out on the journey while it was still light, but the distance was far — she was living in Tafo at the time — and reaching that church was never an easy journey even in daylight. Her only strength the whole way was the Holy Spirit. When the men finally reached her and brought her the rest of the way in, they told her, amazed: "This has to be written in your book. We will come and testify to it ourselves." They had seen with their own eyes how God had protected her.

Family, Marriage, and a Shared Calling

She married her husband, Mulugeta, during the COVID-19 pandemic — a season they used to pray and align themselves toward a shared vision. He is now her main partner in both marriage and ministry. Together they planted a church in Alemgena to replace one that had closed after Mulugeta was imprisoned for the Gospel; that congregation is led today by the very youth they raised. After the birth of their first child, the two of them published a book together, "A Tested Life" (የተፈተነ ሕይወት).

Reaching the Unreached

The first church the ministry planted was in Bonga, among the Manja minority community — people who, in their poverty, eat and even sleep on leaves. Bizuayehu and her husband went there themselves, carrying their three-month-old baby along with them. God has been merciful to their home, blessing them with three children in all — a daughter and two sons — and each has gone on mission with their parents from infancy onward. Within a single year, that first congregation in Bonga had grown into five churches, in 2022 G.C.

A Covenant to Serve

Even while pregnant, she kept serving in the field until each pregnancy reached seven months before she would finally slow down. "Nothing can stop me from preaching the Gospel," she says. "I fully put my trust in God and go on mission. God has shown me His care, His love, and His faithfulness throughout my life, and I will speak loudly about Him until the end of the world. I will praise Him, I will serve Him — that is the covenant I have with Him."

"All of this has been funded by faith alone," Bizuayehu says. "God has always been the provider. We simply stand up and do His work, because we are His servants, and our God is an awesome God. Whatever we have sacrificed, nothing compares to the work of the Cross, which has already set us free. Now we go and spread the Gospel, so that others can escape the darkness and taste the same love we have tasted. How awesome is our God — may His name be glorified forever. Amen."

This is just the beginning. However many souls Bizuayehu is able to reach, God is doing His own work, and winning souls. "My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me" (John 10:27). "I will follow you, my Lord," she says.

As shared by Bizuayehu Gebeyehu, Missionary

Why This Testimony Is Shared

This story is shared not to center a person, but to show where the mission truly began — not in a strategy, but in a child's love for Jesus, and in one woman's obedience to a calling only God could give. She listened, and became a vessel for His work. She continues that work today alongside her husband.

All of this is to honor Jesus our Lord, and to lead people from darkness into His light. This testimony exists to magnify our precious Lord Jesus — every work accomplished has been by the grace of the Holy Spirit; we are only His servants. May glory be to our Father in Heaven. Amen.