The Lesotho Shepherd Outreach Partnership Fund seeks financial partners for the Lesotho-national members of AIM’s Shepherd Outreach Team. In the mountain Kingdom of Lesotho of southern Africa, seminomadic shepherds spend much of their lives in isolation taking care of their flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. Many of them have extremely limited access to education and healthcare. The traditional religious practices of ancestor veneration enslave most of them to fear. But the Shepherd Outreach Team, comprised mainly of local believers in Christ who are also from Lesotho, some of whom are former herdsmen themselves, seeks to reach these oft-forgotten young men out in the rugged highlands. Through conversational evangelism, oral Bible classes, through relationship-building and meeting practical needs, and even through care for the shepherds’ wives and children back home in the foothills, this team is establishing small groups of Christian Basotho shepherds who worship their Creator in ongoing fellowship with each other and in ongoing evangelism of still more shepherds.
This project provides a small portion of monthly supplemental support disbursed to Lesotho-citizen members of the Shepherd Outreach Team and other team members from elsewhere in Africa and the global south. Donors are thereby sponsoring these local and near-culture missionaries in situations in which their local Lesotho churches and communities provide mostly nonfinancial support. While team members are responsible for raising funds in their own networks of friends and family, this project allows for some of that support to come from elsewhere, freeing the evangelists and disciplers up for more time spent at shepherds’ sides listening to God’s word, befriending them and in prayer with them.