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Registered Charity Number: 1025616




MACS in action

Church

The Anglican church in Malawi is growing rapidly and MACS receives many appeals for church building enlargements, re-developments or essential repairs. As new congregations are formed, temporary bamboo and thatch structures are often built. The congregation then set to work making bricks for more permanent buildings and it is then that they often appeal for funds for cement and roofing materials. More than 40 churches have received some assistance from MACS, about half of this number being for completely new structures.

MACS has also helped with the building of clergy houses. Often, when a priest is allocated to a new parish, there is nowhere for him to live and MACS has now funded more than a dozen houses.

One-third of healthcare in Malawi is delivered by church hospitals, health centres and mobile clinics. In rural areas the figure can be 60%. Much the same is true of education and women's development. MACS tries to support Christian communities struggling to bring the fullness of life of which Christ spoke.

  

The church in Malawi is central to the community and is growing rapidly.

 

 

 

 

 

MACS support for pastoral projects:

MACS supports pastoral work in Malawi in many different ways. Each example demonstrates the committment individuals and communities have to helping achieve a fuller life for their people. Specific examples include:

    
Chapananga is a remote valley on the Mozambican border. A group of Jehovah's Witnesses, expelled by former dictator president Dr Banda, returned to Malawi and asked to be received into the church. Two men working at Nchalo sugar mills cycled 50 miles to Chapananga every weekend for six months, preparing a group of 100 for baptism. They were baptized in the river and the Christian community is now 1,000 strong. They have built five churches out of local materials - meaning a grass roof with a life of two or three years. MACS has given grants to put permanent roofs on two of them. Chapananga is now to be a parish with its own priest.  

Maurice Malasa is a Yao speaker and therefore of Muslim origin; the Yao people came with the slave-traders from Zanzibar 150 years ago. He has three jobs: as parish priest, Yao translator of the Bible, and as leader of a community-based orphan project which feeds, clothes, educates and sustains 2,000 orphans. This is a joint Christian-Muslim enterprise. He has severe diabetes, needing an expensive form of insulin not available in Malawi. He also needs a new motorbike. His former one was stolen and the doctors have forbidden him to ride a bicycle.