Finnish missionary work has played a major role in the growth of Pentecostalism in Ethiopia. The membership of Pentecostal partner churches working with Fida exceeds an incredible 10 million. Sanfrid and Anna-Liisa Mattson were the first Pentecostal missionaries in Ethiopia. They arrived in the country in 1951.

There is a great need for missions training and church planting

Ethiopia has 128 ethnic groups whose cultural and social spectrum is a major challenge for churches. There are still dozens of unreached regions and people groups among the country’s over 100 million people. Many people groups do not have the Bible in their own language. Ethiopia’s neighbouring countries are at the top of the list of least reached nations in terms of the gospel.

Ethiopia’s missionary work has a strong support base in Finland: Several churches, monthly donors, and the significant financial support of the Christian entrepreneurs’ mission network (Fida business team) have made it possible to reach the country’s most remote regions. Hundreds of Ethiopian evangelists have been able to start working with new church planting.

Finnish missionaries support partnership

Fida has three partner communities in Ethiopia:

• Guennet Pentecostal Church was started in 1978, and currently has about 2.1 million members.
• The Full Gospel Believers Church has approximately 8 million members.
• Rural evangelism is carried out together with the Gospel for the Nations (GFN) ministry.

The work of Fida’s missionaries is to develop biblical teaching and equipping of local pastors, evangelists and missionaries for wholistic evangelism work.

Fida has two missionary families in Ethiopia: Samuel and Helena Tedder, and Taneli and Auli Halonen.

There is also another family currently preparing to do bible translation work together with Wycliffe Bible translations.