“IT’S ABOUT PEOPLE helping people they’ve never met,” Ken says.

Helping Others Because You Can

Posted July 15, 2010

AS HE PREPARES for his 11th church-building trip to Kenya, Ken Rowland reminisces about his first in 1995.

“There were 11 men that went,” he says. “On the way over, my Sunday School teacher passed out a flyer—a newspaper article—and it talked about some missionaries who had been killed just miles from where we were going. And some others who had been dragged off a bus and beaten.

“We asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell us about this?’ He said, ‘Would you have gone?’”

Well, no. Probably not. But they did go. And in two weeks, they built a stone church with their own hands. It was the start of something profound; both for these Americans and for the Africans they were helping.

By the next trip, Ken had become the leader of the building team. More and more fellow members of Central Church (a nondenominational congregation in Collierville, Tennessee, just southeast of Memphis) joined him in traveling to Kenya, in east-central Africa.

To date, Ken and his team have built more than 20 churches.

When a village gets a church, Ken says, the government sends a teacher. So in more than two dozen Kenyan villages, children for the first time have gotten the opportunity to go to school.

And it has all happened because a Kenyan pastor decided to reach out across centuries of mistrust. Paul Ndungu of the Kikuyu people (the largest ethnic group in Kenya) gave himself the mission of reaching out to the Kikuyu’s traditional enemies, the Masai. By 1995, his new flock needed a church. Pastor Paul contacted David Olford who had grown up in Kenya but was then Ken Rowland’s Sunday school teacher. Could the church help?

Ken volunteered. At first, it seemed like an adventure, but more important, he said, “I felt a need to try to help somebody that couldn’t ever help me.”

Now, at 62, he says, “The best part of my life has been the last part of my life.”

He lavishes praise on his coworkers at Morgan Keegan Fixed Income Division, who have helped finance almost all of the churches. One year, Ken did a 40-mile bicycle ride in return for donations. Often, he says, people simply say, “You just tell me how much to write the check for.” Once, he got a check that covered the entire cost of an entire church.

“It’s just the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen—the generosity,” Ken says. “It’s about people helping people halfway across the world that they’ve never met.”

After all those trips, Ken has some stories: About the elderly blind man who walked, a cane in each hand, four days and nights to ask that a church be built in his village. (It was.) About the long drives—up to four hours each way—between the headquarters compound and the work sites. About changes in construction techniques that now allow the team to build a church in only two days. About the eventual realization that January, with its 105-degree temperatures, was the wrong time to be traveling to Kenya. About the Kenyan children he has seen grow into young men. About the construction site where the vegetation had been burned off, he was told, “so you could see the cobras.” (He’s seen lions, zebras, giraffes, and baboons, but no cobras. So far.)

Again and again, he returns to the same theme: “People helping people; I like that.”

That help need not reach international dimensions. “You may never go to Africa, but almost every day one of my friends here takes something to the homeless,” Ken says. “It’s the same thing. Helping others because you can.”

KEN ROWLAND is a Managing Director for the Fixed Income Division of Morgan Keegan in Memphis, Tennessee.

Everyone has a story.