For the members of Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church in Apple Valley, the Tungamalenga Parish in Tanzania has given new meaning to the word partnership.

Over nearly 10 years, through a ministry focused on evangelism, education, healthcare and economic development, both sides of the relationship have seen tremendous change. For Tungamalenga, it has come in scholarships, hospitals, and chapels. For Shepherd of the Valley, it has come in humility and inspiration.

“The nature of the mission is not paternal but progress,” senior Pastor Chris Smith said. “We are as much in need of mission as they are.”

Talk of the partnership began in the late 1990s, when the large congregation of SOTV realized it had the resources to take the ministry to a new level, Smith said. Tanzania, which has a strong Lutheran church presence, was the perfect match.

In June 2001 the church’s partnership with Tungamalenga Parish, which 20 smaller village congregations spread over a 50-mile area comprise, became official.

In August 2002, SOTV members made their first visit to Tanzania, and since then, they have sent more than 100 members on about a dozen trips. The Apple Valley church has provided scholarships for 150 students each year, and have 10 chapels under construction now.

In addition, SOTV built a small ward that contributes to health care for 10,000 people around Tungamalenga, and a microfinance cooperative and agriculture demonstration plot have been developed to try to improve the livelihood of the large subsistence farming population there.

But greater than all of these developments has been the personal connection shared between the people of SOTV and Tungamalenga, partnership coordinator Kirsten Levorson said.

“It’s not the number of churches, it’s not the number of students,” she said. “The thing that every single person comes back with is this kind of awe-struck realization that we have so much and we take so much for granted, and they have so little and they share it with such generosity.”

“They have a hope that goes beyond reason sometimes but is grounded in that faith that God is taking care of us,” Levorson said.

Levorson, who has been on seven mission trips since the partnership began, said that being there for the hard times, not only the good, has been the most meaningful.

“We’ve been included in births, baptisms, weddings, and funerals,” she said. “But holding each other and crying with each other—it’s when you know you’re really brothers and sisters when you can share the dark moments as well as the joy.”

Levorson is confident that overtime more and more members of the church will get to experience that connection and have it shape the way they live their lives.

Already, she said, young people have come back from trips and had it change what they want to study or go into for a living.

The Tungamalenga Parish is one of 70 similar partnerships between congregations in the St. Paul Area Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and congregations of the Iringa Diocese of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania.

But the partnership has been especially successful because of its mutual nature, participants say. The motto for the mission is the Swahili phrase “Bega Kwa Bega.” Translating to mean, “Shoulder to Shoulder,” this phrase says it all.