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Dr. Thomas A. Lambie was called a "loose cannon" by his Presbyterian missionary colleagues in British Sudan in 1907 because of his energy, vision, and spiritual fervor. Through combined gifts of diplomacy and medical prowess, Lambie, together with two missionary colleagues, launched the Sudan Interior Mission in Ethiopia in 1927. The goal of this enterprise was to evangelize the primal religionists of southern Ethiopia. During ten years of pioneering mission efforts by Lambie and nearly one hundred SIM cohorts, a young church of nearly fifty baptized believers was formed. The missionaries were then evicted from Ethiopia by the invading Italians in 1936. This modest beginning became the foundation for what is today the vibrant Ethiopian Kale Heywet Church, the largest evangelical denomination in Ethiopia.
About the author
Paul Balisky, together with his wife, Lila, served with SIM in Ethiopia, 1967-2005. During his missionary career he was involved in church planting, supervising various development projects in southwest Ethiopia during the 1974-1991 Marxist regime, instructing at various levels of the Ethiopian Kale Heywet Church's theological schools, and most recently teaching at the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology, Addis Ababa. His PhD thesis, supervised by Professor Andrew Walls at the University of Aberdeen, Wolaitta Evangelists: A Study of Religious Innovation in Southern Ethiopia, 1937-1975, was published by Pickwick Publications in the American Society of Missiology Monograph Series in 2009. Paul and Lila now make their home in Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada.
