Kale Heywet Word of Life Church

Kale Heywet (Word of Life) Church (KHC) is the largest evangelical denomination in Ethiopia. Started in the early 1920s by pioneering Serving In Mission, formerly, Sudan Interior Mission, (SIM) missionaries, Kale Heywet Church thrived in the South Central and South Western corners of the country during the five-year Italian occupation in the 1930s.

Dr. Thomas Alexander Lambie (1885-1954) is one of the prominent of early missionaries towards the establishment of the KHC. His entry and stay for some seven years and re-entry with a group of the first batch of SIM missionaries into the country, his fast friendship with the commoner as well as the high-level officials, including the emperor himself, his brave commitment even to relinquish his birth citizenship to be an Ethiopian in order to get the right to buy and retain land titles and build mission stations with less bureaucracy, is a story in its own right. Articles such as this one and his books testify to his life and ministry. In the first decade of the missionary endeavor the mission itself was known locally as "Lambie's Mahber" - Lambie's association.