Orphaned as a child and educated in exile, Moses Womleh now chairs Liberia's newly formed Free Evangelical fellowship. This week he travels to Kenya to meet the worldwide Free Evangelical family for the first time.
On his 58th birthday, Moses Womleh received a renewed passport and a flight ticket to Kenya. "We don't know how to praise God for this!" he wrote. He has planted churches and built a seminary branch of more than 200 students, and five days before his birthday he was elected chair of a new national church fellowship. Even so, this will be the first international conference of its kind he has attended.
From exile to ministry
Womleh was in first grade when both his parents died of illness. "I came up as an orphan," he says. "I stayed with others, going to school. But when I graduated high school I chose Jesus to be my Lord and Savior."
He finished high school in 1989, the year civil war reached Liberia. The conflict continued, with pauses, until 2003. Womleh fled across the border to a refugee camp, and there he began studying with Worldwide Evangelical Seminary (WWES), an international seminary serving students who cannot reach conventional theological schools. He kept studying after he returned home. He completed a Bachelor of Theology and then a Master's degree, which was celebrated on 7 March 2020 at Beersheba Ministries with district education officers among the guests. According to WWES, he was its first student and first graduate in Liberia.
Churches first
He began his ministry before he had a degree. In 2006 he founded Beersheba Ministries and registered it with the government, with the aim of evangelising rural and urban Liberia, training pastors and planting churches. "I have planted three churches on my own," he told WWES in 2019, "no help from anybody."
The outside support that came later was modest. In March 2021 it paid for the young churches to travel together to their annual conference, a hundred kilometres from Monrovia. Churches in Finland have since stood with the pastors as well. By March 2025 there were five congregations, one of them a preaching point. That October a new church opened in Kakata, Margibi County.
A seminary branch without fees
While the churches grew, Womleh also built WWES's branch in Liberia. When he described it to the WWES office in 2021, it charged no fees and all its teachers were volunteers. The needs he listed were books, an office and a vehicle. WWES records now show 222 Liberian students and graduates, 219 of them still active. Annual course completions rose from six in 2013 to 250 in 2024. Students are based in Monrovia, Margibi, Ganta, Gbarnga, Harper and Todee.
On 30 May, six pastors in Todee received Bachelor of Theology degrees. In August a bishop in the Monrovia area proposed a partnership to extend the programme into Grand Gedeh, Maryland and River Gee counties.
WWES has deliberately kept its role limited. The seminary provides education, not licences for ministry, because credentialing belongs to the national churches. The vision, the congregations and the leadership described here are Liberian.
A national fellowship
On 19 September, leaders of ten Liberian churches agreed to form one fellowship. The largest congregations are in Monrovia, Saclepea and Buchanan. Eight more congregations, also led by WWES graduates, were represented at the meeting and took partnership agreements home to be signed. Womleh was elected chair. "We have organized the Free Evangelical movement in Liberia," he wrote that evening.
To Kenya
From 28 September to 3 October, Womleh will attend the IFFEC Worldwide conference at Brackenhurst in Kenya. It is the first worldwide gathering of the International Federation of Free Evangelical Churches to be held in Africa. He will bring news that most delegates have not yet heard: a Free Evangelical movement now exists in Liberia.
"This sounds wonderful here," he wrote once his travel was confirmed, "my wife and church members are overjoyed."
Interested in studying, or in supporting students like those in Liberia? Learn more at Worldwide Evangelical Seminary. This story draws on Moses Womleh's correspondence with WWES and on WWES records.
