Member Spotlight: Nathan Holland, Angola Mission Team

It took Nathan Holland nine years to get to Angola to serve as a missionary, but he got there.

Now the 30-year-old Samaritan Ministries member is making it count.

He serves Angola Mission Team alongside fellow Samaritan members Robert and Teague Meyer and Danny and Katie Reese, mostly helping existing Angolan churches and their members to mature, mainly through Bible study. They’re working in Huambo, the nation’s second-largest city.

“We are trying to work with and encourage Angolan Christians in planting new churches,” Nathan says. “Having only been here for a year, we have only recently begun this phase of our work.”

The very focused Nathan felt his future call to Angola 10 years ago while he was a college student at Harding University. He had several friends who were from Brazil, like Angola a former Portuguese colony. After he became aware of Angola’s tumultuous, war-plagued history, Nathan and future teammate Danny Reese decided they would go there “if the war ever ended.”

A few months later, the civil war that had lasted for most of 27 years, did end.

“It took us nine years to get here, but we arrived about a year ago,” Nathan says.

Nathan prepared in a variety of ways. During those nine years, he:

• Traveled to Brazil several times.
• Spent two summers doing missions internships in East Africa, Kenya and Uganda.
• Spent a summer learning from missionaries in northern Mozambique, a country that also speaks Portuguese.
• Lived in Portugal for a year and a half to study Portuguese. He also became very involved with a church in Lisbon, living with an Angolan family from that church while he was there.
• Studied with other team members at Harding Graduate School of Religion (now the Harding School of Theology) in 2004 and 2005.
• Went through training with Missions Resource Network.
• Raised money and found a sponsoring church in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
• Worked with a church in Picayune, Mississippi, in 2005 and 2006, helping to organize volunteers who were rebuilding Gulf Coast communities after Hurricane Katrina.
• Was involved in a church plant in Pearlington, Mississippi.
• Worked part time at a Starbucks for a couple of years.

Finally, things came together, the team was formed and it settled in Angola in 2011. Since then, Nathan and the others have been developing relationships with the Angolans and getting used to living there. He says cultural differences play a larger part than racial differences, “making communication difficult.”

However, they’re working at it and have learned a lot.

“I love the Angolan people,” Nathan says. “They have been through a lot and have experienced things I can’t even imagine, but they are very friendly and genuine. After so many years of civil war, they are ready to move on, eager to learn, and love to enjoy life. They are very happy people.”

They’re also very busy. Nathan describes Angola as “one of the most rapidly developing nations in the world.” That’s partly because they’ve had to start over from scratch. However, the country also has “plentiful natural resources, including oil and diamonds.”

He says it’s also a heavily urban nation because cities were the safest place to live during the war, leading most people to leave the countryside.

“Several generations have now lived in the cities, and nobody wants to go back out to the countryside, so there’s very little agriculture or livestock,” Nathan says. “Nearly everything, including staple foods, is imported from Brazil, Portugal and South Africa.”

That means high prices and a very high cost of living. Angola’s capitol, Luanda, “is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, yet so many Angolans live on very little.”

The Angola Mission Team also has had to learn to live on less, and with fewer comforts than in the U.S.

“I really have learned to appreciate simple things like a shower, ice cubes, and a flushing toilet,” Nathan says.

Electricity can be intermittent, as can Internet access. Getting things done can be frustrating.

“It seems like everything happens at a snail’s pace here,” Nathan says. “We have had to learn to do things one at a time, even when it means spending an entire day just trying to get somebody’s signature on a piece of paper or getting a key copied.”

However, Nathan and his fellow team members are focusing on the tasks at hand. For instance, he’s leading a group Bible study three times a week, reading through the Gospel of Mark “with a particular emphasis on what each chapter or section we read has to say to us about how we can be better disciples or followers of Christ.”

“I am in the process of trying to hand over the responsibility to a couple of the Angolans in the group, and they are already wanting to start and lead new Bible study groups,” he says.

“One of the key aspects of our ministry is that in whatever we do, we want to be doing it alongside and with other Angolan Christians in a system of mutual mentorship. We have tools and resources that we can bring from our training and connections, and they have the cultural insight that we need to make things work in a healthy way. Whether it’s church planting, service ministries, or evangelism, we want to work side-by-side with Angolans.”

Evangelism can be a challenge, Nathan says, not for lack of interest, but for the ability to get their attention.

“For the most part, Angolans are very receptive to the Gospel, but also rather preoccupied with other things,” he says.

Taking care of basic needs is time-consuming.

“So many mundane things like finding food and water can take an inordinate amount of time and energy,” Nathan says. “I live on the fifth floor of an apartment building and have no running water and the electricity is sporadic. Putting food on the table is a full-time job for most people.”

Nathan has been heading toward this job all of his life, it seems. Long before his college days, when he first began to sense his Angolan call, he found other cultures and their people “fascinating.”

“I would always want to meet any missionaries who came to visit at church,” he says. “I remember my second-grade teacher telling me that I should be a missionary one day. It sounded like a good idea at the time, and I just started assuming that I would be a missionary one day. My parents were also very encouraging in that regard as well. They themselves had intended to be missionaries in Australia, but it never actually worked out for them. My dad joined the Air Force, but they were great role models who actively pursued working in God’s Kingdom wherever they were or wherever we lived.”

Now Nathan Holland is pursuing the work of God’s Kingdom wherever he lives—especially in Angola.