Page 158 - Unseen Hands by Nona Freeman

Unseen Hands
padding the ballot box, he sternly limited voting to the ministry.
Tekle won the election by a large margin. Amare became his assistant; Teshome, the treasurer; and Erkenesh, the secretary. Instead of being in a desert, Tekle now found himself in quicksand. The board mem bers ignored him and held their own secret meetings, mak ing decisions that hampered the work.
They first decided that the leader and his assistant should receive only fifty birr a month out of the tithes. This was no hardship for Amare: he had the income from the school, and onlyhis wife to support. Tekle had his wife, three children, his mother, and two sisters who depend ed on him. This effectively confined him to Addis, mak ing it impossible for him to visit and encourage the other churches. He could neither make calls on saints living at a distance in the city, nor buy sufficient food; he paid forty birr a month in rent alone.
Danger mounted in Addis when the communists toppled the emperor's regime in September 1974, and a time of unprecedented violence swept the city as factions backed by China and Russia continued a tug of war for control.
Having rendered Tekle helpless, Amare took control of the work with careless disregard of the consequences. The revival stopped, and weak believers fell away. At a time when the church needed strength to minister to the uprooted and devastated, it had only a carnal power strug gle. Tekle patiently waited on the Lord while the board members ruled that he could not preach in Addis. Tekle and Erkenesh could only cry to the Lord for help. In May, Brother Harris wrote to Tekle as the official leader say-
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