I am a certified United Methodist layspeaker, and I fill the pulpit on occasion at my father's church or anywhere else that asks me. But twice during my Kenya trip, I will do something I've never done before: preach a sermon someone else has written.

LEAMIS has planned out a specific sequence of messages for the worship services during our stay in Kegogi, and they've asked me to preach two of them. The Rev. Debra Snellen, co-founder of LEAMIS, has e-mailed me the sermons and told me to tweak them to fit my own speaking style. I've looked over the sermons and I have no problem with them, and I have monkeyed with the phrasing a bit, but it will still be a new experience.

I gave my testimony during the 2003 trip to Nicaragua, and I helped to explain and talk about a Prodigal Son skit during street ministry last year. But this will be the first time I've ever preached a sermon as such to the locals while on a foreign trip.

Even though many Kenyans speak English, our services will be translated into Swahili.

Speaking with an interpreter is a unique challenge. You can't use a wandering sentence structure; you have to break things up into short bits and get into a rhythm of pausing at just the right point to let the interpreter do his job. If you go too long before pausing, the interpreter may not be able to keep up with everything you said; if you stop after a phrase or sentence fragment, the interpreter may not figure out where you're going and thus may not be able to come up with the right translation. You also have to avoid figures of speech which may not translate well from one language or culture into another.

The nice thing about Bible verses is that you can just give the translator the chapter and verse and he or she can read it out of a Swahili Bible.

I am also responsible for giving devotions at two of our team meetings. The mission team will meet by itself each morning to touch base about the day's activities, and that meeting always starts with prayer and a devotion. Those I am writing myself.

LEAMIS always sends out a prayer journal to mission trip participants to encourage us to pray for specific things before, during and after the trip. I started that journal on Thursday. During the trip, however, I don't use the LEAMIS journal because I am journaling on my own -- a combination of personal journaling (for my own spiritual benefit) and journalism (taking notes for the stories I will eventually write for the newspaper). I have some extra blank books from when I used to teach creative writing to teenagers from the Cumberland Mountains; I will take one of those with me on the trip.

There has been some tension in Kenya in the past week or two, but none of it involves the part of the country where we will be, and I am not concerned. Some protesters outside a government building in Nairobi were treated roughly by the police, and there was some tribal violence in the northern part of the country. But both seem to have been very specific, localized incidents, and neither has anything to do with the area of western Kenya where I will be working. All I can do is trust that God will protect me while I'm on the mission field.

John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government and other topics. His home page is lakeneuron.com.