New pastor accepts challenge of mission

Willows United Methodist Church has a new pastor.

The Rev. Shim Habte took over about three weeks ago, following the Rev. Janna Adamson's retirement after 15 years at the church on North Shasta Street.

"The bishop sent me; God sent me here," Habte said.

Methodist ministers get moved around every few years and bishops always try to "match the church's needs with the minister's needs," Habte said.

He was chosen for the Willows assignment because he spent several years preaching in Williams and Arbuckle and understands rural communities, he said.

Just prior to his move to Glenn County, Habte was pastor at the Gilroy Methodist Church. But they could not afford a full-time pastor, he said, so he needed to find another situation.

Habte's said moving around is part of the job.

"I don't put much into where I go. It's where God puts me and I go," he said.

"I go here, to this people to this place. God's there and I'm going to serve God."

"It's not about upward movement," he said.

A former philosophy professor, Habte said, "you do the best you can to do the best work. It's not how much money you make, it's how many people you touch."

It's too soon to have a firm sense of what he wants to do at the church in Willows, he said, adding that he will sit down with church leaders and "look at what they've been doing and praying for."

"This church is really making a difference," he said. "I want to support it. ... I love the fact that this church is involved."

It fits his idea that Christianity is based on two premises: "you love God by the way you behave ... and, love your neighbor," Habte said.

It's a matter of following Christ's teachings.

"Jesus lived his life for the sake of other people," he said.

Long journey

to Willows

Born in Ethiopia, where Habte, 56, suffered from anemia and migraine headaches as a child, his journey to Willows took him to many countries and 49 U.S. states.

He was raised in the Coptic Church, a branch of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the dominant church in Ethiopia.

Habte's life took a dramatic turn at age 15, when he went to a protest down the street from his family's business where an English preacher was speaking."

"If you accept Jesus, your life will change," Habate recalls the preacher saying that day.

Though he regularly attended church, Habte said he had never heard anything like it. Services in church were in Latin.

Hearing the sermon in English "made it personal," he said. "I'd never been invited to have a personal relation with Jesus before."

Sixty days later, he was invited to a Bible study by a Swedish Lutheran missionary. About 700 people attended the one-week event.

"I felt God was healing me," said Habte, still sounding amazed by the experience. "I threw all the medicine into the toilet and I got healed."

Through the healing, Habte said he knew Jesus had changed his life — just like the English preacher had said.

Also giving the Bible study a special meaning was the warmth and acceptance he felt from others there. Habte said that was especially important, because his mother died when he was a baby.

So he decided that "I'm going to share this with other people," Habte said.

As political and religious tensions rose in Ethiopia, non-Coptic Christians were persecuted and many of Habte's friends were arrested or ran away, he said.

"I prayed, 'what am I supposed to do now,'" he said, as communists took over the east African country.

In December 1972, Habte arrived in New York City. Then 18 years old, he had planned to attend a Campus Crusade for Christ in California, he said.

Coming from Ethiopia, where the weather was warm, he was not dressed for the cold New York streets. A taxi driver, Habte said, took an interest in him and asked where he was going and how much money he had.

The few hundred dollars in Habte's pocket was not going to get him far, so the driver took him to a YMCA. Habte already was familiar with the organization, because that was where he exercised at home.

One of his most vivid memories was the first trip out to get something to eat and he saw a cart that said "hot dogs."

"These people eat dogs?" he thought. Assured that was not the case, his adventure continued.

He'd been told to find an Ethiopian woman at the United Nations. All he knew was her name, Mulu. They found each other, and she arranged for Habte to stay with missionaries in upstate New York.

They had lived in Ethiopia 14 years and "received me like a son," he said, telling him "it is God's will for you to live with us."

Unsure of his path, the missionary, who also was a pastor, assured Habte, "God has wonderful plan for your life and I want to be part of it."

The pastor contacted a friend in Springfield, Mo., who had connections at Essence of God College. But the college didn't have scholarship money, so a way had to found to pay for his education.

A pastor from Miami, Fla., stepped in and sponsored Habte. Plus, the church he attended in New York, took a collection and the pastor drove 1,500 miles to deliver it.

That covered his first year. After that, he earned academic scholarships, he said.

By the time Habte finished seminary, Ethiopia was embroiled in the Red Terror of the late 1970s. So, when the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service wanted to send him home, he protested and the agent told him he could stay if he attended school.

With an advanced degree, Habte went to work for a Christian school in Woodland. Later, he traveled as an evangelist in Asia, Latin America and Jamaica, as well as throughout the United States.

In 1997, he took a post teaching philosophy at Sierra College in Rocklin and did a pastorate at Citrus Heights United Methodist Church. By 2001, Habte was pastor of the Methodist Church in Arbuckle.

Exuberantly passionate about his calling, Habte believes pastors "are bridges between God and man, an agent of grace."

"God is my point of reference. I talk from his point of view," he said. "A pastor is a messenger of God."

Habte said his sermons challenge parishioners. He asks hard, spiritual questions.

"Why should people come to church if they're not getting something out of it?" he said.

After all, Habte said Abraham Lincoln complained in one of his diaries, "the preacher failed. He didn't ask us to do anything. He didn't challenge us."

For information about the church, call 934-3190 or visit 544 N. Shasta St.