The week of the 22nd we did a Church Planting Storying Movement training. It is storying of the Word focused on the book of Acts and how God started, empowered, directed, encouraged the beginning of the church. It was very interesting and I learned things about the perhaps true intent of church that our Father intended. The 5 main focuses of the early church and today are : Fellowship, Missions, Discipleship, Worship, Ministry. As part of the training, we created our own church. We did different events during the week just as a church would. We had some amazing worship and pray time. We prayer walked around Bethel Church that is celebrating it's 20th Anniversary Easter weekend. We prayer-walked the university and were able to share stories with some students. The men visited with some of the many truck drivers at the truck stop who often speak English from Gambia, Nigeria, Ghana. We had fellowship lunch and did an 'walk-up' ice cream parlor for the M Kids. We closed the week with worship on the roof. We had divided into two groups and each group was to take an Acts story and share it in a fun way, so our group wrote on song from the Acts 4 where Peter stands before the religious leaders. It was a powerful night of worship together as it's free and spontaneous with song, prayer and the Word.
One powerful point --- the reminder of the HUGE emphasis the early church placed on PRAYER and how scripture directs us to do so. We spent a great deal of time in prayer as we learned and retold these stories and analyzed them. I really feel the power of the Spirit moving in this place.
One of the other very obvious aspects of the early church was also signs, wonders, miracles and visions. Acts if full of them as the new church grew rapidly. We all must believe if God did these things then, that He is still doing them today and recognize these events for what they truly are and give all glory to God for them.
One co-worker shared an amazing miracle story that just happened three weeks ago. You may recall me talking about a missionary couple from Nigeria working in one of our co-workers village I first visited when I got here - "Mo" and "Angie". Their little 6 month old daughter became very ill. They took her to the hospital where she was administered some drugs. She continued to get worse. She was more or less unconscious and her veins collapsed. They tried to administer another dose of medicine but were unable to find a vein. Mo and Angie were there the whole time on their knees praying that they would be able to find a vein. They couldn't, so they injected her muscle in her leg instead. She was still not responding so they decided to drive to the Capital, about a 3hour drive.
"Cowboy", our worker and their great friend, sent an immediate email. He figures in less than 24 hours there were probably no less than 5000 people praying. The hospital here discovered that she had been over-dosed causing her to be within hours of losing her life. Three other babies came in in a similar fashion shortly later and were laid on the same bed with their daughter. One by one these other little babies died. But she held on as everyone continued to pray. At one point, the doctors and nurses gave up on her and stopped coming in and avoided "Mo" and "Angie" completely. God miraculously healed her! She slowly started to come around and was able to leave the hospital 4 days later. Talk about a powerful testimony to those doctors and nurses that witnessed this. Our director was there along the way and "Mo" told her, "Praise the Lord He answered our prayers negatively!". Come to find out, she lived only because they could NOT find a vein and extra dose went into her leg instead which bought them time to get to the capital. GOD HAD SEALED HER VEINS FROM THE POSION!
Another important aspect of the early church - GO and TELL! We are familiar with the Great Commission, but how many of us and how many of our churches today are following this command? We discussed how many of our churches are in the mindset of "Build it, have a great program and they will come". The early church and disciples by NO means waited for people to come to them. They went out to find the people, to find the unbelievers! This is so important for us to impress upon 'baby believers' here as they form a church community, that they immediately need to go and tell. Please pray that the new believers here will not become complacent, but that they will speak boldly to their family, friends and all Malians. Please pray that Our Father will raise up native missionaries among our new believers here.
One of our workers, shared a praise story about going and telling..... the husband and wife team arrived in October with no local language skills, however, from the moment they arrived they have been 'speaking' and spending time with their guard "Yo-Yo". As their French language grew they were able to begin to share some with him. They had brought some scripture in French with them. For Christmas they gave him one of these. They noticed him reading it at night and he would ask quite a few questions. In January they invited him to come to church, he did and continued to almost each week. About a month ago they felt the spirit telling them is was time to ask the question, but they didn't have enough language to really explain the path to acceptance. They gave him a Roman Road tract in French. They asked him to read it and think about it. A short time later, the husband came out to see "Yo-Yo" again and without hesitating, he asked him for a pen because he needed to sign the tract! That was that! The next day they called the pastor of Bethel church and arranged for him to come talk to "Yo-Yo" later that week. "Yo-Yo" is being baptized Easter Sunday at Bethel Baptist Church -- Praise the Lord! What a way to celebrate Esa's triumphant Day of Resurrection and I will get to be there. GO & TELL works.
One thing we discussed in storying is the difficulty in wording things for Malians to understand. You can't just translate a word always. For instance, the word shepherd can be difficult for many to understand here in the context that we refer to it in scripture. We don't have shepherds in the US really, so our vision of them, mainly comes from scripture. We understand shepherds to be care-takers that feed their animals, water them, carry the little ones, etc. So when we are given the example in scripture that ' Our Father is our Shepherd', we immediately picture the nurturing, loving person that this is describing. However, here, often you will find the answer to 'what is a shepherd?'.... oh you mean a nomad, like a Fulani. Fulani is a people group, looked down upon because they are nomads, they are herders and just considered to be uneducated, etc. So, their view when we say "Our Father is our Shepherd", as you can imagine would be completely different than ours and NOT at all what scripture intends.
We study church planting as workers because in many villages here and one day hopefully many more, we have small groups of believers and it is our job to disciple them and to help them grow together as a community. Community here is very, very important because making the decision to follow the Esa road can mean persecution of many sorts. Your family disowns you, or at the least may not let you eat with them. Perhaps you won't be allowed to shop in certain boutiques or you can't find work. This is the case for one male believer who has been calling our co-worker, "Tex" for several weeks about his difficulty finding work. Finally one day he called and said, 'men are telling me if I go back to the building of their faith and pray and return to my old traditions they will give me work', so can I bring all my God's Words books to you please? I just can't follow Esa anymore. Can you imagine be forced to make a statement like that? Please pray that our Father will give strength to new believers to withstand persecution.
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