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Gorée Island Revisited

Marina and I visited the island of Gorée yesterday. It is located just off the coast of Senegal and was used as a staging post to transport around 70,000 West Africans into a life of slavery in the Americas. For a summary of some little-known facts about the slave trade, click here. 

Click on picture for larger image

Point of No Return

Loron Church Leaders Appointed

Representatives from most of the Loron churches in Ivory Coast gathered last Saturday in Gogo to participate in the appointment of three new church leaders. Joel, Donald and Moses became the first elders and pastors of the Loron church.

Two of NTM's leaders in Africa, Danny Germann and Dan Rabe,
came to Ivory Coast to take part in this important event for the Loron church. 

Eli preached an encouraging message during the morning meeting.
His son, Daouda, translated into French. 

A section of the attentive audience

Moses, Donald and Joel

Loron Church Leaders

At the end of this month we are planning to appoint three Loron men as elders and pastors in the Loron church. We praise the Lord for the leadership, vision and faithfulness that each of these men has shown over many years as they have been involved in teaching and encouraging the Loron believers. We would ask you to pray for Joel, Donald and Moses as they take on the responsibility of nurturing and shepherding the Christian community among the Loron people.

Donald

When Donald was a child he lived for a time in the same village as the NTM missionaries. However his family moved to another village a full day’s walk away, and it was many years before he had an opportunity to hear the Gospel. When he eventually did, he responded with enthusiasm to God’s love and trusted Christ as his Saviour. In his late teens he taught himself how to read and later became involved in helping to teach literacy to others. He had a desire to take formal Bible training and recently completed a two-year course at Bible school. He got married in April.

Joel

Joel was a teenager when NTM missionaries first arrived in his village. That was over 25 years ago. He was one of the first people to respond positively to the Gospel and has been a faithful believer and Bible teacher, and also a hard-working member of his community, over many years. Like most Loron adults he never had the opportunity of an education, nevertheless, he learned how to read and write and eventually became the Loron literacy coordinator, supervising dozens of literacy teachers in 10 villages. Over the past twenty years he helped to bring the Gospel to a number of other Loron villages, where there are now thriving groups of believers. He is married with six children.

Moses

Moses became a believer in the early 90’s. He was around 25 years old. His father was the first Christian in their village, but it was Moses who learned how to read and who began to take an active interest in teaching God’s Word and caring for the believers. He lives in an area where there are not many believers, but he has faithfully taught in the local fellowship, has taught many to read and write and is highly respected in the community.

Donald baptising believers, Oct 2010

Joel going to preach in a village in the bush

50 Missionary Maxims

1: – "The gospel is good news only if it gets there in time!"

2: – "We talk of the Second Coming, but half the world has never even heard of the first!" -- Oswald J. Smith

3: – "If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him." -- C.T. Studd

4: – "The Great Commission is not an option to be considered; it is a command to be obeyed!" -- Hudson Taylor

5: – "I have but one candle of life to burn, and I would rather burn it out in a land filled with darkness than in a land flooded with light." -- John Keith Falconer

6: – "It is as necessary for people to hear the gospel as it was for Jesus to die."

7: – "This generation of Christians is responsible for this generation of souls on the earth!" -- Keith Green

8: – "The mark of greatness in a church is not how many it seats but how many it sends!"

9: –"If God calls you to be a missionary, don't stoop to be a king!" -- Charles Haddon Spurgeon

10: – Is it fair that some people should hear the gospel twice before everyone has heard it once?

11: – "In the vast plain to the north I have sometimes seen, in the morning sun, the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary has ever been." -- Robert Moffat, missionary to Africa (villages like these still exist today!)

12: – "God uses men (and women) who are weak and feeble enough to lean on him." -- Hudson Taylor

13: – "While vast continents still lie shrouded in darkness ... the burden of proof rests on you to show that the circumstances in which God has placed you were meant by Him to keep you off the foreign field." -- Keith Falconer

14: – "Sympathy is no substitute for action." -- David Livingstone

15: – "Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God" -- William Carey

16: – "The supreme task of the church is the evangelization of the world." -- Oswald J Smith

17: – "If a commission by an earthly king is considered an honour, how can a commission by a Heavenly King be considered a sacrifice?" -- David Livingstone

18: – "Believers who have the gospel keep mumbling it over and over to themselves. Meanwhile, millions who have never heard it once fall into the flames of eternal hell without ever hearing the salvation story." -- K.P. Yohannan, founder of Gospel for Asia

19: – "I believe that in each generation God has called enough men and women to evangelize all the yet unreached tribes of the earth. It is not God who does not call. It is man who will not respond!" -- Isobel Kuhn, missionary to China and Thailand

20: – "People who don't believe in missions have not read the New Testament. Right from the beginning Jesus said the field is the world." -- J. Howard Edington

21: – "Let my heart be broken with the things that break God's heart" -- Bob Pierce

22: – "If God's love is for anybody anywhere, then it's for everybody everywhere." -- Edward Lawlor

23: – "If you take missions out of the Bible, you won't have anything left but the covers" -- Nina Gunter

24: – Don't say, No! when God says, Go!

25: – "Our God of Grace often gives us a second chance, but there is no second chance to harvest a ripe crop." -- Kurt von Schleicher

26: – "The reason some folks don't believe in missions is that the brand of religion they have isn't worth propagating." -- unknown

27: – "Christ wants not nibblers of the possible, but grabbers of the impossible." -- C.T. Studd

28: – "If the Great Commission is true, then our plans are not too big; they are too small."

29: – Is Christ’s final command our first concern? (Check out: Matt 28.18-20; Mark 16.15; Luke 24.47; John 20.21, Acts 1.8) 

30: – "Missionary zeal does not grow out of intellectual beliefs, nor out of theological arguments, but out of love" -- Roland Allen

31: – "God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supply" -- Hudson Taylor

32: – "Missions is not the 'ministry of choice' for a few hyperactive Christians in the church. Missions is the purpose of the church." -- Unknown

33: – "The church’s goal has not been reached -- until

the unreached have been reached! "

34: – "Any church that is not seriously involved in helping fulfill the Great Commission has forfeited its biblical right to exist." -- Oswald J. Smith

35: – "Missions; not an option, but an absolute."

36: – "We are debtors to every man to give him the gospel in the same measure in which we have received it" -- P.F. Bresee

37: – "Only as the church fulfills her missionary obligation does she justify her existence." -- Unknown

38: – "God had only one Son and He made that Son a missionary." -- David Livingstone

39: – "God isn't looking for people of great faith, but for individuals ready to follow Him" -- Hudson Taylor

40: – "Lost people matter to God, and so they must matter to us." -- Keith Wright

41: – "All the world; every creature; every nation; to the uttermost parts of the earth; to the regions beyond; where Christ has not been named"

42: – " The mission of the church is missions" -- Oswald J. Smith

43: – "He was not willing that any should perish"

44: – If we found a cure for cancer, would we not tell others about it? Why then do we not tell others about the cure for sin and death?

45: – "Millions dying there have never heard—and millions there have never cared!"

46: – "He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose" -- Jim Elliot, missionary to the Auca Indians

47: – "You can give without loving. But you cannot love without giving." -- Amy Carmichael, missionary to India

48: – "The Bible is not the basis of missions; missions is the basis of the Bible" -- Ralph Winter

49: – "'Not called!' did you say?
'Not heard the call,' I think you should say.
Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear Him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father's house and bid their brothers and sisters and servants and masters not to come there. Then look Christ in the face -- whose mercy you have professed to obey -- and tell Him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish His mercy to the world. " -- William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army

50: – "Is Christ’s final command our first concern?"

Kyle and Jennifer's Wedding in Shetland

Our son, Kyle, and Jennifer were married in Shetland on June 15. They went to Cyprus for their honeymoon. Here are a few photos of a very special time.

(click photo for larger image)

Southern tip of Mainland, Shetland

The Happy Couple

Cliffs of Eshaness, northwest Shetland

Seth and Caleb

Tombolo at St Ninian's Isle

Sumburgh Airport

Laura, Leanne and Marina

Lerwick, looking up to the town hall on the hill

Viking ship in Lerwick Harbour