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

Bible Teachers' Seminar

Last weekend we held a special seminar in Gogo, Ivory Coast. We were focusing on training Loron Bible teachers how to evangelise by teaching chronologically through the Bible, i.e. starting in Genesis, and going right through to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

For the past couple of months Marina has been working hard on revising, formatting and printing sets of the 85 chronological Bible lessons that we have developed for the Loron teachers. She photocopied well over 900 lessons making up elevens sets in all.

Pray for these Bible teachers as they return home with these teaching materials, and as they endeavour to present a clear message of the Gospel to their communities, surrounding villages and other ethnic groups in the region.

Altogether, twenty one Bible teachers from eight Loron churches participated in the training.

Waken Up You Sleepy Christian!

Waken up, you sleepy Christian!

Wedding in Boba

Marina and I attended a Loron wedding in Ivory Coast over the weekend. Donald Pale, a young Loron believer who is training to be a pastor, and Marcel, the daughter of Hovare, one of the first Loron believers, were married in a little village called Boba just a few miles from Gogo. It's the first time we have ever seen a white wedding dress being used in a Loron wedding!

Click on pictures for larger image

There is joy...

… there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.

Lu 15:10

Almost three years ago we distributed several hundred little solar-powered radios among the Loron people living in the rolling hills of southwest Burkina. Since 2008 we have heard sporadic reports of small groups of Loron folks listening to the chronological Bible lessons, recorded in their own language, that were being broadcast by the local radio station, but we were not aware of any one in particular who wanted to hear more about the gospel.

Last Saturday, Marina and I made a special trip into the region to visit three of the villages where we knew people had been listening to the evangelistic Bible lessons on the radio. We arranged for one of the Loron Bible teachers, Joel, to come from Ivory Coast to accompany us to help ‘spy out the land’, looking for openings to begin face-to-face Bible teaching or maybe even to start literacy classes.  

We visited the large Loron village of Nyolka - which means ‘Thirsty Place’ - but we were a little disappointed with the response of most of the people there. The chief of the village was quite abrupt with us, which was very unusual for a Loron village leader, and he didn’t really want to spend any time talking with us. The others in the village were clearly intimidated by him. We did, however, get some requests from a few of the young adults for more radios.

The second village was a lot more encouraging. The people in Lata seemed to be a lot more open to hearing more of the Bible teaching and were also interested in the possibility of starting literacy classes. They are going to meet together and arrange another time for us to visit them again with the goal of setting up regular visits.

At the third village, located right down near the border of Ivory Coast, we went to talk with a young semi-educated Loron man who had shown some interest in learning how to teach literacy. As it turned out, he told us that he is a travelling salesman and that he wouldn’t have the time to spend teaching others through the literacy course. As we chatted with him and the other folks in the village, we got talking to a lady who told us that she had become a Christian after hearing the gospel on the little radio we had given to her. Praise the Lord! She has been crossing the border into Ivory Coast to attend a little church there. She brings her children with her. She said that it had been very difficult for her as she is the only Christian in the village. Please pray for Mariam.

25 Years Ago Today

On 28 January 1986, just off the east coast of Florida, the space shuttle, Challenger, disintegrated seventy three seconds after take off, resulting in the deaths of the seven crew-members. 


At that moment, we were on an Egypt Air Boeing 737 somewhere over the Mediterranean Sea on our way to Ivory Coast for the first time.

During 1985 there had been a string of airplane hijackings, and about eight weeks before our flight was due to leave for Ivory Coast, an Egypt Air jet was hijacked, and most of the passengers had been killed in a botched rescue attempt in Malta. Although a little anxious, we, nevertheless, decided to go ahead with our flight through Egypt. Although it had doubled our journey time, we had chosen to fly with Egypt Air because some missionaries had recommended it to us as the cheapest way to get to Ivory Coast.

We were travelling with three small children, including Kyle, who was only six months old, but the all-male crews on our Egypt Air flights were very helpful. After a long trip from London, we landed in Cairo just after dark. We carefully descended the airplane steps with the children and in the dim light of the airport apron the first person that we saw on the ground was an Egyptian soldier wearing what appeared to be a Second World War steel helmet. He was holding a Lee-Enfield rifle close to his chest and he looked like he had not shaved for a week.

Peter (6), Kyle (9 months), Laura (4) in Morofe, Yamoussoukro, early 1986

We followed the other passengers into a large, noisy reception hall and we immediately began to experience some of the things that make travelling in Africa so interesting, or frustrating, depending on your attitude. After spending a long time retrieving our suitcases, we discovered that the hotel room and meals that we been promised were non-existent. The airline had no helpdesk in the Arrivals lounge, so we asked around to see if there was a place we could spend the night. We were eventually shown into a tiny room at the far end of the terminal that had two small, bumpy single beds, one of them having a thin mattress on a wooden box. Peter remembers it like he was sleeping on top of a coffin. There was a single light bulb hanging on a twisted wire from the ceiling. Having slept for only a couple of hours the previous night, we were all exhausted, so we made the best of our situation, and, in spite of our spartan accommodation, we had a surprisingly good night’s sleep. 

The following morning we went to the airport restaurant for breakfast. The prices were displayed in Egyptian Pounds, so we had no idea what the prices were in Sterling. We asked if they took British pounds, and the person behind the counter nodded, and with a big smile, said, “Oh, yes”. At least, I think that is what he said, because he spoke in Arabic, and at that time, I did not know a word of it! We selected a few basic items of food, just to keep the hunger away. When we got our bill was, it was obvious we had been well and truly ripped off.

We had to sit in the departure terminal for a couple of hours until we could check in our baggage. There were dozens of cats roaming around the terminal, licking crumbs from beneath the tables in the restaurant and searching for food in overflowing rubbish bins. Apparently, in ancient Egypt, cats were sacred. They may still be considered so in Cairo airport. Around noon we finally boarded our next plane and took off from Cairo on the second leg of our journey to Ivory Coast.

Our flight was scheduled to make two short stops in Nigeria before going on to Ivory Coast, so we settled ourselves for the long trip ahead. We flew low over the pyramids, and, apparently to avoid Libyan airspace, we followed the River Nile for a couple of hundred miles south, and then headed west. It was fascinating to see the irrigated fields along both sides of the Nile, but just a mile or so from the water’s edge it quickly became barren and soon there was nothing but sand and desert as far as the eye could see.

The Plateau, Abidjan

We had a very comfortable trip to our first stop in Nigeria, the northern city of Kano. After disembarking a few passengers and gaining a few more who were going to the next stop in Lagos, an announcement came over the loudspeaker system. We were informed, in Arabic and broken English, that there was a problem with the hydraulic system in the wings of the aircraft, and they were not quite sure if it could be fixed. After sitting for over three hours in the hot African sun, the inside of the airplane became extremely uncomfortable, but eventually the fault was repaired, and we were able to continue our journey towards Lagos and, as we were hoping, to Abidjan in Ivory Coast.  

However, another problem arose. Someone informed the airport authorities in Ivory Coast that our flight had been cancelled, and the missionaries who had gone to meet us at the airport were left in a quandary as what to do. After a brief stop in Lagos in southern Nigeria, and a change of crew, we took off again and finally arrived at Abidjan airport in Ivory Coast just around midnight, several hours late. After gathering together our suitcases, we made our way through customs and then out into the main Arrivals area. As soon as we passed through the exit doors, we came upon a crowd of passengers, who were shouting and pushing and shoving, all trying to grab one of the few taxis left at the airport. We stood off to one side and waited until things quietened down a little, hoping to catch a glimpse of the missionaries who had come to meet us. The terminal soon emptied, but there was no one there to pick us up. The folks who had come for us had gone home, because they had been told that we would probably arrive the next day.

Having delivered their passengers to the city, some taxis started arriving back at the airport. With our limited French we managed to find a taxi driver who spoke a little English and who said he knew the location of the Mission Evangelique in the city. We hired two rickety taxis, and with our windows wide open, we set off into the balmy African night. As we crossed the bridge from the airport over the lagoon to the centre of Abidjan, we marvelled at the skyline, replete with fifteen and twenty-story buildings bedecked on top with huge Nissan and Coca Cola neo signs. Abidjan was a very modern city, boasting the only ice rink in West Africa.

When we arrived at our destination, we discovered that the taxis had brought us to the Mission Catholique. By this time, it was 1:30 in the morning, so we had to return to the airport, where we spent the remainder of the night in the main entrance hall. We tried to make a bed with the suitcases for the children to sleep on. One of the workers at the airport who saw our predicament took pity on us. He brought over some Johnnie Walker Whiskey cardboard boxes and laid them out flat so that the children could sleep more comfortably. Marina and I did not sleep very well that night!

The next morning, with the help of some WEC missionaries, we were able to make contact with our mission guest home. Raymond and Marie Parker, NTM missionaries working in Abidjan, immediately came to rescue us. They were horrified that we had spent the night at the airport, and were very apologetic, but it was not their fault in the least. We spent a couple of very relaxing days with them at the mission guest house, and they showed us some of the many interesting sights in Abidjan.

We registered at the British Embassy, and then we travelled 150 miles north by bus to Yamoussoukro, the capital of Ivory Coast where the New Tribes Mission headquarters was located, to begin a year-long French course and orientation to West African culture.