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I am writing this post from Aplahoue, Benin. A rural village in the southwest corner of this developing country in West Africa, this was also our home base for almost 10 years during our church planting missionary work. Each opportunity that I have to return (this marks my 3rd visit since moving back Stateside), I am reminded of God’s faithfulness during our time here. This is a small place, so I can literally recount stories, experiences, happenings and memories from just about every corner of this place. My long-term colleague in this work, Greg Bailey, has made the same trip back the past 3 years. We return to visit with church leaders, encouraging them in the Scriptures. In a vastly non-literate society, teaching oral learners alongside a few learned in the written Word is a complex mission. These leaders are very young in the faith and very limited in their knowledge of the Word. This trip we are focusing on how to not only study the Scriptures (whether literate or not) but also how to share it with others through obedience and generosity. Hebrews 1:22 says that we are not only to “hear the Word” but we must do what it says! Today we ended our leadership workshop with all 20 participants reciting that verse in unison.
In talking with Greg, it was also good to reflect not only immediate ups and downs of this work. It’s easy to concentrate on weaknesses of the movement, limitations of certain people, or backsliding of specific past leaders. As we were talking, I was reminded that although our family first joined this mission in 1996, Greg and his family first started praying about this specific work in 1992. Not at all to dismiss all that God was doing before that, it was stunning to realize that we are soon approaching a 20-year anniversary of our families’ participation in this story (15 for my wife and immediate family, but we celebrate as a team). Congregations and leaders have fallen away, but new ones have emerged. So while the peaks and valleys of today encourage and discourage, it is God’s faithfulness throughout the entire story that propels to commit further to seeing the Kingdom advance here. 20 years! Thank you for friends like you who have prayed with us and given generously so our family’s work during these two decades could be sustained.-Randy
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