The World Race is full of many opportunities to lose yourself and do things you aren’t comfortable with. Before this year, my way of ministering to people was through making relationships and mentioning Jesus here and there and possibly seeing the person come to Christ years later. In Africa, things work a little differently. It is completely normal to walk up to random people and start preaching the gospel to them and have them listen and receive everything you say. It almost feels unreal to have people be so receptive to a message like this since we don’t see this type of response at all in America.
This month in Morogoro, we are doing door to door evangelism. Not only that, but we are also preaching sermons 3 days a week at a local church. As we have been going from place to place sharing the gospel, almost every group we meet and talk to, pray to receive Christ. At first, we were a little confused and wondered how real people were being. Were they just praying to make us happy and get us to leave them alone or was it a legit choice to follow Jesus and forsake all other ways? Only God knows the answer to that, but it has been troubling some of us because we don’t just want a bunch of numbers on who we got to pray some sinner’s prayer; we want to see people truly come alive because we know that is what Jesus has done for us.
So, the beginning of ministry was tough because of this internal conflict we were having, but God quickly showed us how much He can work even if we don’t think people are truly receptive.
One of the first places we stopped at to preach was a job site of brick makers. It was our very first day doing this in Tanzania and some of us were really struggling with being bold. We walked up to this work site and started talking to this group of men, about 20 of them and just introducing ourselves and getting to know them. We walked over to some of them and our translator turned to us and asked us to share something. Me, Simone and Miranda all looked at each other wondering who would go first. We all poured into the conversation and it turned out really well. God moved and all 6 or 7 of the men we were talking to prayed to receive Christ. From the outside, you couldn’t tell if their hearts were sincere or not, but on the inside God was doing something.
We then turned around to two guys sitting behind us, curious of what we were doing there and started sharing with both of them. It turns out they are both muslim but still sat and listened to everything we had to say. All the while, Caleb, Matt, Emily and Lauren are off ministering to the other guys on the work site. We left and went on to other places, sharing and seeing many people pray to accept Jesus. Still unsure of who all truly received it and who didn’t we just chose to believe that God would make it all good. Two days later, we had a prayer meeting at the church and 15 people who had prayed to accept Christ showed up. 14 of them were from the work site and they had left work early because they wanted to know more about Jesus and two of them are muslim. We were shocked and humbled because we had doubted so much about the approach our contacts are having us take. It is so not the American way to do things like this, but here, it just works. We realized how close minded we can be sometimes and how big God is despite our own attitudes.
God is moving here and people are coming to know Him and even hungry to learn about who He is. This is a group of spiritually hungry construction workers who are willing to lose money to come and learn about God. Praise the Lord!
