This
month, we are in Morogoro, Tanzania working with a local church doing
door-to-door evangelism, preaching, visiting a Maasai village and putting on an
evangelism seminar for the church. God has been sustaining me here in the late
months of the World Race, and this is just one of the stories of His
faithfulness.
Sometimes
when I’m having a bad day, I go running to get some time alone with God. At the beginning of this month, I was
having just such a day, so I took off in the direction of a mountain nearby. Along the way I was praying that God
would give me a ministry that in which I could know that I was making a
difference. I ran for about 20
minutes and then decided to turn around.
After running for 30 minutes on the way back and not arriving back at
the Youth Mission where we were staying, I knew that I was horribly lost. I certainly wasn’t panicking, but it
was a fact that almost no one in the area spoke English. I tried to talk to a couple of people,
but my Swahili is very limited. I
was about to give up and just try to find a main road when I saw two younger
guys walking along. I decided to
try them.
One of
them was named Robert and he spoke great English. He told me he’d be happy to take me back to the Youth
Mission (which by that point was pretty far away). Along the way he found out that I was a missionary. He said that he was Roman Catholic, but
that he didn’t really know how to study the Bible. I didn’t even have to say anything, he asked me right out if
I could teach him how to study the Bible.
He also didn’t know how to evangelize or preach, but he wanted to learn,
and asked me if I could teach him.
“Of
course!” I said. So we met several
times and studied the Bible together.
Robert and I formed a strong friendship over the month. We hung out together, played
basketball, watched movies, and I spent the night at his house with his family
one night. I can honestly say that
he is one of the closest friends I have made on the Race. Now all this would be enough for me to
thank God once again for His provision, but the beauty of this story doesn’t
end here.
The
church we’ve been working with here is fantastic, but one of the problems that
we had is a lack of translators.
Also, one of the things that I thought from the beginning could be
addressed is the church’s distrust of other Christian denominations. They are Pentecostal, and they’re not
so sure about Baptists, Presbyterians, etc. The most highly questionable, though, is Roman
Catholic. Now, please hear me when
I say that I acknowledge that there are some serious problems with Catholic
theology and I don’t think that everything in the Catholic dogma is true. Still, I do believe that because
Catholics believe that Jesus is the Son of God and it is only through Him that
life can be found, they are Christians.
The pastor and one of the head elders at the church with which we are
working stated from the beginning that they don’t believe Catholics are saved.
We
brought Robert to church to translate for us in preaching and evangelism. It was a bit risky with the church’s
beliefs (don’t worry, we had a discussion with the pastor and the elder
beforehand about Catholicism and Robert), but once again, God was faithful. Robert did a fantastic job translating
over the three weeks or so that we hung out and helped us in evangelism as
well.
I am
overwhelmed by how good God is.
Near the end of our time in Morogoro, one of my teammates came to me and
told me that the Pastor and Deacon Reagan had been talking about how great
Robert is and how they want to make a way for him to be able to continue going
to church so he can be discipled.
After several discussions with Deacon Reagan, who was pretty good at
English, he agreed with me that Catholics are indeed Christians. I couldn’t believe the way that God had
worked. In just three weeks,
Robert learned about evangelism and preaching, Deacon Reagan and Pastor
Emmanuel changed their minds about Catholics (and other denominations) and met
a Catholic that they came to love, God provided us with a translator when there
were (at times) no others, He gave me a friend and a ministry in which I saw
fruit.
And all
this came from getting lost while I was running. I think sometimes, He lets us get lost, so we can get
found. God is good.
Robert and I
