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Greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus, from Banyo, Cameroon. Sonya is away in Nigeria right now, and incommunicado, so it has fallen to me to write our report. I pray it is helpful to you as you partner with us in prayer.
It’s a funny thing – as I look over the past several months, I don’t feel like we have been terribly busy, and yet an awful lot has happened. Not a bad way to be, I suppose.
I spent about seven weeks in a small village in Nigeria at the beginning of this period. During that time, I was given the opportunity to teach most mornings (6:00–7:00 a.m.) during our worship times, though this schedule was sometimes disrupted. One morning, my friend beside me leaned over and asked if I understood what was going on. Not really, I replied (since they were talking pretty fast, and my language skills are not the best that early in the morning). A wedding was taking place, he informed me – my first experience of a wedding among our Least-Reached People Group (LRPG) partners. That was pretty special.
While I was there, I was able to keep a promise I made to one imam I met a couple years ago. I had preached Christ to all the men in his family (during a naming ceremony held in his compound), and afterwards he had asked me for an Ajamiya Bible (i.e., printed in Arabic script). I told him I would do my best, but it was only on this trip that I had time to travel to his compound again and give him a copy. Pray that he will take the time to read it and that it will continue to preach to him.
As bookmarks to my time there, I taught for a week each in two different seminaries. I taught the contents of my new book, African Shepherd: Athanasius and the Fight for the Faith, which is all about the Person of Jesus Christ and the Nicene Creed. In our context, knowing how Jesus can be divine and human is rather an important foundational issue.
In our fellowship in Banyo, we have started to preach through all the “I am” sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of John. We pray that this will help us to have a better foundation concerning the question of who and what our Lord Jesus is.
Sonya has gone back to a little village (it serves as the flagship community for our LRPG believers) and will spend some time there. The first week there, she was helping in the accounting department of the health clinic. This is the health clinic that our supporters in Alberta helped to get going, and it is doing some wonderful ministry. There are a lot of medical quacks (I’m pretty sure that’s the correct technical term) in their area, and the difference in care and treatment is stark. Our health team, small though it is, is highly professional, only deals with trusted medicines (in a place where a lot of drugs are counterfeit), and provides compassionate care.
The second week, Sonya will be working with the primary school and the teachers there. This little primary school is rated as one of the best facilities of its kind in the local government area, but even so, they are still in need of help.
A couple of weeks ago, Sonya was in another village on the Cameroonian side, spending a week doing crafts in a Kawtal Bikkoy (Children’s Fellowship) – sort of a VBS-style kids’ program. A group of children was transported from their very poor village to this one through the generous support of an AWANA program in one of our supporting churches in Manitoba. The week went really well, and those young people had lots of stories to tell their parents when they went home.
Our own fellowship here in Banyo is quite small, but even so, during the Easter season we saw two young men enter into the waters of baptism. The service was held in a small stream behind our house, officiated by my friend S. It was a testimony to the goodness of God in the midst of circumstances where praying Psalm 35 (cited above) is a normal thing.
One of our supporting churches in Ontario has given funds for one of our communities to build a much-needed guesthouse. I have been hearing good reports of the progress being made and am looking forward to staying there the next time I travel east. Perhaps some of you will also experience the joy of staying there one day soon!
In the meantime, grateful thanks to you for your support of this ministry and the people we partner with. May God bless you as you partner with us.