French Region Update 2014

Transcript

If you’ll turn with me to Acts, Chapter 14, I’d like to justify, I guess, or explain a little bit the approach I’m going to take today by referring to something that the Apostle Paul did after one of his missionary or evangelistic tours. Acts 14:26. This is Paul returning from the end of his first great trip to preach the gospel in far-flung parts of the world and it’s quite interesting to note what Paul did when he returned back to his home church area.

Acts 14:26-28  From there they sailed to Antioch, where they had been commended to the grace of God for the work which they had completed. Now when they had come and gathered the church together, they reported all that God had done with them, and that He had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles. So they stayed there a long time with the disciples.

I find that very interesting that one of the first things Paul did was to gather the church together and give them news of this trip and that was because this congregation there had worked together to help support Paul financially while he was doing this work. They were no doubt supporting him through their prayers and Paul felt this was a team effort. So he wanted to get everybody together and say look this is what God has done through the work that was committed to us and he wanted to share that with everyone. Well, in a similar fashion, brethren, those of us who travel on behalf of the church, those of us who work in some far-flung parts of the world, we want to share with you what God has done through the work that has been accomplished. And it is a team effort. Those of us who travel on behalf of the church can only do so because we all work together through the faithful tithes and offerings and prayers of God’s people. Those of us who travel are able to do so and support our brethren in other parts of the world.

So based on Paul’s example, I would like to take some time today and give you an update on the French region, the French language region of the church. Let’s see if I can, okay, here we go, so far so good. To give you an update, a quick overview, of some of the things happening in the French-speaking parts of the world, and then I’ll also give you some news, kind of inter-sprinkled with this of the trip that I just returned from and some of the interesting things that occurred while we were traveling on this particular trip. So this will be a French-language update and then when we get to the end of the slides, I would like to tie this all together with a lesson from the Bible which I think you’ll find very useful and something that we can take away with us.

First of all let me just give you, you probably can’t see everything that’s up on the screen here, but this is a line-by-line area for the twelve countries or overseas territories where we have church members and many of them are in Africa, one in the Caribbean, several in Europe and basically, the bottom line is that we’re serving a little bit over 500 people who are attending our services in all of these areas and they are served by three elders and three deacons. So there’s a lot of work to be done by not very many people. These are the locations where we have members in the French language region and the larger the circle that you can see on the screen here, the more members we have in this particular area. So you can see some of the larger circles are in French-speaking Africa, and then we have some scattered around in other places including a couple in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. We actually do have a couple of French-speaking members in Canada, but they also speak English so while we do send them literature and put them on our mailing list, we’re not directly responsible for pastoring the Canadian brethren.

In the work that we do, this is Mr. Bernard Hongerloot and his wife. He and I are the French Department and this is basically what you have as far as the French Department is concerned. Mr. Hongerloot does a great deal of translating. We do our best to provide in French as much literature as we can. He also records sermons regularly which are made available on our website to our church brethren. And he will travel occasionally as well and is willing just to jump in and help out with whatever needs to be done. 

We do have a French language website where we post sermons each week. We have newsletters, we have our church literature that’s available for download and we are working now on a “Life Hope and Truth” website which we hope will be up in the next couple of weeks in French as well so that’s been in the making for quite some time.

Other publications that we have include a weekly newsletter that goes out every Friday where we give news of not only of what’s happening in the French area but we also pass along other announcements and things that may have been sent out in English. We also translate One Accord and that’s made available with a little bit of a time lag but each time one comes out in English we translate as much of it as we can, whatever is as useful for our French-speaking members and that is made available to them. We do have a number of booklets as well some of which only exist in French and some we’re translating from English directly into French as well so we have put out a number of booklets. We had to come up with some literature very quickly because many of our brethren in Africa, for example, simply don’t have access to the internet so they have to have something in printed form and so we put together some booklets very quickly.

Another interesting thing that we have in the French area is we publish an annual calendar and this is because many of our church brethren in the French-speaking region are scattered. Many of them don’t have access to the internet. And they may only receive a ministerial visit two or three times a year, sometimes even less than that. And so we like to have something to remind them, something they can put on their wall to remind them that they’re a part of something bigger than just their own lives. And so each year we publish a calendar with photos giving news of the work, help them get to know administrators in the church, also bringing them up to date on baptisms that have occurred in different places and it’s quite interesting, and I find encouraging, to go into a hut someplace in Africa, a house made out of mud brick, very simple, a Spartan type of environment and yet up on the wall you can see this calendar and they’re tied in to what’s happening in the work of the church all around the world. So that’s something that has been very helpful and very encouraging for them. 

We have begun publishing Discern also in French. This is what it looks like. It looks like “Discerner” in English but actually the pronunciation would be different but we are publishing the magazine in French as well and this is a photograph taken from our Feast of Tabernacles in France. Most of our members in Europe and we only have about 30 French-speaking people that attend the Feast in Europe. They come from three different countries and the Feast of Tabernacles is a really important time for them because most of them are scattered and aren’t really able to attend an actual church service on the Sabbath so they listen to recorded sermons in their home and then they really look forward to the Feast of Tabernacles when everybody can finally get together. 

It is not easy to be a church member in Europe. Europe is an extremely secular place and it is very hostile to Christianity. If you’re actually a believer and your life shows that you are a practicing Christian, there will be persecution. There will be put-downs, there will be obstacles that people will put in your way so it really takes courage to be a Christian in Europe and I really salute the commitment and the courage of our church brethren over there.

I’ll just put in a little plug which I do whenever I can if you’re thinking about going abroad for the Feast, please do think about France. Once you get there, and I’m not saying that’s inexpensive to get there but once you get there it really is quite inexpensive. It’s about around $600 for all of your room and board, all of your three meals a day, including wine with lunch and dinner, so that’s really quite a good deal and you’ll be warmly welcomed if you do come. 

These are some of the members in France. On the left side over here you can see Mr. and Mrs. James Muir, he’s our elder, and his wife, and then these members here from Belgium, and another member from around Geneva. We also have here a few other church members. The Vernaud family from Switzerland and I’ll just mention that the Vernauds are here. Daniel Vernaud has been at Foundation Institute this year and has done very well and his parents are in town to be here for graduation. So notice those people and when you see them walking around, go and say hello to them and welcome them. It’s very nice for us to have them with us here at this time of year. 

Now we’ll just kind of go around and I’ll give you an overview of different places where we have church members. This is Martinique in the French West Indies in the Caribbean. It is a very beautiful tropical island and it’s part of France the same way Hawaii is part of the United States. There are a number of islands in the Caribbean that are actually part of France. The people living there are French citizens and you have French courts and they use the Euro and we do have a number of members living on this island. Some of the most beautiful beaches in the Caribbean. This beach here is called Salines and many people consider it to be the most beautiful beach in the Caribbean, certainly in the top two or three. So it’s a very, very beautiful island, and on this island, we have a small group of church members many of whom go all the way back to Worldwide and prior to that although some of them have just recently been baptized as well. So this is our little group of church members on the island of Martinique, French-speaking, and normally my wife and I try to go visit them once a year. Here we are, this was our visit this last year. You notice the people on the left there look a little pale for people from Martinique. Mr. and Mrs. Evans came down at their own expense for not only some vacation time but also to spend some time getting to know our brethren there so that was very nice during this last year. 

Then we have two islands out in the Indian Ocean where we have church members. One is the island of Mauritius and the other is the island of Reunion and we have very small, quite isolated groups. This is very, very far off the beaten track. You have to fly about four hours out of South Africa or three hours beyond Madagascar to get to these islands out in the middle of the Indian Ocean but they are very, very beautiful islands again, some very gorgeous beaches. 

Some of you may remember the story of the dodo bird. The dodo bird only existed on Mauritius. That’s the place where it was and there were no people living on Mauritius when the first Europeans discovered it and so the dodo bird had no natural predators. That’s why it didn’t know to run away from the hungry sailors that were walking up to them to hit them on the head with a rock and roast them for dinner. They were famished after weeks on these ships without any fresh meat so when they saw the dodo bird and it didn’t run away, they thought that was pretty good. So that’s why the dodo bird went extinct and why if somebody calls you a dodo today, that’s not complimentary. 

The interesting thing about Mauritius is that it is a mix of old and new. It is quite advanced compared to the African continent and yet there are some rather old-fashioned ways of doing things as well. It’s an interesting mix of old and new. Many people like to do their shopping in large markets like this outdoor market. They don’t go to supermarkets the way we do. They tend to do their shopping this way so this is kind of a throwback to a slower lifestyle. And here is some of the members from Mauritius and actually the two members from Reunion were over for a visit here as well. So this is a very small little group that gets a visit from outside the country once or twice a year. Oftentimes, a minister will go for the Feast of Tabernacles and then I’ll make at least one or two other visits during the year but other than that, they are by themselves. The Sabbath for them is to sit together and listen to a recorded sermon and everything has to come through e-mail or snail mail and so they feel, which they are, rather cut off physically and we do the best that we can to make them spiritually feel very much a part of the family. 

This is Mr. and Mrs. Jocelyn Prodigue. They are kind of our lead members there. Services are held in their home and here we had, this was the Night to Be Much Observed last year, not this year, but last year and it was quite interesting because I mentioned before there we no people living on the island when the Europeans first discovered it in the 1600s thereabouts, and so everybody who lives here has been brought in from someplace else usually by colonial administrations. The Dutch owned the island for a while, then the French took it from the Dutch, then the English took it from the French and each of them left traces of the people that they imported to help them work. So you have people of African origin. You have people from Madagascar. You have a lot of East Indians which the English brought in to work and administer their colonial administration. You have people of Chinese origin and the amazing thing about Mauritius is that everybody gets along pretty well. With all the ethnic differences that there are, they actually get along quite well. But the reason I mention all of this is that when we have the Night to Be Much Observed here, it’s quite interesting because the meal that we have is a reflection of all these different cultural origins so you may have a Chinese dish and a French dish and a Creole dish and it’s all sort of on the table at the same time. You’ll be happy to know that America made a contribution as well. We contributed Coca Cola to the meal. So that was our great cultural contribution to our Night to Be Much Observed meal there. But that’s a very special occasion for them to be able have a visitor during this time. 

The next island over also it’s just about a 100 miles from Mauritius is the island of Reunion. The island of Reunion is part of France, once again. French citizens, they use the Euro, French Administration, and on this island we have one couple, Mr. and Mrs. Laval Prodigue. They’ve been members of the church for a very, very long time and they’re the only members of the church on their island. So the only visits that they get are when I come through once or twice a year to stop over for a day or two. They’re starved for conversation during that time and we really enjoy the fellowship when we can get together. But they’re very faithful members of the church. They download all of the sermons, they download church literature. We’re able to communicate by e-mail and keep in touch through Skype and things of that nature as needed. But imagine, you and your wife or your husband being the only members of the church on your island and it’s been that way for 20 years or more. So they really appreciate the visits and I hope that helps us maybe appreciate some things that we can easily take for granted like the opportunity to be together on the Sabbath, every Sabbath, and have a live pastor speak to us every Sabbath and be able to fellowship with quite a number of different people. For the Prodigues the Sabbath really isn’t that way. They have each other and that’s what the Sabbath is for them.

Now we’re going to move over to the African continent itself and we’ll see where some of our church brethren live in Africa. And the first place that we’ll go is Rwanda. Probably if I say the name Rwanda, one of the first things that you’ll think about is the genocide that occurred there in 1994. April marked the 20th anniversary this year of this genocide when as many as a million people were killed in a very small country over the course of 100 days. The killing lasted 100 days. Much of it was done in a very brutal, barbaric fashion using machetes or clubs or things of that nature to kill anywhere from 800,000 to 1,000,000 people. And our church brethren lived through that, many of them fled the country for safety, tried to get into the Congo. They had to leave their homes not knowing what they would find when they came back and several of them risked their lives in order to try to save people who were going to be murdered by the militia. This is a famous photo here of refugees trying to get to Goma in the Congo and we did have church brethren among that exodus trying to reach that area. It was very barbaric. These are some photos that were taken of the dead after the killing occurred. A million people in a very small country in just two and a half months. The scale of it is just really breathtaking. 

There are a number of places around Rwanda even today that are genocide memorials because there are people who deny it ever occurred just as with the Holocaust in Europe during the Nazi years. There are people that deny that occurred and so there are genocide memorials all over the country in some of which they for a very long time simply left the remains, the bones of the people, on the floors of the churches. Churches ended up being some of the worst killing fields because up until this time when there was violence, when there was sectarian violence, someone could run to a church. It was considered holy ground and the killers wouldn’t go after them there and so in 1994 when the genocide began, many, many people rushed to these churches thinking that they would be safe there and this time they were murdered even in the churches and so the churches became some of the worse places for the massacres and many times now they are the genocide memorials. This was one that we had the chance to visit and you could see very clearly as you were stepping from one pew to the next in the church all of the human bones that were there and even today there are places where they are stacked up just to give you an idea of the scale of how many people died. There are still remains being found. People that were buried in shallow graves and when they’re found, then they’re put in a coffin and given a proper burial and there are some pretty horrifying and gruesome things that are found even today they’re still finding people who were killed twenty years ago. 

In the middle of that kind of environment which is very difficult for anyone to imagine we do have a thriving group of church members. We have two small congregations in one village of Kayenzi and one in the village of Giti. And here we have the two groups together on the occasion of Mr. Jim Franks’ visit in 2012 just about two years ago now. Hard to believe it’s gone so quickly but Mr. Franks was able to go up and visit with them and get to know the people and speak to them and really enjoyed that visit and they very much appreciated the president of our association making the trip all the way out into rural Rwanda to meet them and spend some time with them and one of the comments we had from members there was, “Well this really shows that we are important to our church brethren elsewhere if the church president will come to visit with us, that means we count.” And they were very much appreciative of that visit.

They’re standing in front of a church hall. They do have a hall in Giti. It’s made out of mud brick covered in plaster. Here’s another view of it here. This smaller building that you see on the side over here is a cistern. There is no running water and no electricity in the village of Giti thus far and so we have to store our own water and we have a little gasoline generator that we have bought for them to be used during the Feast of Tabernacles. This is because Rwanda is almost exactly on the Equator and you may not have ever thought of this before but on the Equator the sun always rises at 6:00 AM and it always sets as 6:00 PM. The days are always twelve hours long, there may be just a slight difference of a few minutes but basically the sun goes down at 6:00 PM, which is pretty early, and if there’s no electricity, you’re pretty limited as to what you can do. So we have a little gasoline generator that allows them to run some lights and that makes it possible for them to fellowship and extend their day a little bit further during the Feast of Tabernacles. 

These structures that you see over on the side here, these are actually supports over which tarps are placed during the Feast of Tabernacles and these are booths. These are actually little tabernacles and this is where families who don’t live in Giti will stay here during the Feast so this has become their Feast site. This is the kitchen which as kitchens normally are, the cooking is done outside of the house normally because of problems of ventilation. Almost all cooking is done over charcoal or wood. People don’t have electrical appliances because there is no electricity and this is the way our church brethren live all the time and so they’re used to doing it that way and this is the kitchen, the church kitchen, that’s used extensively at the Feast of Tabernacles. 

Here’s another shot of some of the structures that we have put up for their use during the Feast of Tabernacles and they just roll foam mats out on the ground and that’s what they sleep on during the Feast and, of course, that’s what they sleep on the rest of the year in their homes. Their homes have dirt floors in any event so that’s not very much different from what they know. Here we had some long drop toilets built for them so there would be enough facilities available during the Feast of Tabernacles. 

And I thought you might enjoy meeting a family. This is Mr. and Mrs. Étienne, that means “Steven” in French, and the last name is Rutamunjyanye and if you can pronounce that three times, I’ll give you a prize. So this is their home. Etienne built this home. You can see it has a corrugated tin roof. The houses, as all the houses in this area, are built out of mud brick and then they’re plastered over with a mixture of mud and cow dung, and a little bit of cement plaster and they mix all of that together and it will protect the mud brick from rains that may fall. So this is the Rutamunjyanye family house. This is their living room. You see they have very Spartan furniture. They spruce it up because Mr. Mundeli, their elder there, and I was coming to visit so they put a tablecloth on the table. They have the 10 Commandments up on the wall and they have the church calendar that I showed you there earlier up on the wall. So this is where they live. It’s very, very different from anything that you and I know. Even if we camp we probably would have a nicer facility than this in which to spend our time. But I just want to point out at this juncture when we’re talking about the difference in standard of living that our brethren over there have compared to us, let me also underscore for you that they are pursuing the same goals that you and I are pursuing. They’re trying to raise their children to fear God. They’re trying to develop godly character. They’re putting aside their tithes so they can keep the Feast of Tabernacles as God wants them to. They’re putting aside a tithe of what they grow because they’re subsistence farmers and they give that tithe to God to help support the work of the church in their area there. They are seeking first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. They’re pursuing all of the same goals that you and I are pursuing and they have their eyes focused on the same final outcome—the return of Jesus Christ. They very much want to be in the Kingdom of God and you can do that very well living like this. You don’t have to have all of the things that we’re used to be able to pursue what is truly most important in life and our brethren really are doing that. Etienne showed me, this is his bank account, or the equivalent thereof. This is what they have in reserve, a couple of goats and a cow and you’ll notice that he’s smiling. He finds this very amusing that somebody would come all the way from America to take a picture of his goats and his cow. He thought that was a pretty funny one. But he’s very happy and actually he’s a little better off than most because not everybody has a couple of goats and a cow and to have even a little bit of livestock like that is quite a blessing for them. 

We were here for the Passover and the First Day of Unleavened Bread and this year for the first time Mr. Daniel Harper who is a recently ordained elder in the church who also speaks French, he lived in France for a while, he and his wife, he came along during three weeks of this trip which was a five-week trip for me but he came along during the middle three weeks and met me here in Rwanda and was able to do some of the speaking and fellowship with some of the members and they really appreciated having Mr. Harper with them. You’ll notice, this is inside the church hall, you’ll notice the calendar up on the wall and you would find that calendar in every church home as well. It really means a lot to them to feel that connection. And sometimes they even see their own picture in the calendar and that’s even more exciting for them. They really feel like they’re connected with the work of the church. 

So this is Mr. Harper speaking. Now you may think well that’s complicated to have to speak in French before you can communicate with them. It gets even more complicated than that because not all of our brethren there speak French. Some of them only speak their local language which is called Kinyarwanda, it’s a little bit similar to Kiswahili. And so when we speak to them there, we speak in French, phrase by phrase, and there’s a translation into the local language as well. So that’s why James is standing next to Mr. Harper. Mr. Harper is speaking one phrase in French and then it’s being translated into Kinyarwanda for the brethren who don’t speak French. So it’s a challenge to be able to communicate in some of these areas. 

You may be wondering, well if somebody doesn’t speak French, that means they can’t read our church literature, how did they come to the church in the first place? One of the main reasons or the main vehicles through which we have growth in this area is the example of other church members. In fact, it is the most important way that people come to the church. Friends and neighbors notice a change in someone’s life. He’s not like he was before. He’s different from everybody else in the village. He seems happier. He’s got it together. He’s hopeful for the future. Why is that? What’s changed? And they come and say, “Well what’s going on with you? What brought this change in your life?” And they start sharing. And now we actually have probably more members in Rwanda who don’t speak French than we do who do speak French well and that’s because of the examples of their church brethren. Their lights were shining brightly enough that it got the attention of other people and they said I need to find out what’s different. What’s happened? Something is happening here and I want to find out what it is. So I believe it’s important for us never to underestimate the power of our examples and God can use our examples to get other people’s attention and if it’s His will to bring them to His church and His Work.  

We did something unusual for the First Holy Day. Normally when we get together because we have members coming in from different places, some people travel several hours in a van to get to Giti, three hours to get there, or at least two hours, more like three hours, so we have a sort of a picnic and we’ll have cold food that we serve, kind of a snack for everybody when we get all together. But we decided for the holy day to do something different. We decided that we would serve something that everybody in Rwanda really, really loves but they don’t get to have very often and that is goat brochettes. Rwanda is kind of famous for its goat brochettes. There are lots and lots of goats around and you know you make kind of a shish kabob out of it and grill it. That’s what people really enjoy. So we decided we would offer them goat brochettes. We had several members in the States had contributed some small sums of money to do something nice for the brethren over there. So we bought a couple of goats and we hired some people from the village to do the cooking so that there would be a hot goat brochette meal ready after services in the afternoon. And so when we arrived there, the workers were getting the meal ready. This was really fresh goat like the goats were alive that morning and they were on the skewer by after services at 3:00 o’clock. These are the men working on the goats here. 

You’ll notice the head is still attached. Now maybe that seems rather strange to you and I asked about that. I said “Doesn’t that sort of get in the way.” And they said, “Oh, no, no, no. This is very important here because this way you’re sure what kind of meat you’re eating.” If the head is still attached, they can’t substitute something else for the goat, so you know you’re not going to be eating Fido, for example, if the goat’s head is still attached there, and that’s the kind of thing that might happen otherwise. So here’s the fellow getting ready. He’s making the brochettes and while we were in services they were grilling the brochettes outside. It got a little  hard to concentrate on the sermon with the smell of goat brochettes wafting in through the hall and again this may seem a bit strange to you but one of the topics that we had to decide afterwards was who gets the goats’ heads? Nothing gets thrown away. Nothing gets wasted and I am told you can make quite a nice soup out of a goat head. So, they were debating. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to leave that up there so long. These were the brochettes at the end and we did find a good way to divide up the heads so that it would be fair. Actually, we gave them to the cooks because it wasn’t possible to divide them up between 70 church members or however many families that would be so the cooks were very, very thankful that we gave them that delicacy. So this is what the meal looked like at the end. Fried bananas, some fried potatoes, some raw bananas, part of an avocado and goat brochettes. And this was very, very much appreciated by all of our church brethren there. This was a very, very memorable First Day of Unleavened Bread for them. 

Next we’ll move on to a neighboring country which is just below Rwanda. It’s called Burundi. It is one of the poorest countries in all of Africa and it has a very similar make-up. It’s the Hutu/ Tutsi tribal make-up there as it is in Rwanda and they also have had tensions between those tribal groups and this is also a place where God has been working and bringing quite a few new people to the church. This is the capital city of Bujumbura which is located on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Lake Tanganyika is one of the largest fresh water lakes in the world. By volume it holds more water than any of our Great Lakes so that’ll give you an idea of how big it is by volume. It’s not as far across but it’s extremely deep. It’s thousands, I believe it’s 5,000 feet deep at parts so it’s quite a deep lake and it holds a great deal of water. Here we are on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. This area is also famous for a fellow named Gustave. Gustave is a Nile crocodile who hasn’t been seen for a couple of years now so we’re not even sure that he’s still alive but he did hold the record for having eaten the most human beings of any known Nile crocodile and they would have warnings whenever Gustave was sighted. They would have warnings on the radio. They’d be making announcements, “Watch Out For Gustave.”  So happily he hasn’t been seen for a couple of years and we hope that he’s gone where crocodiles go. 

This is the road going north. Most of our members live in a very rural part. They live up close to the Rwandan border and the Congo border and I mentioned to you it’s one of the poorest countries in Africa and so a great many things are transported simply by bicycle. If you have a bicycle, you have a means to make your living and a lot of people can transport things on a bicycle. They’ll go out and they’ll cut fodder for animals and they’ll bring it into the city of Bujumbura and they can sell that. They may buy fruit in the rural areas and bring it in. I’ve seen as many as a hundred pineapples draped over one bicycle. You can do that. They can transport almost anything on a bicycle. I’ve seen couches. I’ve seen beds. I’ve seen just about anything you can imagine. Huge milk cans full of milk from milk cows and so on. They can bring almost anything on a bicycle. It’s quite amazing to see the ingenuity involved. 

Here are workers in the field in the rice paddies. As I said, this is a place where again almost all of the population is subsistence farmers as in Rwanda. They grow what they eat and whatever they can grow, that’s what they eat. They store bags of whatever it is, beans and other types of things that they grow and they use that through the year and they hope that there’s enough food to get them through to the next harvest period. And so that’s the way most people in this part of the world live. 

This was a group shot that was taken during Mr. Franks’ visit, again two years ago, and at the time they did not have a church hall. We did have two buildings that we put up for some outlying congregations but the largest one that we needed to construct was here in Mugina and so we were waiting to have the funds necessary to be able to put it up. This is what the hall looks like now. It is large enough to host the Feast of Tabernacles so it can hold 215 people plus and some of you here in the Dallas area were involved with helping finance the construction here. You know who you are and your contributions were very much appreciated and they do now have a very nice hall. The work’s not completely done. They’re still putting doors in and windows in and things of that nature but they were able to use it for the Feast of Tabernacles this last year and it worked very, very well for them. 

This is another one of the outlying buildings that we have built out of brick, as you can see fired brick, which is better and oftentimes what we’ll do when we go to these areas, of course, I’m not actually able to function as a church pastor for people that I only see in passing for you know a day or two every couple of years. So what I spend a lot of my time doing when I travel into these areas is holding leadership seminars, developing the local leadership, training them, giving them the training that they need to be able to serve their brethren so we do a lot of leadership training when I travel to Burundi. This is what a leadership training class looks like while I’m there. This is inside the church hall. We don’t have a cement floor yet, which most churches don’t so I would be sitting behind that table and then I will speak in French and it’s translated into Kirundi for everybody and we take questions and normally, I’ll spend at least a day or two days every time I go working with a group of 10 to 15 local leaders to make sure that they understand our fundamental doctrines, they understand how church services are supposed to be organized. We really try to equip them the best we can so that they can serve their church brethren. 

We produce a lot of very simple literature for them so that they have something written down. We’ve used these tri-folds that you can see here on the screen where we print on the front and back of a piece of paper and we fold it up but at least they have the fundamental teachings of the church and we’ll do it sometimes in colored paper as you can see here. These are different tri-fold booklets explaining different things. This one is “Did Jesus Die on Good Friday and Was He Resurrected on Easter Sunday?” This one is “How Can We Pray So That God Will Answer Our Prayers?” And this one is “Has the Sabbath Been Changed to Sunday?” So we had to give them something that they would be able to reproduce as needed inexpensively so that those who are interested can learn the truth of God. 

While we’re holding the leadership seminars this is often what’s going on outside. We do try to provide a meal for the men who come in and spend the day with us so we had some ladies volunteer from the congregation and they are out cooking all morning. This is the way most cooking is done here. It’s simply done outside, maybe under a roof if it’s raining, but this is the way almost everything is prepared in these countries. 

And here the men are enjoying their meal. One of the things that we always try to provide for them is just a little bit of meat. It really is not expensive by our standards. We can provide per person for between a dollar and two dollars we can provide a meal with just a little bit of meat and probably many of us eat meat every day or almost every day, but in this part of the world the poverty is such that many, many people in Rwanda and Burundi both, I’ve asked a number of them, “How often do you eat meat, normally?” And they’ll say, “Oh, once or twice a year.” It’s just not normally a part of their diet. They can’t afford it. Mostly it’s vegetable protein that they get, beans and rice and things of that nature. So for us even to provide a couple of bites of beef or something like that is very much appreciated. I think it’s safe to say you might not appreciate the beef over there. The reason is that before it ends up on your plate it has lived a very long and productive life pulling things out in the field so you really have to chew on it before you can swallow it but it’s a real treat when people don’t get to have that very often. 

This was the church hall before the structure that we were able finally to put up for them for the Feast. They just had tarps. They had built a mud brick building, but those don’t stay up very well during the rainy season and they had a building that was out of mud brick that finally collapsed and so this was a stop-gap until we were able to get funds to put up another building for them. Now you may be wondering you see the fellow playing the electric piano here and you’re thinking, wait a minute I thought you said that there’s no electricity in this area. And that’s true. There’s no electricity in this area, but necessity being the mother of invention you will notice down underneath the electric piano here there is a car battery so they wire the electric piano to the car battery and they play hymns during services, and then they put the battery back in the car afterwards and recharge it. So there’s more than one way to power your electric piano. And you notice that he’s got a parasol here. That’s not because it was raining. That’s because of the heat of the equatorial sun. Again, you’re almost right on the Equator here and you can get sunburn with remarkable rapidity. I can get sunburn if I’m exposed for about 20 minutes in the straight sunshine, I’m going to start turning pink already. So the sun really beats down in this area. 

This is Mr. Jean Marie Mundeli, our elder from Rwanda, and Kinyarwanda and Kirundi the languages are very similar so he is able to come down. I often invite him to come down from Burundi and he can speak and people can understand him directly in the local language. It’s also helpful for me to have another set of ears as things are being translated so that I can make sure that everything is being translated correctly. This is Mr. Mundeli giving a sermonette during one of our services there. And this is what it looked like from the back of the hall or the back of the tent I guess you would say. We do a great many things at each visit. During this visit I was asked before services, do you think you could you bless a few children. We’d like to have the blessing of the little children. And I said well we have a pretty tight schedule. I said, “How many children are there?” He said, “There are five.” I said, “Okay I think we can do that.” So when the announcement period came, I introduced the ceremony, we asked the blessing on it and then I said the parents who have children that haven’t been blessed and would like to have them blessed please come forward now and 30 parents came forward with 15 children and it was too late to back out by that time so we went ahead and asked the blessing on the little children. We were very happy to do it and then we had time for a very, very short sermon after that. We did have a very happy event. This is Mr. Mundeli and me doing the blessing of the little children

We had a very happy event two years ago. Mr. Nathan Mukeshimana was ordained an elder. He had previously served as an elder in the Church of God, Seventh Day, and has been really instrumental in most of these people coming to the Church of God as we know it. He set a very fine example, knows his Bible very, very well and is a true servant. He has never taken any salary from any of the churches. He works his field like everybody else does and then he serves in his free time, he serves the members here in this area. So he and his wife set really a very, very fine example. This is Nathan Mukeshimana and his wife. 

You may be wondering why she looks rather grim in this photograph and I have explained this a few times before. Africans in this part of Africa think it’s a really weird idea to smile for photos and I asked them why that was. Why don’t you like to smile and you know look happy when you’re having your photo taken and then they said it’s like this. “What really makes people happy is if they come into some money. So if someone’s really smiling and looking really happy, everyone’s going to assume that they’ve come into some money somehow. And in Africa, if one member of the family comes into some money, other members of the family have a right to their part of it. So if we go around smiling, all of our family members are going to think that  we’ve got money and we’re holding out on them and we’re not giving them any and it causes big family problems so we look like everybody else does even when we’re having our photo taken and we have to look really, really serious.” So I finally have convinced them. I said, “Look, I’m going back to America. I won’t show these photos to any of your family members. Would you just smile so that I can show people in America they’re happy when I go to visit them. Otherwise, they may not send me over here anymore.” And so I can get them to smile. Mr. Mukeshimana has it down. Mrs. Mukeshimana is still back in the old mode, but I do actually have photos of them smiling now occasionally even though they’re convinced that it’s a really crazy idea to do that. 

It can be really difficult to get back to see many of the members in this area during the rainy season. You really need a 4-wheel drive to be able to get back in there and sometimes even with a 4-wheel drive it can be a bit difficult. On this recent trip I conducted some final counselings for baptism. Mr. Mukeshimana does some of the initial counseling with people but I will do the final counseling with them until we get our system completely worked out and he’s totally up to speed. So I had 14 baptismal counselings this time and we take each of them individually and I was able to baptize, we were able to agree to baptize ten of them. There were four who needed a bit more work. There were some things they didn’t yet understand and so but we were able to baptize ten and I was very happy to be able to have Mr. Mukeshimana and also Daniel Harper assist with the baptisms. So this is the baptism spot. You see they have a very high tech bridge to cross over the stream at this point here and this is where the water is deep enough that we can baptize people without any problem. So here is Mr. Mukeshimana and Mr. Harper baptizing people and then we all join together to do the laying on of hands afterwards and these are nine of our ten new brothers and sisters in the faith. One of the young ladies had already gone off to help get lunch ready so she’s not in this photo but these are nine new brethren that we have in the faith in Burundi and that’s always a very exciting moment. 

I wanted to show you one last slide from Burundi because this was about two years ago. I asked them, I said, “I’m going to take a photo of you that I’m going to show to your brethren in other parts of the world, is there anything that you would like to do or any message you would like to pass along?” So they all waved, and they’re waving at you and they told me please let them know that we very, very much appreciate their support and their help. They rely on the help and support that comes from the U.S. and other countries, particularly the U.S., and they know that they wouldn’t be able to have visits and receive the training and the support and the literature that they do if brethren in other places, and the U.S. in particular, weren’t working together and pooling their contributions, their tithes and their offerings to be able to do a work altogether so please consider this their thanks to all of you for your faithful support of the work of the church. They really appreciate it and they pray for you and they ask God to bless you for your faithfulness and your generosity. 

The next country we will go to is the Democratic Republic of the Congo which is neither democratic nor a republic, but it is the Congo and we actually have members in two different sections of the country. We have one family that lives over in the area of Bukavu and you’ll hear that in the news if you listen to the news of Africa. This is an area that’s heavily fought over because it has great mineral wealth. If you have a smart phone on you someplace, probably part of that phone came from this part of Africa. It’s one of the few places where some minerals come from that are necessary for some of the technology that we use now and so a warlord who can get ahold of that area even for just a few months can become very wealthy. So they’re always groups vying for control of this part of Congo and it’s so far away from Kinshasa, the capital, that basically this area is almost independent. The central government has very little control over what goes on in this part of Congo. 

The other place where we have members. We have a group of church members in Kinshasa and so we have members that are in the same country but they have no communication with each other. It’s easier for the members in east in this part, they’re actually connected with Rwanda more than they are with the capital city of their own country. There are more United Nations peacekeepers in the Congo than any place else in the world and there are at any given time there can be as many as three different wars going on within the country. None of them are related to each other. There are three separate conflicts that are going on in Congo and they sometimes they cool down for a little bit or there won’t be a hot war but then they’ll flare up again and so it’s in this context that we have a number of church members whom you’ll see in a moment in some of the photos that we have. It’s a very violent place. It’s a very corrupt place. The State Department says basically, “Just don’t go there.” But we have church members that are thriving spiritually in these kinds of conditions.

This is the Barumé family. This is the family that lives in Bukavu in Eastern Congo. They’ve had to leave their homes several times as the ebb and flow of these wars and civil wars go on in their part of the country. Mr. Barumé actually works in a university in Bukavu and earns enough to be able to feed his very numerous family as you can see here and this was a photo again taken during Mr. Franks’ visit two years ago. They all came. This is the first time their whole family had come. We sent them some money to subsidize their travel so they could meet Mr. Franks and it was the first time that their children had ever met other members of the church. Up until this time in their lives they had grown up in the church of God but the church to them was just their parents. That’s all there was. They had never met another member of the church before so this was quite an event for them, a very encouraging event for them both to be able to meet Mr. Franks and also just to meet other young people in the church, and they formed some friendships that are ongoing to this day. 

The other side of the Congo is Kinshasa. Kinshasa is a very chaotic, dangerous city. The big problem in Congo has always been corruption and it’s still a huge problem today. You’ve probably heard of Mobuto Sese Seko. He was the dictator for a very, very long time and basically ran the country into the ground. They have invented a new term for the Government in the Congo. We have democracy, you can have a republic, you can have a monarchy, but in the Congo some experts have coined the phrase “kleptocracy” and if you recognize that prefix, if you know what a kleptomaniac is, it’s someone who can’t stop stealing so “klepto” means theft. A kleptocracy is government by the thieves and that’s basically what you have here. There is corruption at all levels of the government, all levels of society and it’s just a very, very difficult and dangerous place to live. 

This is the Congo River. Some of the falls there. That’s why Kinshasa was built where it was. The river is not navigable past this point. People used to have to pull their boats out of the water and haul them around the falls and then they could continue farther inland. The infrastructure has been almost totally gutted. Everything is broken down. The streets, they’re starting to rebuild some of the streets now and resurface them so that’s good but basically everything is just kind of held together with baling wire and duct tape kind of thing. The whole culture. 

This is our church hall where we meet for services, Sabbath services. We rent it for about four hours each Sabbath and this was actually prior to services the young adults asked if they could have kind of a meeting and a Bible Study so I was happy to do that with them. 

These are the families that are attending in Kinshasa now, the parents with their young children and this is the young peoples’ group so you can see they have a lot of children in this part of Africa and you’ll notice, maybe you can see there I’m wearing blue jeans. I normally would never do that for church but my suitcase had been lost and I didn’t have any other trousers to wear for a couple of days so we had to make do with what we had. But very encouraging to see so many, we’ve had quite a number of new people who wanted to attend services and of course we don’t know if they will stay or not. It’s too early to say how many of them will say, how many are truly being called by God but it is encouraging to see people that are interested and curious and have questions and want to know more. 

Let me just open a little parenthetical statement here. I think it’s important for all of us to understand in the Church of God. It is in Africa it’s very easy to get people to come to a church service. It’s easy to fill up a photo with people after church. All you have to do is offer a little something. A snack or something. People are so poor they will come. The trouble that we have in the Church of God is not so much having people come. The challenge for us is determining who’s truly being called by God and who’s coming out of hope for a little something that they might get in their poverty and in their desperation. And so we, actually, we spend more time trying to limit the number of people that we’re dealing with rather than trying to always have more and more people. Anybody who comes we’ll give them a fair chance. We’ll work with them, we’ll teach them, we’ll answer their questions, but the number of people that actually are being called by God is quite a bit less than the number of people who initially manifest an interest. And if I mention that, sometimes some Church of God groups will trumpet the fact that they got this huge number of people that are coming and all of these new people that are coming. That’s fine as far as it goes but the challenge has always been to determine who’s truly being called by God and that is always a much smaller number than the people who initially show up. So we have to be careful if groups are touting the fact that they’ve got, you know, hundreds or thousands of people. It’s good to be preaching the Gospel as widely as possible but that doesn’t mean that all of those folks are truly being called by God and that’s the challenge is always to find those with whom God is actually working. Okay, I’ll close that parentheses now and we’ll move on to Togo. 

Another small sliver of a country in West Africa now where we have a number of church members. This is flying into Lomé. From the air you can see how red the dirt is in this part of Africa and Togo’s a very poor country as well. A lot of the commerce that goes on is just at the side of the road like this. This is a store. People just set up a table or set up something on the side of the road and they’ll start selling whatever it is they have to sell. And that’s the way many people make ends meet. This is, believe it or not, this is a gas station. It has all of the important elements. The gasoline is up here in an old whiskey bottles. You have a sign with a price on it. You have a funnel made out of an old cut-up bottle and you just pull in and say I want so many liters and you pay him and the gas goes in the tank. And these are found all over the place in Lomé and the reason is because hardly anybody can afford his own vehicle. Most people use taxies to get around and most taxi drivers don’t own their taxies. They rent them by the day from the owner of the car. And so they pay up front. They may pay $10, $15, $20 to use the car for the day and whatever they can make above and beyond that is what they get to take home with them. So the one thing they don’t want to do is leave any gasoline in the tank at the end of the day. So they’re putting it in one quart at a time or two quarts at a time and they do this all through the day so that at the end of the day they haven’t left any money in the gas tank. So what happens, that’s why every few hundred yards you’ll see a little gas station like this. It’s because when the taxi runs out of gas, he’ll coast as far as he can, hope that he makes it to one of these places and he’ll pay to have another liter or two liters of gasoline put in the tank. 

This fellow is not happy to have his photo taken as you can see here. The idea, someone has convinced Africans that anytime a Westerner takes their photo, we’re going to come home and sell it and become immensely rich from doing that so they feel like they should get their cut up front and if we don’t want to pay them, they don’t want to have their photo taken. So you have to do it quickly and move on. 

This is the core group of our church members in Togo. There are a few others who weren’t here for this particular photo. We have a few others that are scattered in the interior of the country. These are the members who live in Lomé, the capital city. A very fine group. Two of the men here are quite well off by African standards. Two of them actually own their own cars. That’s the only people like that we have like that in French-speaking Africa. One works as a consultant for the United Nations and the other represents a German pharmaceutical company that sells anti-malarial drugs and their quite well educated, both of them, and so this congregation really profits from having that extra level of understanding and even financial support that comes from these members that are doing better. This is where they have services in a room in one of the members’ homes. Here is Mr. Harper giving his part of a Bible Study during the time that we were there on this trip and then afterwards we shared a meal outside as the heat of the day was beginning to dissipate a little bit. It’s always about 90 degrees with 90% humidity during the day so when evening comes and the peak heat subsides, it’s a nice time to sit outside and enjoy a meal together which is what we did. Lots of fellowship. Almost everybody here speaks French. There’s only one lady who doesn’t speak French well so we’re able to converse much more easily with this group. 

I’d like to introduce a couple of the members to you there so you just know what it’s like for our members. This fellow’s name is Dieudonné Telou and he’s a motorcycle taxi driver. His uncle actually gave him this motorcycle and so it belongs to him and that’s what he does. He gets up before sunup every morning and he runs courses all day long. He’ll take one or two passengers with him and he can make four or five dollars in a day by doing this after all of his expenses are paid. So that’s how he earns his living. 

This is Mr. and Mrs. Kloutsé. He’s the one who works for the German pharmaceutical company and she uses this foot-powered sewing machine over here to sew formal dresses for ladies for special occasions like weddings and funerals and things like that. So between the two of them they do pretty well. They’re standing in front of the house that they rent here. 

This is another one of the members. Her name is Anna Djromadzi and she bakes things. This is her job. She gets up before dawn every morning. She comes in here and mixes up a big bowl of batter as you can see and then she takes them to the marketplace. She fries them in oil. She makes doughnuts essentially and she sells them on the street through the day and she has to sell everything that she’s made that morning. When the last one is sold, she can go home. She’s sold enough to make what she needs for the day. So that’s how she makes her money and supports herself. 

The last French-speaking country that we’ll go to now is Ivory Coast. Ivory Coast has just come through a civil war and is still in the midst of a lot of civil unrest as well. In spite of that we’ve had quite a bit of growth here over the last seven or eight years. We have two little groups that are meeting around Abidjan, the capital, and then we have a number of budding groups that are starting up in the region of Man. M-a-n is the name of the city up here. So over in this area here we have a number of congregations and you’ll see some photos of that. If any of you have been following the news recently about the Ebola scare in Guinea, some of those were just right across the border over here and in fact in Man where we were the World Health Organization had set up a crisis center to deal with the Ebola disease if it were to come across the border. We were praying, obviously, that it wouldn’t and it had not at the time that we were there but we were taking special care to make sure that we were being careful of our hygiene. One of the things that we were really warned to avoid because this is one of the ways that the Ebola has been spread, we were warned to avoid one of the local delicacies which is bat soup and I said that wouldn’t be a problem. I didn’t think we’d be having any of that while we were there but they have what they call “bush meat” and that’s basically anything that they can catch that lives in the wild so they eat bats, they like bat soup, there’s a large rodent called the “grass cutter” or “agouti” and it looks basically like a very large rat. That’s bush meat. Those are sold along the side of the road, snails, giant forest snails. Just about anything can be consumed and so we were careful, not that we’ve ever eaten any of those things but they did warn us to be very careful with our hygiene and diet because of the Ebola scare. 

First of all, just outside of Abidjan, about 20-25 miles outside of Abidjan, in the little village of La Mé, we have a number of church members. This is a little hall that we put up for them. Their houses are built and cluttered in a way that it’s not really possible for them to have a service or to listen to a sermon in their living room. This is what a typical house looks like on the inside. You can see there’s very little furniture, they have a mosquito net here that they can let down at night. They’re just hanging things on the wall, there’s a bench and this would be the bed area. They would simply roll out a piece of foam and that’s what they would sleep on at night. So this is the way most people live in sub-Saharan Africa and that’s why we ended up putting up this little simple hall for them to be able to use during services. 

When we arrived for our first visit it was bath time so this little girl was not, she was not happy about having her bath here and then we were back for a Bible Study. Here’s Mr. Harper once again presenting part of a Bible Study and then this is the group that is meeting together there, just a small group in La Mé. They were very, very interested to see the French Discern magazine and got right into it when I brought a couple of printed copies along for them to look at and they were very, very interested in that. 

Then we set out north. We left the region of Abidjan. We headed up north out in the sticks, down in the bush. The road went from pretty good to not very good to atrocious and we were able to make a number of visits in areas where people are becoming interested in the church. They are learning about it from the literature that we printed and also from the examples of other members who are either members or potential members that are interested in the area here. So you can see Mr. Harper along with one of the groups that we visited. This was in a village called Blole and we had a rather interesting experience here. They told us as we finished the visit. I’d given a little talk about God’s calling, and answered some questions about