By Aaron D. Taylor, Great Commission Society
I can remember it as if it was yesterday: My wife and I were in a strange new land with strange customs, strange food and a strange language. Well, looking back, it really wasn't that strange. The food was mostly rice & fish or rice & chicken and the language was French, not some bizarre tribal language where people make strange clicking noises to represent words. But, for my wife and I, Senegal, which is a predominately Muslim country on the tip of West Africa, was our newly chosen home.
We had only been in the country for about six weeks and, after living in a pastor's house temporarily, settled into a nice, quiet neighborhood to start our work as church planters.
There is a feeling of utter helplessness you experience when living in a country that speaks a language other than English. At this point, my French was barely intelligible and my pronunciation probably sounded like a two-year-old trying to recite the Apostle's creed. It was in this moment of deeply felt weakness that God showed His greatest strength.
One day, during the first week in our new neighborhood, I felt prompted by the Lord to take my French Bible out on the street corner and begin asking people to help me read it. I would say in my atrocious French "Excuse me. I am a Christian pastor and I am trying to learn French. Can you help me with my pronunciation?" Then I would craftily point my Good Samaritan Muslim friends to Salvation passages in the Bible like John 3:16 and Romans 10:9-10. Although they didn't buy into the theology I was presenting to them, they did appreciate my effort. In fact, one young Muslim man, Touri, decided to help me out by introducing me to a man he was sure would be the first to go to a church if I were to start one in the neighborhood. The man's name was Jean-Pierre.
Shortly before this incident, I was well-briefed by a few missionary colleagues on how difficult it is to convert a Senegalese. I was told that if a Senegalese seems interested in the Gospel, it is only to extract money from the missionary. As I was to find out during my time in Senegal, their cynicism was well founded. Very few Senegalese show a real interest in Christianity, and most see Western missionaries as unlimited suppliers of disposable cash. So, against my better judgment, I decided to invite Jean-Pierre to church (a/k/a - our living room) for our kick-off service.
My wife and I spent the week before that first Sunday transforming our living room into a house of worship. We bought chairs, Bibles, a chalkboard and even a pulpit. We also handed out invitations throughout the neighborhood. Just when we thought nobody was going to show up, along comes Jean-Pierre. So along with our associate pastor (a young man from Cameroon), we conducted our first service. For the first six weeks of church, I preached like I was Billy Graham standing before millions during a televised crusade. The only difference was that my audience was... er... only Jean-Pierre and one other guy. When I awoke from my daydream, I faced the reality of my dismal audience. Worse yet, when I looked at my audience of two, I received nothing but a blank stare.
After weeks of not knowing if my message was getting through, I heard a knock on my door and, lo and behold, there stood Jean-Pierre. After a few words of polite conversation, Jean-Pierre proceeded to tell me how his life had been transformed during the past few weeks. To make a long story short, for the next 18 months, my wife and our associate pastor discipled Jean-Pierre on a daily basis. He became a passionate evangelist - going to prisons and squatter camps, praying for people on the streets and bombarding his friends and family with literature, cassettes and even e-mails promoting Christian websites. After two years of Bible School, Jean- Pierre is now living in the Casamance (a remote region in the southern part of the country) apprenticing under a well-established Senegalese church planter. After his year-long internship is finished, he plans to launch out as a church planter.
My wife and I are now back in the good-ol' U.S.A - Hillsboro, Missouri to be exact. We have started a mission called the Great Commission Society for the purpose of supporting and equipping native evangelists, just like Jean-Pierre, to plant churches where none yet exist. Our experience on the mission field has taught us that, with few exceptions, native evangelists are far more effective in church planters than Western missionaries.
I am not sure why God chose me to be the one to lead Jean-Pierre to the Lord. He could have chosen anyone. We went to Africa to win a nation. We left with a friendship that we will carry in our hearts forever. I think that Jean-Pierre and I were set up by the Divine matchmaker in Heaven for the purpose of partnering together to win a lost and dying region of the world to Christ. In short, our lives are a part of God's great design to romance our fellow man.
Aaron D. Taylor, is the author of The Angels are Watching and founder of Great Commission Society www.greatcommissionsociety.com To contact Aaron, write to fromdeathtolife@yahoo.com or call 636-208-6828.