From our correspondent
3 minute 40 second read
My wife, Alison*, and I, and our four children, live in a small, remote village in a country in North Africa. We have been here for the last five years, and in the country for eight.
In our village, there’s no electricity, no running water. There are no paved roads, no grocery stores – but we do have market day, one day a week. There are some places that resemble restaurants in that they serve food, but to call them restaurants is probably a stretch of the word. Our village is surrounded by a number of other villages and there are also a number of refugee camps less than fifteen miles away. So although the village is small, there are a lot of people in the area.
When we talk to people, like Abbass*, one of our neighbours, and Noura*, who is helping us learn the local language, their hearts are so hard and their eyes are so blind – we know full well that until the Lord removes the veil, they will never see the truth. That’s what we’re praying for this people group – that they would have eyes to see and ears to hear.
The only international airport is in the capital, and it takes two days to get there – 14 hours to our first stop, and then another six to 13 hours the following day. This leg is only about 170 miles, but there’s no road. The length of the journey is also determined by how many flat tyres or breakdowns you have and whether it is the rainy or sunny season. If it’s the rainy season, the dry riverbeds across the road fill up, thus making it even harder to get there.
As a team, we meet twice a week. One of those times is for strategy talks, and our primary strategy is prayer. ‘Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vain,’ – Psalm 127:1. And so we are dependent on prayer because we are dependent on Christ. Then we also worship together on Sundays – a really sweet time of worshipping in song and through reading the Word together, and then having some times of accountability and prayer. We usually share a meal in the evening, as well as read a book or something and discuss that together.
For us, we are still very much in the language learning process. We’ve had to learn three different languages – we started with French, then the local Arabic dialect, and now some of our team is trying to learn the tribal heart language of the local indigenous people. We are finding it very, very difficult. The language is unwritten; it’s tonal, with what they call harmonics within the language – so one word or even one letter could literally mean nine different things based on how the tones go. It’s extremely complicated.
One family has recently left the field and our biggest team need right now is for more people – especially people gifted in language and linguistics. We would love to see some translation work happen and eventually get scripture into their language – but that will be quite a long process.
After encountering Christ, through His Word, he decided that this was truth. He turned away from Islam, and, overnight, lost everything.
Our team vision is ultimately to see a reproducible local indigenous church but, so far, it has been a slow and painful process. It feels like there’s very little to no visible success right now. That definitely makes it hard to continue, but we trust that the Lord is working even when we can’t see what He’s doing.
There was one miraculous story of the first and only believer that we knew at the time from this people group. This young man left everything in order to follow Christ. He came from a wealthy family, had memorised the entire Qur’an and was even thinking that he may become an imam at a mosque. He really had everything a Muslim would want. But after encountering Christ, through His Word, he decided that this was truth. He turned away from Islam, and, overnight, lost everything. His family was trying to kill him and is still after him. It has been a really difficult road for him, but it’s been encouraging to see him cling to his faith and grow – albeit in another country.
One thing we’ve realised from his story, and others, is if Muslims come to faith, they want community and without community so many of them return to Islam. So we are praying for families and groups to come to faith. It’s so much harder when it’s just one individual here and there. We can provide community for them, but it’s not the same as having their own communities, from their culture and language.
In our ministries here we’re trying to build foundations for a local church to grow as they are crucial to any structure. Everybody enjoys seeing the finished building but without the foundation, there would be no building. I take courage from people like Isaiah when he was called and the Lord said, ‘You’re going to go and nobody’s going to listen to you, but this is what I’m calling you to.’ So we pray for perseverance to continue on in pursuing our vision even when we can’t see.
*Names changed to protect identities.
