Ministry on the Wet Wood and Fire at the Altar

First, sorry that I haven’t updated in a while!  School kicked off in September (taking 12 hours this semester), plus French studies and work at some recent church events have left me more than a little busy.  Despite a fuller schedule, one thing has not changed--I’ve still been facing incredible opportunities and lessons in this school of missions!

Altar call at the end of the first Ruashi evangelism
campaign.  Altar calls might be a new idea here, since
the call was for people who wanted to believe in Christ
for the first time and many involved believers showed up,
but praise God anyway!

We just finished participating in one of our biggest events since we've been here.  On Sunday, Oct. 19, the church we’ve been working at threw its first anniversary celebration.  Lively praise and worship, an exhortation and invitation for the baptism in the Holy Spirit, dancing, food, and good times with friends filled our time together.  We weren’t just praising God for what He did the past year, though.  We were especially remembering all that He did the past week.

The week before the anniversary, Pasteur directed a three-day evangelism campaign to focus the church on its real mission and to bring more souls into the community of believers.  This was going to be big.  Four banners posted around the neighborhood, 4000 flyers distributed (and later 1000 more after those all went out in only two days), church reconstruction, tons of extra chairs, new musicians and instruments, a car with speakers tied on top parading around the community announcing the services… this part of Lubumbashi was definitely going know about this crusade. 

I got an idea during the second day
of the Ruashi evangelism campaign
to go outside and invite people in off
the street.  At least 5 people came as
a result of that and a few went up to the
altar to confess Christ.  Praise God for that!

Everyone was involved in preparations for the event.  We gave.  We prayed.  We fasted.  We believed.  The day finally comes.  The church is packed, about 100 people attending, a decent number being non-church people from the neighborhood, and about 60 kids.  Pasteur preached a powerful, Spirit-lead message on the importance of believing in Jesus, and at the altar call, about 10 people answered.  After two more days of similar services and responses, we praised God for a successful campaign and were looking forward to see the lasting fruit. 

The week directly following the campaign would show if the people who came would remain in the church.  During the week, only two people, relatives of a recent convert, came to the Wednesday night teaching as a result of the campaign.  The following Sunday service attendance was below the average before the campaign.  It’s tempting to see the astounding amount of work invested in this campaign to have amounted to very little. 

In spite of any doubts on the efficacy of the campaign, God’s been teaching me a lesson.  We are people of faith.  I must still believe even though I don’t see the results I believed for.  I need to trust that the Lord is working through the seeds that this campaign has sown to bring about a fruit that I may never experience.  And not just because I myself invested money, time, prayer, and fasting—but because the work of God demands that we trust God to produce the results that we are unable to fully accomplish in our own strength.  Sometimes we do ministry on the wet wood, but we must believe that the Lord will send fire to the altar!

New arrival on the field:  my fellow intern, David.
Great guy, we get along well, greatly blessed to be
doing missions together for the next 6 months.
Here's us helping out at a community clean-up we
put together with the Ruashi church.

However, I’ve also been learning that we can both have faith in God bringing to completion what’s already been done and we can adjust our strategies to serve God more excellently.  We need to continually improve on our personal abilities and corporate resources because those are the gifts God has given us to use for ministry!  Maybe our time, energy, and resources could be better invested in another way that would produce more lasting fruit, more people who would stay in the church community to be made into disciples.  I’m not sure exactly what that would look like or even how to go about discussing that.  But I will do my best to learn why the Congolese do the ministry they do and we will work together to complete God’s mission in excellence!

These are the people who answered the call for service
in the Kingdom at the Acts in Africa conference.  There
was another one of these with the same result
the Sunday after!

Another big event happened in L’shi recently.  Acts in Africa, an Assemblies of God group dedicated to igniting a world-evangelization vision to this continent, put on a 5-day seminar on the Holy Spirit and the mission of the church.  Two seasoned American missionaries, Denny Miller and Mark Turney, and a prominent Malawian pastor, Ensen Lweysa, thoroughly hammered Acts 1:8, Jesus’ commission to the disciples to preach the gospel everywhere by the power of the Holy Spirit, into each pastor’s teaching and vision.  After the conference, the Katanga district committed to planting 156 new churches, training 36 new church planters, sending out 4 missionaries to other countries, and creating an extension school to train more church planters.  Further, In two of their services, over 200 people in each responded to the call of God to ministry.  Praise God!  Truly this was experience of God's fire on the altar!

Right now we're teaching an English class at Ruashi's
mother church, Epee de l'Eternel (Sword of the Lord).
The courses's purpose is to provide a place for regular
attenders to bring their friends to hear the gospel
and be more easily welcomed into the church, but
already people who don't normally attend there
are showing up! 

The conference’s emphasis on the Holy Spirit’s role in the individual believer’s life made me seriously question my relationship with the Spirit.  If the apostles in Acts were performing miracles, healings, and powerful sermons in the power of the same Holy Spirit that lives in us, then where is that power in my life?  Where is that power?  Where are those messages of wisdom and knowledge, those prophecies, those healings and miracles, those utterances and interpretations of tongues?  Will I just be content with saying I believe these things but never seek their power in my life?  Or will I really commit myself to being lead and taught by the Spirit and using His gifts for the good of the church and the salvation of unbelievers? 

Well there’s enough thoughts and events for one blog for now.  God really has been teaching me the most life-changing things!  I’ll make another post soon about other adventures!

Mark Verslues, the missionary here overseeing the
construction of a new Bible school, invited David and I
to help build a brick oven.  That's what we're standing on.
At the end of the day, it was up to our chest and we still
hadn't loaded the field of bricks in the background.
In total it contained 6,000 bricks.

Before I go, I want to say a huge thank you for everyone who’s been praying for me.  Thank you to #iam2nd back at SAGU for praying for me every hall devo and every midnight proverbs.  Thank you to the many saints at Gateway and WBC church who’s been interceding for me.  Thank you to the WBC college group for lifting up my needs to the throne.  Thank you friends, family, and everyone else for interceding for me.  There are too many times to list here where something has happened in my personal life or the ministry around me only because someone was praying.  Thank you and Mungu awabariki!  God bless you!