DEM & GLORY

DEM & GLORY

They are both doing well but Dem had to have a C-section so her recovery will take a while, probably 3 months. We are thankful that they are both okay. We do miss Dem at the Baptist House/Abuja, especially her smiling face. The Baptist House continues to be a busy place.

MORE PICTURES OF THE KADUNA AND ABUJA CONFERENCES

Akila worked harder than all the rest of us during the conferences. On the left is a picture of him translating into the Hausa language as Dave Dawson spoke. That is not easy and he was drained at the end of the day. The middle picture is a picture of Dwain Camp speaking at the Abuja conference. He is a missionary from the USA serving in Saudi Arabia. He came down to help us with the conference. The picture on the right is a picture of the participants of the Abuja Conference. I am meeting with a group as a result of the conference and will be starting several other groups with pastors and church elders. We praise the Lord for all that he is doing.

Two Discipleship Zonal Conferences

ECWA LEADERSHIP DISCIPLESHIP CONFERENCES IN KADUNA AND ABUJA, 2007

Dave Dawson & I, along with the ECWA Discipleship Ministry Team saw the Lord use all of us as we taught in large meetings and smaller workshop times. Dave taught with passion as the Holy Spirit used him at both places. In Kaduna over 750 pastors and Church leaders attended and in Abuja around 350 attended. We could all sence that the Lord was opening the hearts of many as they were chellenged to consider what their role is in their churches. Many purchased a tool for establishing people in their relationship to the Lord and which also lays a foundation for some of the basics of discipleship.

In the Abuja Zone I will be following up over 30 pastors who indicated they wanted someone to disciple them. I am in the process of contacting them and starting groups in this zone. This will give us a way to reach into the churches and encourage them to launch a ministry of disicpleship in their church.

We once again are blessed to be here and to see the Lord create more of a vision for discipleship in the hearts and mind of His people that he has called to make a difference. Of course they will face challenges of doing this, so we all covet your prayers.

NO, WE HAVE NOT GONE BANANAS YET

Are we going bananas yet? No, but in a few weeks we should be enjoying these bananas and many more like them. Our backyard has about 15 bunches growing right now and when they rippen we will be feasting on them for awhile.


We are also enjoying feasting on the Word of God. The past two months have been very good for that as well as opportunities to share the gospel. We have gotten use to doing a lot more traveling just to get around the Abuja Zone. Jos city was easy to live in in many ways but Abuja is proving to be a big challenge in terms of travel.

We also have been making some good contacts. Judy has met some other expat ladies and they are even starting a study together. They are doing a study by John Piper called, 'Don't Waste Your Life'. I, Chuck, have also had the opportunity to share the gospel with some of the new contacts I have made. I have 3 men that I am meeting with now and several others I am following up. This past Thursday I was talking to one person and when asked, "What would you tell another person if they asked you how they can become a real Christian?", they said, "start doing what God says". A typical answer here. In continuing to probe they never mentioned anything about Jesus and being forgiven through Him. This is the problem we face here. Many claim to be Christians but are only religious, never fully understanding the gospel.

Of course not all claim to be Christian. Many follow aother religion and we are praying for open doors to share the love and forgiveness of Christ with them, especially during this time of the year when they are seeking and looking for forgiveness by another way and not "THE WAY".

The ECWA Leadership/Discipleship Conferences for Kaduna and Abuja Zones are just a few weeks away. Registration is going on in both places. We are expecting about 500 pastors, elders and other leaders in each location. Dave Dawson will be arriving at the end of this month and will be with us until mid October. I am anticipating that there will be lots of follow up to do after the Abuja conference. The theme of the conferences is "THE ROLE OF CHURCH LEADERSHIP IN THE BIBLICAL MODEL OF DISCIPLESHIP".

WELCOME TO ABUJA

The group of people you see are the elders and their wives of our home church in Jos. They gave us a send-forth to Abuja. They were very encouraging as we told them we were going to the land of the giants and needed their prayers. The youth fellowship of the church remembered that statement and gave us a painting that said “Farewell to the Land of the Giants”. It had a ship sailing away in the horizon. The Nigerian culture is very good at making sure they say goodbyes properly. They made us feel appreciated for the years we were members of the church and the different ways we served there.

In the other pictures you get a glimpse of our new home in Abuja, Nigeria. The first house is the house we are living in, and it has two bedrooms in which people stay if needed. There is another house that is on the compound. It has four rooms that people stay in while in Abuja.

The past three weeks were busy ones. The work getting ready to move on July 14th was a lot but the Lord provided strength and besides what we sent earlier we managed to get everything in the vehicles on the 14th and made it to Abuja without any difficulty. The two weeks since arriving here have been very busy. I think Judy did about five loads of washing everyday to get everything clean, after sitting for 6 months through our dusty season. We first thought it would take us until August 1st to get set up but we actually ready this past Thursday, July 26th. We are thankful to the Lord for strength to get the many things done by then.

I have also been busy contacting people in Abuja. The ECWA Abuja Zone has a committee that is planning the Pastors/leaders Discipleship Conference, October 8-12, 2007. I got to meet with the chairman and some other members of the committee to let them know that I am now in Abuja and would be willing to help them with whatever I can. The committee is planning to meet August 2nd and they invited me to join them. They are expecting over a thousand people to be in attendance. A lot of plans still need to be made.
I also got to meet a pastor that has a real passion for making disciples. I actually knew him from before. He attended the first Equipping The Saints Conference I held in Jos in 1993. He has been applying the principles he learned since then. God has enabled him to see several generations of disciples raised up at the churches he has been at over the years. I was really encouraged by my meeting with him. We will be getting together regularly in the future.

The Tree Trimmers

The Thursday before Easter Weekend a crew of tree-trimmers arrived on our compound to take down two trees and to trim eight others. Most of the trees were not difficult but there was one tree that presented a challenge for them. The tree had been left for a long time without being trimmed. It had grown very tall and big at the top.


Tree-trimmers here don't have all the modern equipment we find used back home. Here all they have is a chain saw, machetes and ropes. Most of the limbs are chopped off by the machetes. When I was home I could hardly stand to watch as they would climb high up the tree and start cutting the limbs off (sometimes very big ones). See the challenging tree? Needless to say our yard looked like a jungle for a while. But because people use wood here for cooking, our workers on the compound will make good use of it and it will quickly disappear from our compound.


Trimming of these trees reminded me of how we grow as Christians. God sometimes has to come along and do some trimming on us. It is easy to have some things grow as part of our lives that aren't pleasing to God. John 15:1&2 says "I am the true vine and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful." Even though pruning is hard we should want God to prune us because of our desire to bear more fruit for his glory. Here are some of the piles of wood that were trimmed off of the trees. These reminded me of how many things the Lord has trimmed from my life and that there is still more trimming needed.


As the trimming was finished we were thankful that no one was injured and that the work was accomplished. We are looking forward to the trees growing back to be even more beautiful than they were before.

PRODUCING DISCIPLERS

The men in the pictures are pastors that I have been helping to become producers of reproducers (disciplers).

This is the goal of The ECWA Discipleship Ministry Team for the people we meet with each week. The reason we focus on this is that we believe that a true disciple isn't one that just learns to love God but he also learns to love his neighbor, just as Jesus spoke about in Matt. 22:37-40. Loving your neighbor involves sharing the gospel with unbelievers and helping believers to become disciplers also. If we only emphasize the verticle relationship with God without the horizontal relationship with our neighbor, I think Jesus would say we are leaving something out. This is the essence of what Jesus said to the lawyer, when He was asked, "what is the greatest commandment"?

This is why in churches around the world Christians are not bearing the fruit that God desires for them to bear. How are things in your church? We certainly see this in the church in Nigeria. Because of this churches spiritually are many miles wide but only an inch deep. They are filled each Sunday with babes in Christ but not true disciples.

It is the desire of the ECWA Discipleship Ministry Unit to see this change. The key is to teach people what it means to be a true disciple of Jesus. Jesus said in John 15:8 "This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples." A true disciple will be fruitful in his own spiritual life and in the lives of others as he helps them learn how to follow Jesus.

How long does it take to produce disciples who reproduce disciplers? It is not something that will be accomplised in a few months or by a one week long conference, as is often thought. But rather it takes one or more years of discipling and equipping someone so they can reach that point of being an effective discipler. It involves establishing a close interpersonal relationship with them.

Here is an example of what I am talking about. In the mid 90s I spent four years discipling a young man. During that time he began to disciple others. Today he is pastoring a church of about 800 people and he is producing disciplers who in turn are busy discipling others in their church.

Maybe you've been reading this and wondering if you are a true disciple. If not, maybe you can find a discipler (your pastor or a mature believer) and ask them to disciple you. Make sure it is someone you see making disciples.

Any comment or interaction will be most welcomed.

ECWA Church District Discipleship Conference

March 1-3, 2007 three of the discipleship ministry staff went to a city about one and a half hours from Jos for a discipleship conference with the district's pastors and elders. About 60 people attended. We had to divide up into three groups. One was for a Hausa language group, one was for an English group and the other one were people who had already done Equipping The Saints (ETS) Book One-A. This group did ETS One-B. Each of us had to teach about seven hours a day. The Lord gave us some rather cooler weather than normal, which was a blessing, and a nice place to sleep.

The exciting thing resulting from the conference, besides seeing their eyes begin to open up to how the Lord can use them to make disciples in their local churches better, was seeing their desire for us to come back monthly to meet with them and carry them on for further training. So every first Monday of the month, we are going to travel there and back. We will have about 3 hours with them. This hopefully will encourage them to follow through with what we taught them and we can keep doing more training and mentoring with them. Please pray for this to bear the fruit that the Lord desires.

Here today and gone tomorrow – electricity that is.

A good supply of electricity is often not available here. Like week before last we had three days when it was off ninety percent of the time. When this happens we have to phone (if the phone is working) or send someone to the local power supply office to report the outage. Many times when you phone they will tell you that it has been reported and they are working on it. Then you wait to see what happens. If it doesn’t come back soon, you phone them again. Finally in desperation you drive over to their office and see them face to face but still that is no guarantee that you will get your lights on any time soon.

After those few days it finally got fixed and now for several days we have had power almost constantly. So we thank God for that. We are thankful that we have a compound generator to use when this happens and are able to keep fridges and freezers cold. Many of our friends do not have an alternative and have to buy food stuff on a daily basis.

Another big problem with not having electricity, besides trying to keep your freezer from defrosting, is thaat we have a phone intercom security system that runs on a battery that has to be charged. So when the electricity is off for a long time, we end up with no alarm. Why is this important? Two week ago armed robbers went to one missionary’s compound. They roughed them up to the extent that the woman had a slight concussion. They stole their car and took a number of things from their house. The security is a siren that is set off by the phones. If set off it will alert everyone around that something is happening and supposedly scare off the burglars. The police will be called and hopefully come to our rescue. We share these things not to complain but to give you a glimpse of what life is like here at times. We often do have to remind ourselves that we are not here because of the comforts of life but to share with people that in Jesus we have a wonderful Savior.

Be careful what you ask for.
I thought of this after what happened two weeks ago. Judy and I had been praying for the Lord to open a door for her to disciple women. Then we talked and prayed with Deborah Dadang about it and she shared her heart for Pastors’wives. The Lord led us to talk to the Jos District Church Council (DCC) Chairman and Secretary. From that talk we were invited to a meeting for about seventy pastors and their wives. Judy and Deborah challenged the wives to take the opportunity to be discipled by getting into a group with them. We all hoped for at least enough ladies that would enable Judy and Deborah to start meeting with a small group. Instead what they got were forty-six wives indicating their interest. So instead of one small group, each of them have three groups with six to nine ladies in each group. I also had another twelve pastors who expressed interest in being discipled. This reminded us of Ephesians 3:20 that says, ´Now glory be to God! By his mighty power at work within us, he is able to accomplish infinitely more than we would ever dare to ask or hope.’ New Living Translation.


DOES PRAYER MAKE A DIFFERENCE?
Someone wrote recently something they read from Philip Yancey’s book, “Prayer, Does It Make Any Difference? It was a story of an SIM graveyard here in Nigeria. It has about 70 gravesites in it. Each grave is a testimony of the sacrifices that missionaries have made in coming to Nigeria for over a century. Out of the over 60 graves around half are children. Through prayer each one comes filling the Call of God upon their lives. Did their prayers, commitments and sacrifices make a difference? Over a century later the SIM related church, The Evangelical Church of West Africa, has over five million people worshipping in its churches every Sunday. Do you think they have made a difference?

The week's surprises. What were they? The first was a real answer to prayer. Judy, Deborah Dadang (wife of the ECWA General Secretary) and myself have been praying about how they could start a ministry to pastors’ wives. On Tuesday we went and talked to the Chairman and Secretary of the Jos ECWA District Church Council. They shared with them what they had on their heart and to our surprise there was a meeting on Friday, Jan. 26th with the district pastors and their wives. The district has about 70 pastors. The Chairman invited us to attend the meeting and share with the wives. So on Friday morning we went. We don’t know what the response was yet. We will get a list from the chairman tomorrow.

Yesterday, Sunday, Jan 28th I spoke at a service of the ECWA Student Ministry Chapter at the University of Jos. We were really blessed as there were over 200 students in attendance. Why were we blessed? In 1993 the ECWA Student Ministry was just getting started at the University of Jos. This was the first chapter for the ministry. Judy and I were going over there meeting with students and leading discipleship groups. Then there were only about 15 students involved. Through discipling those students the vision of disciple-making was caught by them and now over the past 13 years they have continued to reach out to students on campus. That is why we were blessed today. Over the years our ministry has traveled to many campuses and discipled students and now there are over 50 chapters throughout Nigeria.
Another surprise was that today was declared a public holiday by the Federal and State Government authorities. The reason was that they wanted to give workers an opportunity to get registered for the elections that are going to be taking place in the next few months. So Judy and I used the time to work at home.

The ECWA Discipleship Ministry Team

Please be in Prayer for each of us and our families

1 Thessalonians 1:11-12

Chuck Sam Akila Randy