Ministry Report: Our Gospel Focus

There are 10 christian tv channels and an infantry of churches and cults in Vic Falls, so the environment is very “religious”. Strangely though there is a huge shortage of bibles here. That being said there is much heresy and false doctrine floating around. It was very discouraging at first, especially at bible studies when people would start voicing false statements about God and the Gospel. A few of our team members attended a crusade where the leaders were blatantly scamming the people for money in the name of Jesus. Nearly everyone believes that they earn their way to heaven and that if they have enough faith God will do anything for them. Many people lean heavy on the TV evangelists, who focus on healing, prophecy and prosperity twisting biblical truth and forming “religious” idols.

Teaching God’s Story

Our strategy initially was to lead inductive bible studies as we began to focus on a few key people. Once we discovered the goofy doctrine floating in we shifted gears to teaching God’s story and personal stories and that is when things began to change. Telling the story helped the people see that they didn’t really know the Gospel. Telling the story also made them hungry to know more. We are now teaching them to tell the God story, with good initial results. We hope to record some of them and share it with you. We are using 5 chapters; Creation/Rebellion/Sacrifice/Redemption/Commission. We give them verses under each chapter and help them to summarize each scripture and combine all the summaries into a story. It’s powerful to watch them help each other expand the story from their own personal study. Occasionally a new section will pop up in someones God’s story that we didn’t teach them ourselves.

Addressing Sin with Story

When we discover a specific idol/sin that the group dealing with, we integrate scripture into the God’s story aimed at that issue. For example, Munya told the God story to a group and placed special emphasis on sacrifice, addressing the issue of traditional animal sacrifice for ancestors. The results were immediate and a man who is a “church goer” repented of having sacrificed chickens that week to his ancestors. He is now one of the key guys that we are working with, and he craves to hear the Gospel explained. Last night we read Galatians with him and unpacked the first several verses that discuss false gospel. Being a common false belief here, we talked extensively about not being able to earn your way to heaven. With glazed watery eyes he responded by saying this “right this very second there is a preacher in Vic Falls that is preaching that I have to go to church and tithe or I will go to hell, what you guys are telling me is just melting me, its amazing”. Needless to say you can see this guy being set free the more and more we explore the Gospel with him.

Freedom in Christ

We have redefined our strategy a bit. Rather than focusing on starting reproducing communities we want people to have a rich understanding of the Gospel. We don’t want to start anything that doesn’t start and end with the Gospel. You can see the freedom in peoples eyes, they are at the foothills of adoring Christ.

To be totally honest I think we all feel like we are in the foothills of adoring Christ. There have been times of severe discouragment for our team as we battle through dietary issues, team tension and totally foggy vision of what we are suppose to be doing here. Repeatedly hearing the Gospel and attempting to share it has been the redeeming element of everything that we have done here. God is loving us, He is showing up at just the right times, and He is making a difference in the community.