We wound up with seventeen people on the team: three people from Forest Meadow Baptist, four from FBC Quitman, TX, six greenhorn journeymen and women from various parts of the US, and four Dinka translators. The journeymen were with us for only the first week, but everyone else was there for the duration.

The trip was very difficult, but we won some great victories by the end of our time there. We left Dallas on April 12, and returned on April 26. We spent most of our days in the bush in a village called Malek. Malek was destroyed back in 1986 or 87 by Arabic Sudanese from the north. All buildings, including churches and homes were destroyed. Pastors were killed, as were many of the other residents. The area was uninhabited until last year, when people began to return to the place they considered home. It is now a village of about 500 people—the numbers fluctuate—and is fairly prosperous by S. Sudanese standards. That means, of course, that they have some pretty substantial cattle herds.

We visited the village one afternoon last year, when it was only 45 days old. It was a very rushed visit, but we let the people know what we were about and they invited us to come back as soon as possible. So, when we arrived this year, we were planning on receiving a very warm welcome. In reality the welcome was lukewarm to start and it soon got chillier. It turns out that, since last year, the Episcopalian Church of Sudan had established a congregation in the village, led by an “assistant bishop” named Barnabas. The village political powers had also appointed an administrator of religious affairs, named Daniel. The ECS is notorious for appointing pastors who are neither born again nor trained theologically. Barnabas fit the pattern. Though he was a gentle man and a very good man, no one had ever taught him the Bible, and he had not been born again. In fact, he saw nothing wrong with leading both the Sunday services for the ECS, and the pagan animal sacrifices for the non-Christians. Daniel was his partner in crime, and preferred the pagan rituals to the Christian ones. Both of these men were very suspicious of our motives, and had laid down a litmus test of testing our sincerity by how many buildings and material goods we were going to give them.

We told them that we were not there to build buildings, but that we had come to tell them the Story of God from God’s Word. They said we were welcome to do that, but for the first week, they told us to schedule our storying sessions at times that would guarantee minimum exposure. They cancelled a couple of our sessions, and threw some other roadblocks up to prevent us from achieving our goal, which was to tell a complete evangelistic story set of about 40 stories. However, Barnabas and Daniel came to every one of our meetings, and listened carefully to what we were saying. Still, the reception got chillier and chillier as the first week went on. Finally it got so bad that we took a day off and went north to Me’en and Amook (the villages we focused on last year). When we got to those villages it was like coming out from a heavy load. You could sense the Spirit of God among the people. They were glad to see us and wanted to know what we had been doing for the last year. I’ll tell you more about that part of the trip below. But I needed to insert this part of it now, because, as we came back down to Malek from Me’en and Amook, we resolved that we were going to bring things to a head with Barnabas and Daniel.

This is how it happened: The night we returned, we had a badly attended storying session. When it was over, Edwin Makola, the pastor of our Sudanese church in Dallas, took Daniel aside and basically “read him the riot act.” He said, “Why are you being so rude? I am almost ashamed to be a Sudanese for the way you are treating these Americans. They have come over here as volunteers. They have come because they love God and they love the Sudanese people. And all they are trying to do is to teach our people the Word of God. And all you are doing is asking them what material things they intend to give you! That is like a Sudanese man who, when someone comes to inquire about the availability of a daughter for marriage, the first thing he asks is, “how many cows do you have?” (Apparently, this is REALLY rude behavior, almost taboo, in Dinka culture). Makola underscored his statements by pointing out that he (Makola) was Daniel’s elder, and that for Daniel to ignore his counsel would be further proof of his (Daniel’s) rudeness. This is a much shortened version of the conversation. It actually took about 45 minutes. However, at the end of it, Daniel had a change of heart, and overnight became a gracious host.

We decided to put our other “adversary” in God’s hands. The next morning, we split into teams of two-three and began to prayer walk around the village. We prayed for everything we could find, whether it was dead or alive, and made Barnabas and his church compound the focus of our prayers. He was touched that we would spend so much effort praying for him and his church and his village, that God gave him a change of heart as well.

All of this happened on about our sixth day in the bush. >From that time on, we had much better participation from the villagers, and we could sense God’s Spirit lifting the oppression we had been feeling.

We finished our story set on the next to last day. When we were done, we asked if anyone had made a commitment to stop following and worshipping the evil spirits and to follow only Jesus Christ. The first one to raise his hand was Barnabas! The second was Daniel! They were exuberant over their own commitments and encouraged many others in the village to follow Jesus as well. Before we left, we asked Barnabas and Daniel what caused them to commit their lives uniquely to Jesus Christ. Barnabas said it was when he heard us tell the story of Elijah and the Prophets of Baal. He said he had heard of Elijah before, but no one ever told him about the story of the Prophets of Baal. Daniel said it was when he heard from Makola about how and why the Americans had come, that he began to take seriously that there might be something different about Christianity. We were invited by both men to come back again and to teach the rest of the village the stories of Jesus Christ.

Regarding the trip north to Me’en and Amook. You may remember that we visited both of these places last year. Me’en was the place where we baptized 17 people including the village chief. Amook, on the other hand, was where we already (supposedly) had a church, but when we arrived, we found everyone in the village, including the “Christians,” out at the local cattle camp, installing a new witch doctor. When we chastised them for it, 62 of them came the next day to hear us tell the stories from God’s Word. Forty-eight made professions of allegiance to Christ last year, so we wanted to see if they were still being faithful when we returned this year.

Here is what we found. In Me’en, the chief, named David Deng, reported that there had been no backsliding since the previous year’s seventeen baptisms, that they had put a stop to the witchcraft and idol worship that had been prevalent there. They had moved the church meeting place from the chief’s compound to the center of town and the church was growing. When asked how life had been in the village the past year, the chief said, “There has been no sickness among us since you left. The crops were good last year and the cattle herds are growing.” They said that virtually everyone we prayed for had been healed or in some other way touched by God. Life was good.

The story was a little bit different in Amook. The pastor there, a man named James, said that since the previous year, some of the people we had taught, had backslidden, but that the true believers were all remaining faithful to Christ and Christ alone. Much of the village was still steeped in witchcraft and idolatry. The church was doing ok, and while not growing, at least was not declining. When asked about the quality of life in the village, James said, “We have had a lot of sickness. The children have measles and we have a lot of STD’s. The crops got flooded out last year, and so we are very hungry here.” Still, they were able to show us several people who had gotten healed as a result of prayers last year, including the boy, you may remember, who had been injured in the leg by a spear. His knee was the size of a basketball when we left last year. But shortly after we prayed last year, his knee went back to normal size and now he is back to being a healthy, playful young boy.

One other story is worth mentioning. The rains had started up just as we got there. The good thing about that is that the weather was cooler than we expected. But we had fierce daily thunderstorms, and some at night, that blew over, flooded and otherwise made our tents unpleasant places to be, and the roads impassable. The first one of these we experienced proved to be memorable. As the storm blew in, we all headed for our safari tent, which served as our common area. We were joined by three Dinka young men who were also trying to get out of the rain. Two of them were on their way north to join in some intertribal fighting. These kinds of battles are all too common among the Dinka. Rumors were that this battle was going to be particularly fierce. The third man was on his way to Nuerland (the Nuer are a neighboring tribe to the Dinka) to visit a witch doctor who reputedly could drive a pesky demon away from this man. God had other plans for all three of these men. We began to tell them the story of Jesus, how that Jesus taught us to forgive our enemies, not kill them, and that God was more powerful over demons than any witch doctor could ever be. The storm lasted about two and a half hours. About two hours into it, all three men prayed to receive Christ. We feel good about their decisions because all three men stayed with us for the next several days to hear more from God’s Word. The two never did go to the fighting where, ultimately, 96 young men were killed. And the third man was delivered of his demon by Jesus Himself!

God did many other miraculous things there, and I don’t have time to tell them all. It was an amazing trip and one I thank God for. I am also extremely grateful to each of you, for your prayers and financial support. You guys made the trip a success, especially through your prayers. We are planning to go again next March, probably with an even larger team. Keep on praying, y’all! The job’s not yet done!