Burundi - by Mike - Part 5

This is Part 5 of Mike's report on our recent trip to Burundi. He's a senior at Phoenix Christian High School, pushing uphill for the next three weeks of school!!

Every morning we had a team meeting during breakfast. My dad led devotions and we spent time praying for our day. Then we were ready for evangelism. E3 partners ministry developed the Evangecube as a tool to help people share the Gospel in any language. Since it’s all pictures, each person can share the Gospel in their own words using the pictures as a guide to the salvation message. Since it’s so colorful, it catches people’s attention and keeps them interested in what we are saying because they want to see the next picture. My mom had some people accuse her of doing magic with the cube because the picture kept changing on them. These people had never seen anything like it before. We used the Evangecube every single day to share the message of salvation through Jesus Christ.

We also had Gospel tracts that we could hand out to people that wanted to know more about how to be saved but weren’t ready to make a commitment to Christ yet. We always use the Bible to show people verses that can help them understand how to be saved. This time I had a paperback Bible with me developed by e3 partners ministry. It had pictures from all sides of the cube in it and all the verses you could use to share the Gospel were highlighted. Philemon really liked it because of the pictures and because it was in English. I gave it to him as a gift at the end of the week.

 

My dad always budgets enough money to be able to leave some discipleship tools with each brand new church. This time we gave each church a Proclaimer. This is like a giant radio/mp3 player which plays the entire New Testament in Kirundi. It is solar-powered and even has a hand-crank to power it up on rainy days. We had a difficult time purchasing Bibles in Kirundi to leave behind. We had enough funds to purchase 400 Bibles to divide among the churches. The Bible Society would only sell us 48 copies. My dad said the shelves were lined with Bibles. It is always difficult to get them to sell the Bibles. It’s like they hoard them for some reason. On our next trip we are going to try some different ways to get Bibles into Burundi. We also gave each church a Mega-Voice which is a smaller version of the Proclaimer. It’s about the size of an iPod with an external speaker. We always leave behind a lot of Evangecubes so that the new church can train people to share the Gospel with others so that the church can grow. We leave behind a complete printed Discipleship series called First Steps which is helpful in discipling new Christians. We use First Steps at our afternoon church meetings at the new churches so that people can understand what it means to be a Christian. It covers all the basics of salvation and assurance of salvation.

 

Every day we had unavoidable delays before we finally were able to start sharing the Gospel. It’s like satan didn’t want us to leave the hotel and do the job we had come to do. One morning, we had to stop at the gas station on the way to our church sites. This was an interesting experience. The gas pumps were hand-cranked pumps. It took quite a while to put fuel in each van. I felt like it was super-hazardous. Each pump had about 4 attendants milling around with nothing to do. The fuel was diesel. There was a lesser grade called gas-oil. My dad said it probably would ruin most cars in a very short time.