Dear Ministry Partners,
We are profoundly grateful for your prayers and patience as we continue taking the steps necessary to obtain my work visa. It’s a slow and complicated process, but the Jamaican government is processing our paperwork and we anticipate it being approved near year’s end. We had hoped it would be much sooner, but must simply continue to move forward with optimism. Ultimately, the timing is in the Lord’s hands. That said, the work in Burkina
Faso continues with surprising results. The two young men pictured to the right are Pastor Samuel’s newest trainees. Both have moved to the area for three years of vocational training, one as a welder and the other as a carpenter. Samuel explained in a recent communication that both have decided, since they began attending his church (Evangel Baptist Church), that they want to plant and pastor churches after they’ve completed their vocational and ministry training. Needless to say, both they, and Samuel, have fully adopted the tent-making missionary philosophy of church planting and it’s a good thing.
Burkina Faso will be having its presidential election this coming Sunday (November 22nd) and one candidate has already announced that if he wins all public schools in Burkina Faso will be forced to teach their curriculum in Arabic. While that doesn’t sound like an inherently bad idea on the surface, what it really means is that he intends to impose a Quranic system of education on Burkina’s present generation of youth. In other words, Islam will become the center, the foundation, of all public education. That would mean that students would be taught, from elementary through high school, that Islam, and Islam alone, represents truth and that anyone who believes anything else needs to either be converted or eliminated. Though liberal politicians and sociologists may be comfortable pretending that Islam is a peace-seeking religion, anyone who understands their doctrine and history knows that it is anything but.
Training young Burkinabe believers to evangelize their own people and establish new churches without the aid of outsiders is, therefore, absolutely imperative and bi-vocational ministry is the only realistic method by which they can do so. Please, therefore, pray that God would give Samuel and his students the wherewithal to complete the training and the wisdom to get two more local churches off the ground.
John & Tammy Cooley
Jamaica