Family Survey in Rwanda...


On Oct. 22nd, we and the Reeves family (our teammates here in Kara) left for a two-week survey trip to Rwanda. We are planning to transition to a new church-planting work there in the next couple of years. Many of you have been involved in supporting us on this trip, both financially and through your prayers, and we wanted to give you a brief update of how things went.

We are SO thankful to have been able to take this trip together as a family! We decided that we wanted to take this trip to expose our whole family to the idea of living in Rwanda sometime in the next few years. We have felt the calling to go and make disciples in Rwanda through Matt’s leadership and vision for how we can best be used as a family. God has called many more workers to our team in Togo and we look forward to seeing what God will do through them here. There is still much to do over the next few years and our plows and feet have not slowed from the task of our mission in Kabiyeland.

Thanks to all of you who helped by contributing financially and prayerfully to our trip. It was filled with blessings, insight, and encouragement from friends old and new. We were overwhelmed by the physical beauty of the country and yet daily reminded in many conversations of the ugliness and havoc that Satan has wrought there. We spent much of our time observing and absorbing all that we could from trips into towns and the countryside as well as conversations with people that we interviewed. Our main goals were: to visit with friends in the capital city, Kigali and scout out the goods available there, then make a visit to the town of Ruhengeri where we would like to live and work.

In Kigali we visited a genocide memorial with our family and the Reeves family. That was probably one of the more difficult things that we did together. It required a lot of talking together about what happened in Rwanda and how much help is needed there. Abby was especially struck by a section of the memorial that had pictures of children that had died (before they were killed) and some of the things that they liked and did in every day life. It brought it to a reality for her. We were also able to visit a project called Cards for Africa. Cards are made out of recycled paper by orphans or orphan led households to provide income and support for them. This peaked our interest even before we left and we began to wonder if we could use something like this as an access ministry into the country. Aidan had already made his first two pieces of paper as practiced before we left Togo. He enjoyed seeing the process at this place. We are not able to enter the country soley as missionaries or on a long term tourist visa as is the case here in Togo.

While in Ruhengeri for 5 days we observed several things while walking around town and talking with people: first, even though it is a tourist town, we are total novelties. It will be a shock to this town to see five white families move in with all their kids, but we will hope to be a blessing as we serve there. Secondly, a very small percentage of the population speak either English or French (less than 5%), so we found little fallback onto those languages. (We were thankful for the small bit of Kinyarwandan that we learned in the months before we left.) It will be a challenge to learn a new language, but we will welcome it if it means bringing hope and healing in a way that can be understood. Also the population of this area is extremely young; about 1/3 are primary school age, over 67 percent are under the age of 35, and 52 percent are under 18. We were also able to talk with several people about ministries that are available to people in the area. There is much work to be done to help bring people to a place of life to the fullest and true obedience to Christ’s commands lived out daily.

We also discovered some research on church-planting needs in Rwanda that concluded that 15,000 new churches need to be planted in order for every community to be connected to a family of faith. The region with the greatest need for church-planting was Ruhengeri. This information confirmed what Matt and Dave discovered during their survey in 2005, and helped us greatly in our process of discerning God’s calling for our families.

Our children have come back from this trip with a good picture of what Rwanda “looks” like even if they don’t know what it will be like to actually live there. We have been impressed with the flexibility, questions, insight that they have had from this trip. We continue to pray together and ask each other questions as we talk to God about our family life now and in the future.

Some other special highlights included:
-eating out a good bit at restaurants around the towns we visited
-trying out language and seeing how happy it made people (the children too!)
-smelling the fresh mountain air and seeing pine trees (a northerner can really appreciate that)
-driving no more than and hour and a half to get to where we needed to go
-dinner by a fireplace
-time with friends- the Dolingers and Garners especially
-making new friends
-traveling with the Reeves family in a common purpose
-song and story time with all 12 of us in one Landcruiser
-the quietness, order, and cleanliness of the country as a whole
-taking a short safari in Uganda and seeing lions, hippos and buffalo (AnnaMarie’s first safari, and she LOVED it)
-interviewing a lady ministering to other ladies that were victims of the genocide in the Ruhengeri region (very insightful)
-eating lots of good Rwandan cheese
-drinking the yummy passion fruit juice
-spending time at some beautiful lakes
-drinking hot chai in the morning and at night
-seeing our breath in the air on cold nights
-going to the market in Kigali and in Ruhengari
-Aidan and Matt running in their second 5K race together in Kigali (Aidan was the under 12 champ!)

Please continue to pray with us for the work here in Togo over the next few years. We feel a strange sensation having met these new people in Rwanda and yet still feel very tied to our friends that we know and love here in Togo. Pieces of our heart are being pulled all over the globe and we will gladly share if that means that God will be glorified. We are excited about the next couple of years of ministry we have ahead of us in Togo and about all the things God is doing here. We appreciate so much your participation in our ministry here, and your interest and support in helping us seek confirmation of God’s plans for our future. We love you!

Andrea Miller (and Matt)

Go to our family website www.togoadventures.net for a gallery of pictures from our trip

Introducing Church Planting Movements...



This past July I, along with my teammates David Reeves, Murphy Crowson, and Marty Koonce, had the pleasure of attending a conference in Livingstone, Zambia (home of Victoria Falls) that provided training in facilitating the development of Church Planting Movements. The training was conducted by a man named David Watson who has, over the years, served as a missionary in India and is now training people around the world to help church planters become more effective in their work. Over the past 12 years, more than 40,000 churches have been planted as a result of David’s ministry and training.

This training has come to us in God’s perfect timing during a period of transition for our team that has included a process of evaluating our strategy and work among the Kabiye. Many of the principles we learned are ones that we have tried to implement over the past 8 years, but there are many new ideas that are like a breath of fresh wind from the Spirit of God. We have begun a process of implementing CPM principles in our work, and I have recently felt a prompting to document this process through this blog. My hope is to begin a conversation with those who have a connection to our work, those who are working in other contexts, and especially those who are also trying to implement CPM principles. I will share our ideas, our dreams, our successes, and our failures with the hope that our experience could be a blessing to others. The first few postings will be mostly catch-up, because we began implementing these principles about two months ago. Already we are seeing the fruit of obedience-based discipleship that allows the word of God to speak directly to people. I am excited to share the ways that God is moving around us, and hope these thoughts will be a blessing to you.

The links below will take you to a website dedicated to sharing Church Planting Movement principles:

www.cpmtr.org

and to David Watson's blog:

www.davidwa.org

Cleansing the Amana house...

For several weeks I have been leading the elders of the N'Djei cluster through a study of what the Bible teaches about evil spirits. This study was in response to their concerns about some continued spiritual oppression in their lives. Though their experience of freedom in Christ has already made a drastic difference (the most common thing shared when you ask a Kabiye person how their lives have changed since they have accepted Christ is that they can now sleep), they still feel occasional spiritual attacks.

The past lives of most Kabiye Christians were filled with connections to evil spirits through the ceremonies and sacrifices that controlled them. We had noticed that even in Christian families that we were confident were no longer sacrificing, there were often still "artifacts" of sacrifice remaining in their homes. These artifacts included things like the bones of old sacrifices, small cowrie shells cemented in doorways, or pots used for eating sacrificed meats. For some reason these committed Christians had not yet come to a point where they were able or saw the need to destroy these things.

The culmination of our study was a process of renouncing connections to Satan's kingdom with the goal of removing all possible footholds in the lives of Christian families. We adapted 5 "steps of freedom" from some material by the Christian writer Neil T. Anderson. These steps include recognizing and renouncing the lies that Satan has sown into Kabiye culture, publicly giving forgiveness to those who have wronged us, renouncing pride and embracing humility, confessing repetitive sins that have enslaved, and finally renouncing all past ties to spirits and fetishes and destroying any items remaining in the house relating to these things.

Last Wednesday, Jerome Amana, one of the Elders of the N'Djei cluster, was the first to volunteer to take his family through the steps to freedom. At the culmination of this ceremony, Jerome brought out a pot out of which his family used to eat the meat that they sacrificed to idols. The pot was covered in cobwebs and obviously had not been used in years, but it's presence in the house spoke to the continued temptation Satan could have over them.

So, in what was one of the most meaningful events yet in our years among the Kabiye, Jerome and I together took the pot, smashed it on the ground, and bent down to break it into small pieces. We then walked together outside of his compound and threw it into a trash pit. The video below shows this momentous event.





I will share more in a future post about the process that this renouncing ceremony has started in N'Djei and other churches in Kabiye land. Praise God together with me for this step of faith and the victory it will bring in the lives of Kabiye Christians!

Famine Relief Food Distribution...



There is great satisfaction in seeing an idea go from a prompting of the Holy Spirit to its fulfillment. Thanks to the generosity and soft hearts of many Christians in the US and Togo, 50,000 pounds of rice and corn (worth $7,000) was distributed to over 300 families in the Mandouri region of northern Togo this past Monday, Jan. 28th! This aid given in the name of Jesus was in response to the heavy flooding that devastated northern Togo during the month of August, 2007. In the Mandouri region, over 80% of all crops were destroyed. Mandouri is in the heart of the homeland of the Togolese Gourmantche people, on of the least-reached people groups in Togo. This act of mercy in the name of Jesus and of churches of Christ has helped to pave the way for missionaries who will target the Gourmantche in the near future.

We began our journey to Mandouri on Sunday when 12 Kabiye Christians, serving as representatives of the Kabiye Churches of Christ, loaded up into two trucks with Matt, Aidan, and Brett Emerson to make the 5-hour drive to Mandouri. The Kabiye Christians brought with them about 500 pounds of corn and yams that had been given by the churches. Matt had already made several trips to Dapaong and Mandouri to facilitate the purchase and transport of the rice and corn, so all was ready for us when we arrived.

The distribution began on Monday morning in the yard of a primary school with an official welcome and blessing from the governor of Kpendjal state, of which Mandouri is the principal town. A representative from the Kabiye Christians was then given an opportunity to address the crowd, sharing with them that the food was being given because of Jesus and to express his love. Working together with local community leaders before the distribution, 50 widows, the poorest of the poor in Mandouri, were put on a list to be given a sack of rice and corn. None of these widows are Christians (yet!). The gratitude in their faces was very precious. The corn and rice they received should feed them for at least two months, long enough to help them through the most difficult part of the dry season. After these widows, about 150 families from the churches in and around Mandouri were given rice. We then opened several remaining sacks of rice and distributed them to another 100 families who had come to watch, so that no one was turned away empty-handed.

The distribution went forward in a peaceful and orderly manner (an amazing thing in itself--food distributions have been sometimes know to degrade into chaos). The community was very appreciative of the help, and were especially moved by the sacrifice of the Kabiye Christians who gave even out of their own poverty. The journey was a time of encouragement and bonding for the Kabiye Christians who went, and they returned to their churches with a deeper understanding of the Kingdom of God and what it means to support those in need.

Thank you to all who gave to make this intervention possible, especially to Healing Hands International, whose $5,000 donation made this blessing something truly significant.

Please follow the link below for more info and pictures of the distribution.

The response takes shape...

We have received our first official commitment of relief aid for the flooding in Gourmantche land! The source of the commitment is somewhat surprising and extremely encouraging. The N'Djei church, the first church we planted among the Kabiye in 2001, has decided to contribute a sack of corn. Now this is no ordinary sack, as we would think of it. A sack of corn in Togo is made up of 40 large bowls full of corn, weighs about 150 lbs., and costs almost $40. This amount is equal to over six-months of normal contributions for most congregations in Togo. We are amazed by the generosity of this small church and the way they have decided to give sacrificially.

We are anticipating other commitments to the relief effort in the near future. Healing Hands International is considering their response, and several individuals and churches have expressed and interest in helping. No doubt, these gifts will be of a larger size than that of N'Djei, but none will be more significant. We hope their generosity will inspire others to give.

Our overseeing congregation, the Homewood Church of Christ, will be collecting funds for food aid to the Gourmantche. Checks can be sent to:

Homewood Church of Christ
265 W. Oxmoor Rd.
Birmingham, AL 35209

Include in a note and on the check memo: Togo Flood Relief

All funds will be used to purchase food (rice or corn) to be distributed in the Mandouri area of northern Togo.

Flood Relief Podcast...

Please check out this podcast recorded during our trip to Mandouri to survey the damagae done by the floods. The podcast is about 8 min. long, and you can listen to it from the website or download it to your MP3 player. Please keep praying that God will move to meet the great needs, both physical and spiritual, of the Gourmantche people. I will continue to update this blog and our website www.opendoorsforchrist.org as our response to the floods develops. The link below will take you directly to the podcast.

Flood Relief Research Trip...




"Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?" He will reply, "I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." Matthew 25:44-45

It is with mixed emotions that I return from our short trip to northern Togo to research the impact of recent floods on the town of Mandouri. I feel humbled and loved because of the hospitality of my African brothers and sisters in Christ who, in the face of a severe famine, provided our group of seven with some of the best food I have tasted in Africa. Their desire to honor God through showing hospitality in the midst of difficulty touched us (and especially my Kabiye brothers) very deeply. The strongest feeling I have is of urgency, because the needs are so great and people's reserves of food from the last harvest are quickly running out. Our trip brought clarity to the situation and the factors that brought it on. Here are the essential facts:

-Northern Togo has one rainy season, usually lasting from late May to late October. This year, the rains did not begin in earnest until August. When the rains did begin, they came at a level not seen in over 40 years, causing massive flooding, crop destruction, and weakening the walls of the mud dwellings that most people live in.

-Many people in Northern Togo plant in fields situated near rivers because their relative fertility allows them to have a good harvest without using fertilizers that they cannot afford. Because so many plant near rivers, around 80% of the crops planted by people living in the Mandouri area were destroyed during the flooding resulting from two months of heavy rains. Most of the corn, yams, and soybeans that make up the staple diet of the Gourma people were lost.

-The rains stopped suddenly at the end of September, so later yielding crops such as okra, millet, and sorghum have also failed.

-20 people were killed in the floods, thousands of acres of crops were destroyed, and over 20,000 people had parts of their houses collapse.

-Unless there is intervention from those who have been blessed by God with an abundance of resources, famine and disease will overcome thousands of people in Northern Togo.

Now that we have this information, I feel somewhat overwhelmed because the needs are so great. The international community is providing some help, though it is coming slowly, and the government officials we spoke to on our trip have said that it will not be enough. At the very least, we want to help the 200 or so Christians in Mandouri in the Pentecostal and Assembly of God churches. We would like to do more, but must put that into God's hands. Anyone interested in helping can contact us by leaving a comment here or through e-mail at kabiyemission@yahoo.com.

I will also post more information, pictures, and a podcast of our trip on my research website www.opendoorsforchrist.org (see the link below).



Our friend and host Pastor Pascal Lamboni shows us his fields that were destroyed in the floods. He is holding a head of rotten corn.