TOGO --August, 2009
Delron Shirley
I hate being late for anything, especially church. But sometimes life happens, and you just can’t avoid it no matter how hard you try. It was one of those Sunday mornings, and Peggy and I found ourselves trying to slip into the sanctuary a bit tardy. Our regular seats four rows in front of the sound booth in section one were already taken, so we wound up finding a spot in the back of the auditorium.
A little later, two more latecomers took the empty seats on the row in front of us. These stragglers were Dick Eastman, the President of Every Home for Christ, and his wife Dee. Later in the service we had a chance to meet them, and we eventually asked them to join us for lunch. They graciously accepted our invitation and met us at a nearby restaurant where we shared about our connection with Every Home for Christ in Nepal.
When Dick asked about our ministry, we told him about our call to go to developing nations and train the Christian leaders in some of the truths we had spent the last twenty-five years teaching in the Bible schools here in America. Immediately, he had his electronic organizer out of his pocket and was typing in our phone number and email address. Within a couple days, one of his top staff members contacted me and asked to set up a meeting. That meeting led to another and eventually to the request that I assist Every Home for Christ in a project which they were just initiating--a program for training Christian leaders in developing nations!
We were late for church and not in our right seats, but we were in the right place at the right time to meet the right man just when he needed our help!
One result of our “chance” encounter was my trip this past month to Togo in Africa were I met with the top Every Home for Christ leadership from the eleven nations of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo. Out of this meeting will come a new thrust of training and ministry throughout the French-speaking nations of the African continent.
We had some very aggressive goals for this particular mission. The first and foremost was to introduce the leadership from each of these nations to a program in which the second level of leadership within each country would be equipped and empowered to reach the grassroots leadership with instruction which they would in turn pass on to the new believers throughout central and west Africa. Our strategy is to train forty-five leaders who will spend one week each month disciplining small groups of three to five students who will then go back to their areas and train larger groups of eight to ten each. The division of the project into so many tiers is mandated by the fact that even though these nations are considered to be French speaking, only about twenty percent of the population actually understands French. Therefore, the small group discipleship program will be in French with specifically selected students who will be able to take what they have learned and communicate it to the larger groups in the many tribal languages and dialects spoken in their areas. Since the first phase of the project was in English, the goal of this mission was to work with these national leaders and assist them in producing training videos in French which could be shared among the French-speaking teachers in their respective nations. Each of the men in the conference was assigned specific topics to cover. Once all these lessons have been collected and compiled, sets of the complete teachings will be sent to each nation.
In addition to the training program, Every Home for
Christ also provided a solar panel to supply electricity
to a mission hospital located in the nation of Togo. Since this clinic is located in a village where there is no electrical service, the solar panel will be a very significant improvement, allowing them to replace their costly gasoline-powered generator with free electricity generated by the sun. A special celebration put on by the people of the village commemorated the event and culminated in the symbolic crowning of the Every Home for Christ representative as a chief among their tribe!
Unfortunately, the event was held without any solar panels because the shipping container was still in the port being held up in customs. In fact, it was not only the solar panel which was delayed; in addition was a massive quantity of discipleship material which was to be used in the training program we were initiating--three forty-foot containers in total! The problem was that the government was demanding thousands of dollars of import fees. Eventually, an agreement was reached, and Every Home for Christ had to pay only a fraction of the original fee. 
The result of the delay was that the containers were not to be delivered until the day after our scheduled departure. But all that changed when we received word that the pilots of the airline we were flying on were on strike. Because we were grounded for an additional day, we had the privilege of helping unload the trucks and actually placing the training manuals into the hands of the leaders before they left to go back to their individual nations. When we boarded the plane the following day, the pilot made an announcement apologizing for the inconveniences which the strike had caused. I wanted yell out and thank him for the delay because it allowed us have the fulfillment of seeing that one last step of our project brought into reality.
A sidebar to the story about the delay due to the strike was that we lost our tickets home from London because we had purchased the tickets in two different transactions with two different airlines--one as far as London and a second on to Africa. When we missed the original connection in London, we were faced with the possibility of a several-day delay in order to find enough seats for our group. After spending several hours checking every possible option within our budget, we wound up having to “call it a night” without finding a workable solution. The next morning when I was praying about the flight, I was reminded of the Lord’s promise in Psalm 121:8, “The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore,” which I took as a sign that He was in charge of our trip. We did eventually find workable connects and headed home. During a long stopover in Casablanca on the way to London, a couple of us left the 
airport to do a little exploring. Unfortunately, we forgot that there was a time zone change from how our watches were set from our stay in Togo. It was only when we reported back for the onward flight that we realized that we were actually an hour later than we thought and that we only had about five minutes to get through passport control and security before missing the scheduled departure. When the gentleman in front of us at the passport counter was held up due to some complications with his documents, we watched as each precious second slipped away. Then the passport agent had to leave the post to get assistance from a supervisor, we began to “sweat bullets”--until we began to repeat our promise, “The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in…” Finally, the issue was resolved and we were able to step up to be cleared. After rushing to the boarding gate we were greeted with the pleasant surprise that the flight had been delayed! When we finally got to London and checked in for our homeward flight, we got an even better pleasant surprise--our whole team had received complementary upgrades to business class! When the Lord is in charge of your travel plans, He certainly knows how to book the right seats!
Three highlights of the trip stand out distinctly in my mind. The first is the face of one of the team members who, although she has worked with Every Home for Christ for some twenty-eight years, had never been on the actual mission field prior to this trip. There is no way to describe the beauty of seeing the tears in her eyes and the joy on her face as she actually saw the places and met the people which have been the object of her prayers and giving for so many years. I have often said that short-term mission trips probably make more impact on the missionary than on the people they visit. From this case, I have living Technicolor proof!
The second impacting moment was to visit the home village of the national director for Every Home for Christ in Togo. His father had been the chief witchdoctor of this village and had kicked the son out of his house when he became a Christian. As the director stood at his father’s grave and shared his testimony of having to hide in the bush to escape his father’s wrath and how the gospel finally was able to penetrate his village, I marveled at how unshakable he had become even as a brand-new believer and how this unmovable faith had changed his world. This kind of story of faith is being daily around the world. May it be part of my life as well.
The third impact moment was also in this village when we visited the witchcraft shrine and saw the altar containing the “holy water” which the people drink for blessings from their gods. The water was the most polluted liquid I had ever seen; it was absolutely green and made me want to gag just looking at it--much less thinking of drinking it! A few minutes later, we visited the first humanitarian project which Christians had done in the area--a clean water system. How powerful it was to contrast the work of God and the work of the enemy. The devil came to bring corruption and defilement, but Jesus came that we might have living water.
In the process of our transit through London, we had to spend one night there before connecting to the homeward leg of our trip. When I woke up on that final day of our trip, I reached for my daily prayer guide which I receive each month from Every Home for Christ. In this guide, there is one specific nation highlighted each day with some specific prayer requests listed. To my surprise and delight, the nation for that day was one of the ones represented in the conference I had just left, and the prayer request was concerning development of leaders for the many new converts in the nation! As I folded the sheet and returned it to my briefcase after my prayer, I was so powerfully impacted by the fact that people all over the world would add their prayers and faith to our hard work and the sacrifices of the local leadership to see that these African nations will be brought to a new depth of understanding of how to walk in their faith.
Thank you to all who support us with your prayers and gifts as we continue to give ourselves to teaching all nations. Please remember the Nigeria trip--September 2-12.