Sharing the Gospel is just the beginning.
After years of studying and learning the culture of the Mengen people, and 150 Bible teaching sessions, at least 17 more Mengens have clearly placed their faith in Christ.
Now, “my workload has just gone through the roof with all these babes in Christ needing to be fed and encouraged and a lot of this is done one-on-one,” wrote missionary Dave Wright.
Many of the new believers have questions.
“I was finding it hard to move ahead in lesson writing as Loso, my translation helper, now a believer, had so many questions – something that has never happened before,” Dave wrote.
The next set of lessons moves through the Bible from Creation to Christ, like the evangelistic lessons, but this time the emphasis is on the security of the believer.
“This will be at a much slower pace – two lessons per week instead of the four we did previously,” Dave wrote. “But I’ll still repeat each lesson at least once, if not more, depending on understanding.”
Dave and his teammates will also continue to get together with individuals as much as possible, to help them clearly understand salvation by grace.
“Our people have had it drilled into them from early age that God’s favor rests on their good works and for a number, especially the ladies, we find that they are not completely clear,” Dave wrote. “Please pray that God will give us opportunity with each person, which can be hard in a very close village setting.”
So while there are certainly 17 new believers, at least 60 people attended the lessons faithfully, and there are other Mengen believers from previous evangelistic Bible teaching, which was going on when I visited the village in 2005.
Those older believers are also showing signs of maturity.
The Mengen people “don’t often share openly in public. … It was neat to see our existing believers publicly share their testimonies, something that they haven’t done before and as such was a huge boost to their walk as believers.
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