Cameroon (MNN) — After a survey to determine the need, the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism found Cameroon in Western Africa is a field ripe for harvest. God is bringing together a team that is preparing to go into that new mission field within the year.
ABWE’s goal is to help strengthen and develop the church in Cameroon, and ABWE’s Dave Hamrick says they’re connected to local churches there, “We just found a tremendous need and we found some small churches that asked if we would come and help with some leadership training and theological studies.”
Hamrick says the expansion is exciting and much needed, “Our goal is to build strong Bible-preaching churches with trained Cameroonian leadership that then will be able to go out and reach Cameroonians and reproduce that model in southern parts of Cameroon and then, Lord willing, that they would begin sending out their own missionaries.”
Sending an evangelical witness in to the French-speaking southern provinces is a great need. Many of those areas have been left alone over the years without aGospel light. ABWE hopes to see national Cameroonians taking the light of Christ into those areas.
ABWE also has a great opportunity to use radio as a tool for ministry outreach in Cameroon. Hamrick says, “The government is wanting English radio. They have a lot of French-speaking radio, but they are looking for organizations to come in and produce English programming. They’re not concerned with the content; they’re just concerned that it would be done in English.”
The reason for that, says Hamrick is because, “Some of the provinces are English-speaking by birth, a majority of them are French-speaking by birth, and the government is trying to bring these two groups together that have had conflict in the past, and so they’ve made the country bi-lingual. So there’s a large group of young people who want to learn English so that they can get government jobs, business jobs in this new bi-lingual society.”
ABWE’s taking that opportunity to minister through radio, and they’re excited about what God may do. Pray for the team to have wisdom, to learn a new culture, and to be effective in presenting Christ. Pray that strong churches will be built up.
