June 2009

Dear fellow believers

Do you want to know directly from the mouth of a Christian  - a convert from Islam living in Mali, West Africa - how the Lord works through the preaching of the Gospel and what opportunities radio offers for spreading the Word further? Here is the story of my friend and brother in Christ M’Bimba Dembélé, from Sollo (he wrote it directly in English, which he speaks as fluently as French and his native language). M’Bimba airs on a regular base the programmes of Reformed Faith and Life and has testified several times towards me about the impact they have on the local population:

I am going to explain how my family and I became Christians, and how the Lord helped us start an evangelical project in our village, Sollo.

Like my wife, I was born into a family of Moslems and animists – This is the pattern for most families in Mali , as Islam is always mixed with traditional beliefs.  However, I have never had any religion before embracing Christianity.

In 2003, Mylennie and Werner van Straaten invited their friend, Pastor Wynand de Wet, to come on a visit to Mali . Werner was then Eskom’s Technical Manager in Mali and I worked as the translator for the same company. He was my boss and we were friends. When Pastor Wynand arrived, Werner and Mylennie explained to me that they were making arrangements for a two-week outreach with the pastor, and asked me if I could interpret for the audience. I agreed and what I learned about Christ by dint of interpreting was enough to make me ask the pastor to baptize me. On Sunday 16 February 2003 , Pastor Wynand baptized me at the South African Expatriates’ Church at Manantali, in Mali . Not long after that, I decided to study Theology and asked Werner to find me a university in his country where I could do so. Not only did Werner and Mylennie find one for me, namely Pretoria University , but they also paid for my studies. They helped me enroll immediately and I started a correspondence course.

After the Straatens’ return to South Africa , a difficult situation presented itself in my village. A few American missionaries had left a Christian radio station for the villagers themselves to take good care of, but the equipment was too old and the building, a mud house, was dilapidated; the church nearby, the only one for the village and its closest neighborhood, was a thatched little hut in even a worse state.

The villagers, nearly 100 % of whom were unemployed and lived in abject poverty as they still do, could not even properly feed themselves and their families. As you can imagine, the radio station had to close down and the church building to be abandoned. Services had eventually to be held in the open air, weather permitting.

It was then that the elders of the village held a meeting on 27 November 2005 and asked for my help. I sent for an engineer and paid for the repair to the radio. The station resumed broadcasting and I was appointed its Manager. However, everyone knew that it would not be on the air for long unless we had new equipment and a better structure to house it.

Again everyone looked to me for help, but the challenge was too big for me alone: I had a very good job by Malian standard, the same that I still have, but then I was the only one with some income and I had to help as many as I could among the people who were all less fortunate. I had also to support my own family. As a result, I could not afford the much needed new equipment and new building. At the same time, I did not want the Christian broadcast to be stopped forever. Something had to be done.

I thought of asking for assistance from Werner and Mylennie. As soon as I contacted them, they started raising funds and the building of the radio station began. It was at this stage that I took Addie and Cees van der Sluijs to the building site at Sollo during one of their visits to Mali .

Addie and Cees joined the South-African couple in co-financing the radio station and later the church. The said radio and church have positive influence on people’s faith and everyday lives now. Nevertheless, no matter how effective they are in spreading the Word, they are not enough for us to reach our goal, which is to change our community into an entirely Christian one; if we have a school in addition to these two, we can effect that change irreversibly.

Early last December, Addie and Cees again made a trip to the building site at Sollo and were so impressed by the results that we had achieved that they readily granted our request for funds to build a Bible school…

Dear friends, it is in this environment, devoid of the luxury of our materialistic and secularized Western societies, that the Lord starts an amazing work.  Supporting Reformed Faith and Life is supporting the proclamation of the Gospel for all areas of life, for the transformation of not only individual lives, but also worldviews and cultures.  Thank you for your continued support which also means that brother M’Bimba and many other broadcasters kan keep airing sound Biblical material on the radio stations they maintain, sometimes against all odds.  If you wish to know more about the various projects in Sollo, you can write to me directly.

In Christ’s name

Rev. Eric Kayayan