November 2009

 

Dear friends and supporters of Reformed Faith and Life,

Do you believe that preaching the Gospel faithfully will have an impact on the lives of people who hear it, by the power of the Holy Spirit?  If you are skeptical, and perhaps tired of supporting evangelization work such as Reformed Faith and Life, please take the time to read the following email which I recently received from Kananga, a large city in the Kasai province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Theophile K. — a Reformed pastor who monitors the broadcasting of RFL on a powerful local transmitter and can efficiently follow up our work among listeners— writes:

Our Reformed Faith and Life broadcast is doing wonders in Kananga.  Many letters I receive repeatedly ask me to put on the air the same programme after it has been aired.  Really it is a great joy to see this.  Your messages really counter the many heresies which are propagated from this radio.

I recently answered personally several questions asked via email by listeners from the same FM station.  One person wrote:   I am writing to you as a listener of Reformed Faith and Life, which has become my favourite program on our local station.  Last week, my father and I followed the message entitled “the Church under the Cross” [about the persecuted Church through the ages].  Its contents were rich and this allows me to ask you the following questions: The Bible forbids to kill.  How then can a Christian be a soldier and submit himself to the discipline and orders he receives?  Won’t he sin if he kills?  Can one speak of the execution of the Church today?

You can imagine that in a country like the Congo, stricken  by civil war, and by a so-called regular army which commits as many atrocities as the rebel groups it is trying to eliminate, this is not just a rhetorical question.  The answer cannot be simplistic either.  But a Biblical answer will always bring light and perspective to people desperately in need of it.

Dear friends, I would like to emphasize that you are entirely part of the chain of fellow workers who make it possible for RFL to reach this listener and countless others.  Yes, the Gospel, preached faithfully, deeply impacts the lives of people! These emails are vibrant proof of that.  Pastor Theophile and myself,  the Reformed Radio Administration Committee which supports our radio work from North America, my local congregation in Pretoria and other Reformed churches in South Africa, the sound engineer who records the programmes, my secretary who duplicates the CDs and sends them throughout Africa and as far as France and Quebec, we all form part of a chain of workers of which you are entirely a part.  Without you as a vital link, this chain will be broken and the work of Reformed Faith and Life will have to stop. This chain of fellow workers has been put in place not by myself, but by the providence of the Almighty God, through the working of the Holy Spirit and for the proclamation of the Kinghsip of the Son.  Do you believe it? 

As I write to you, several pending projects to broadcast RFL on other local stations in the Congo are awaiting to be “adopted”  and sponsored by a local church.  Please consider these projects prayerfully, and think of the thousands of people who could be reached by the transforming Word of Jesus Christ.

Together united in the faith delivered once for all to the saints,

Rev. Eric Kayayan