DYNAMITE IN THE HEART REACHING THE 99

In their efforts to take the Word to the world, GlobeWorks International Ministries partners with Christian ministries of like belief and like practice at home and abroad. Recently, MAF was able to help them on their way to a hard-to-reach region in South Sudan to support a Bible college, a hospital and 26 bush schools while distributing God’s Word.

As GlobeWorks Director Ben Cohen describes their ambitious outreach itinerary, every activity seems to blend into the next. It’s not at all clear how much sleep was involved in their whirlwind week. It sounds like door-to-door evangelism, if you turned it into a competitive sport, crossed with a student campus crusade. The mountainous location Ben and his colleague AJ are reaching seems to attract these “all or nothing” characters who carry a Bible in their hand and a fire for God in their heart.

Reaching The 99

“They say there are 99 tribes in these mountains, and one tribe lives in each mountain,” Ben shares with an incredulous laugh. With an estimated 42 languages spoken in the area, the reality probably isn’t too far from the truth.

The languages and people groups haven’t grown separately just because of the area’s isolation. Some people arrived here after fleeing conflict elsewhere. Today, they are a melting pot of cultures united by their geographical isolation, poverty and shared experience of war.

As they begin their outreach, Ben sees only the transformation possible through the Gospel. The opportunity to hear and read God’s Word is one he wants to give to each one of the excited children who run to greet them and their truck full of Bibles. As he says, “The Gospel of Jesus

Christ is dynamite in the heart. It is the POWER of God to save!”

TEACHING AND TRAVELLING

The MAF flight takes off in the early morning, flown by Swiss pilot David Graf. Insecurity means the two-and-a-half-hour flight would be impossible to travel overland.

The Bibles have been shipped overland, which is just as well, because every last kilo of cargo is accounted for by 5,000 pairs of prescription glasses and sunglasses, specialist medical equipment, and enough consumables for a surgical outreach.

Although the MAF flight covers more than 80% of the total distance from Juba, the team has a nine-hour drive ahead of them on bone-rattling tracks, which are what passes for roads in this part of the world. Their destination is one of the most inaccessible corners of an inaccessible continent. “We drove from 1 pm to 10 pm to reach the hospital,” Ben explains. “We dropped the doctors there and got them set up. We left the hospital at 8.45 the following morning and went to the Bible college, where we began teaching through the Book of Philippians and continued this from Friday afternoon to Saturday night, finishing up on Sunday afternoon.

“We had chosen Philippians specifically because

it is Paul’s joy epistle,” Ben explains. “The areas people live in have some very challenging conditions. Paul teaches us in Philippians that there is not one drop of joy outside the Lord Jesus Christ.”

SPREADING JOY

“On Monday morning, we started our Bible distribution. We split up, so we were on different teams with the students we’d been teaching at the Bible college. Each team went in different directions,” explains fellow teammate AJ, a youth leader from the States. “We tried to get students on the outreach teams from the different areas that we were visiting, including a new area we hadn’t been to before. In a way, the Bible college teaching was preparation to go out, because when we reached the different schools, each of the students had prepared messages from Philippians.

In each location, they gathered the excited students to share their message of joy. The Gospel preached by the students and visitors fell on eager young ears. Before they left, each student was given their own Bible. For many of these students, the Bible is the only book they’ll ever own.

TRUCKLOADS OF BIBLES

Ben describes his journey to one of the most inaccessible locations. “We hired a tractor, loaded it down with as many Bibles as we could and enough food to survive, and began travelling mid-afternoon on Wednesday. We travelled a combined 32+ hours in the back of that Massey Ferguson tractor over the next three days. We suffered two breakdowns that cost us precious time, and as a result, spent one night stuck out in

the bush, huddling together to stay warm. While the temperature soared to over 37 degrees in the shade during the day, it dropped to around 12 degrees at night with sustained winds of 30-35 mph. It proved to be one of the most challenging journeys I’ve ever been on in my life.” “We visited 20 schools with our big truck of Bibles and gave out 36,500 Bibles in total,” Ben explains. “I didn’t realise how big the schools were! Some of the schools had 1,000 kids in them. As we distributed them, I thought, ‘There goes another 1,000!’”

Amazingly, the 36,500 Bibles distributed are the tip of the iceberg. GlobeWorks has managed to ship three containers with 120,000 Bibles. If the area is home to around three million people, one in every 27 people has received a Bible in the last three years.

GlobeWorks Ministries doesn’t directly solicit funding for outreaches. They prayerfully share their vision with their email list of 250 people and then thank God for generously providing from a completely different source – this time an organisation in Switzerland they previously knew nothing about.

PRAYERS TO PRAY

The team returned to Juba energised by a job well done and determined to water the seed of their outreach with prayers. They pray the Bibles that have been distributed will be read and understood, so that the young people will develop a passion for the Word and, ultimately, be mature enough to take up the Great Commission and share the Gospel with others.

“Pray for each of the unreached tribes in the mountains; that God would raise up men who would go and preach the Gospel in the power of the Spirit and that Biblical local churches would be birthed in tribes where there are none. Pray for the existing local churches, that they would be able to not only evangelise their own people, but also train and then send them to unreached and unengaged people groups throughout this country and the rest of North Africa.”