The Next Generation

It's so important that the next generation be taught the stories of God's love for them, and without parents who can read the scriptures, that is very unlikely to happen.

Pen-zaan Literacy Educators

These leaders from the church in Pen-zaan will help me start a literacy course in their church.  That's Germain in front of them.  Everyone who came to the conference gave an offering to help pay for the conference.  Germain was acting treasurer and he's making change for them.

What's For Dinner?

Some of the amazing ladies from the Dano Pari Church that hosted the literacy conference bringing the ingredients for our lunch that day.

Shade Trees

The first of around 130 leaders begin to gather under the two beautiful shade trees in Dano Pari that we used for a meeting place

Literacy Conference

We'll be hosting our first ever literacy conference among Dagara Church leaders.  We will discuss the challenges they may face in learning and teaching literacy and will be discussing why it's important.  Hopefully we will be able to begin formulating a plan together how to implement a literacy program in our churches.

Just so you can get a feel for some of the things we'll be discussing in the conference, I thought I would just paste below the English version of the motivation speech I plan on giving tomorrow as our churches contemplate what it would be like to be like the Berean Church in Acts who always checked on Paul's teaching by looking back at God's word to make sure that Paul was getting his wisdom from the word of God and not his own thoughts.

The biggest problem in our churches is that people don’t know what are human opinions and what is God’s word.  From the leaders on down to the regular members, they just don’t know.  Why?  They don’t know how to read God’s word.  Some think that all they want is for god to save them from their sins, but they don’t want to truly get to know God and become his disciples and obey his word every day.  They don’t even know how to read his word.  When a child is little he or she plays and laughs and sings and this pleases the child’s father.  But as time goes on if the child doesn’t eventually begin to learn to listen to his father’s wisdom . . . well the father can’t accept that.  It is the same between God and us.

Open Your Bibles . . .

I’m glad to be back in Burkina.  It’s both scary and exciting to be on the last push of the work God has given us here among the Dagara.  Those of you who talked to me over furlough know that God has decided to focus our efforts this last year on the field on literacy.  The more I thought and prayed about how to use the audio new testaments we had been given, the more I realized that we were just putting a band-aid on a problem that needed a more comprehensive solution.

Now you’ve probably heard of different kinds of literacy (computer literacy, biblical literacy).  There are also different purposes for just plain literacy (learning how to read books).  For example, there are two different programs among the Dagara; one is a government run literacy program, and the other is run by a Bible translation and literacy organization called ANTBA.  I’m still learning about these programs.  I’m not sure what the focus of the government program is yet, but the ANTBA program seems to be focused on literacy as a means to economic development.  In actuality what this means is that the students that enroll in this literacy program, if they are successful, get some training in pig raising and soap making, and then get a small stipend to start a small business in one of those fields. This is a very worthy goal, and I’m excited that ANTBA has started this program this year in 7 of the 30 villages where there are young Dagara churches.  However it misses some things that I feel God has called our family uniquely to address.