AFM missionaries believe that a deep understanding of their people group’s culture and worldview is indispensable to incarnational and contextualized ministry. In our case, as West Africans reaching out to fellow West Africans, after eight years among the Dendis, we believe we have reached a good understanding of our Dendi Muslim people’ s worldview. An important part of that worldview has to do with places of worship, which highlights our pressing need for a new church building.
As Muslims, the Dendi have five prayer times throughout the day, marked by calls to prayer chanted by the muezzin (official proclaimer) of each mosque. In their worldview, acts of worship serve to unite worshipers with each other and with Allah.
According to the Dendi worldview, worship must be performed at appointed places, in the right manner, and the sanctity of the place of worship must be identified and maintained. Sadly, our place of worship for the past four years does not meet those cultural criteria. Built to host meetings between Christians and Muslims, our Faith Dialogue Center does not qualify as a place of worship according to Dendi worldview. First, our sign out front does not identify the building as a place of worship. Second, the seating arrangement inside makes kneeling more difficult, and the room looks more like a classroom than a place of worship. Though Dendi Muslims expect a place of worship to contain only mats and carpets, we intend to furnish our church with pews spaced in such a way that people can easily kneel and bow down.
One of the biggest reasons we need a new church building is our growing membership (79 baptized members as of November 15). It is amazing to see how the Lord has raised up such a thriving church where there were no Seventh-day Adventists just eight years ago. Sadly, the Faith Dialogue Center has only 44 seats and can take at most 15 extra chairs. When we have special events, such as the baptism of 27 people on November 15 when our church was officially incorporated, as many as 120 or more people show up, and our extreme lack of seating becomes a cultural offense to our visitors.
We pray that you will join in helping us reach our goal of breaking ground for a new church this coming March, when our next baptism is scheduled. God willing, we will go on furlough in June and can show you pictures and tell you how things are progressing. Another important factor in our timetable is that we would like our short-term missionary partners, Etienne and Carolyn Guenin, to supervise the construction of our church building before they return home in July, 2015.
We have been raising funds for the Dendi church building for almost a year now, and we have reached 15 percent of our $60,000 goal. So you can see that we are praying for a miracle. But we believe we can do this as we team up with you in prayers and donations. Our local members are also contributing, and by God’s grace we do expect a miracle.
May God bless you as you pray about how you can support His work among the Dendi.
