I thought we were merely building buildings. But it turns out that we are building characters for God’s kingdom.

When our family moved from Kotale to Kewa seven years ago, we started holding church services under our new house. We had mostly women and children attending our services, so we prayed that some men would come. The following Sabbath, a group of young men suddenly show up and started attending our services.

Today, seven years later, most of those men have moved on to other places. But we still have a remnant of that group. Umina and Busisi are two of the young men who have been involved with us faithfully for many years. A few years back, Umina invited his friend Abilo to church. Now Abilo is a faithful Bible student and has decided to follow Jesus into the waters of baptism!

Last year, we began preparing to construct a new training center—a facility consisting of several buildings for the purpose of training people in various areas of outreach including Bible, health and literacy. Now that we have begun the Gogodala Training Center project, we have 10 or 12 young guys from our village of Kewa who come regularly to assist with construction. Among them are Umina and Abilo. They are a positive influence on the rest. We wrote a contract with nine of these young men to help us, and part of the agreement is that they must stay sober and drug-free during the contract period. These boys have become like sons to us. In fact, they call me Dad, and Laurie is Mom.

While in Port Moresby a few months ago, we purchased a DVD containing the testimony of the young Hawaiian evangelist, Taj Pacleb, along with a set of DVDs with his 35-part evangelistic series titled “Revelation of Hope.” Last year when I heard Taj tell his testimony of how God brought him out of a life of smoking marijuana to preaching His word, I was impressed that his testimony would be a powerful witness to the young men in our village who are caught in the same snare of smoking marijuana and wandering aimlessly through life. So we purchased his testimony DVD to share with our people.

After my young work crew viewed the testimony of this young preacher, they asked to see his evangelistic series as well. Now, at the end of each workday, after washing the shovels and wheelbarrows and putting the tools away, we sit down together to watch a sermon. My guys take notes and go home and share what they have learned with their families. Praise the Lord!

Of course, the temptations of Satan are still there. If anything, he has intensified his efforts to ensnare these precious souls. A spiritual battle is raging, so we covet your prayers, not just for these young men but for all the Gogodala villagers, many of whom claim to be Christians but are, spiritually speaking, a bunch of dry bones.

It is exciting to see our vision becoming reality as the walls of our new maintenance building go up, the roof is installed, and the floor is poured. Next, we will be setting the posts for our first guest house and using the lumber we cut with our recently donated sawmill to frame it up. The boys are working hard to level the ground for this building using spades and wheelbarrows. I wish we had a tractor to help with the excavation and leveling. It takes great effort over many days to do the groundwork for one building, and we have eight more to build. I also wish I had another skilled builder or two who could take charge of small crews so that more than one building could be built at a time.

Yes, it will be great to have a training center here. But part of the benefit is in the building of it. God is using this construction work as an evangelistic tool to reach our young construction workers. I wish to thank all of you who have given so generously of your means to help the Gogodala people and give them hope. Lord willing, they will soon have more opportunities to discover the truth of the gospel, having a facility where trainers can come to help them, and also a place where they can hold camp meetings. “Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that He will send for laborers into His harvest” (Matt. 9:38).

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