Imperishable Inheritance

Here now is the sec­ond install­ment of my trip recap to North Africa.

An Unreached Vil­lage in an Unreached Land

Our next excur­sion was into the moun­tains to visit a “clas­sic” unreached peo­ple group. We vis­ited a Berber vil­lage. Berber peo­ple are to North Africa as Native Amer­i­cans are to Amer­ica. In fact, many of the early church fathers (Augus­tine for exam­ple) are Berber. They are stretched all along North Africa. When the Mus­lims came through in the 7th and 8th cen­turies they either pushed them far­ther west on into Spain, or they fled to the moun­tains. The lat­ter is what hap­pened with the vil­lage we visited.

We took a taxi a to a tour guide who takes for­eign­ers to meet these peo­ple. We marched for a day into the moun­tains to see a vil­lage much older than the U.S.! There were pock­ets of these vil­lages through­out the moun­tain region, and some­times there were dif­fer­ent dialects spo­ken from moun­tain to moun­tain! These peo­ple we went to didn’t even speak Ara­bic which meant that we couldn’t con­verse with them (our tour guide did for us), but it also means that they can’t read the Qur’an. You see pretty instantly that they don’t have a dog­matic under­stand of Islamic doc­trine as they have mixed what pre­cepts they wanted from Islam into a form of folk reli­gion. They were observ­ing Ramadan while we were there how­ever, and it was an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence to share time with a fam­ily that has never heard of Jesus. Imag­ine not even being able to hear the news about redemp­tion even if you wanted to? That, my friends, is a pow­er­ful impe­tus for action.

An Early Ride Home

I should note that after this trip I find out that I was com­ing home early. This is prob­a­bly where the most tan­gi­ble lessons I could’ve learned tran­spired. It was here that I learned about the lack of char­ac­ter I posses cur­rently to do work like this, but it was also here where God showed me his power to give me the things nec­es­sary in his timing.

Before we went into the coun­try we were told we couldn’t bring in any­thing that would appear as though we had mis­si­o­log­i­cal inten­tions. On that list were Bibles, but I ratio­nal­ized bring­ing in the Ara­bic New Tes­ta­ment that I took with me. For two months I did noth­ing with it, but when some girls on our trip made a friend I thought it would be a good idea to give it to one of them to give to their friend. Well, that friend turned me in (and rightly so). I learned hard lessons on what true lead­er­ship is and is not. I found out after our Berber trip that I was being sent home due to my sin, and it was the first time I got to see how my sin hurt oth­ers in a very tan­gi­ble way. I was heart­bro­ken, and they were as well. Sure enough, two days later I was back in the U.S.

After­wards…

Com­ing back and telling my sup­port­ers what hap­pened has been dif­fi­cult, but I have learned a lot. I have rec­on­ciled my rela­tion­ships with both the staff and stu­dents of the trip, and I have been restored at my local church. It has been a hum­bling time, but I thank God that he didn’t give me over to myself. I am also thank­ful that I didn’t make such a mis­take when I had a fam­ily and full time min­istry over­seas in such a place. Praise be to the God of the harvest!