When God Remembers and Causes Growth
It was over thirty years ago. We had been pioneering the work of Youth With A Mission (YWAM) in the Dominican Republic.
A dear saint from Florida had been working in the country for several months leading short-term team after short-term team in outreach the length and breadth of the island. She was also the vanguard of what would follow and was helping co-ordinate a network of contacts for us to come in later and bring the YWAM ships ministry (Mercy Ships).
I was commissioned then to lead a team of twenty-one people off the two YWAM Mercy Ships vessels called the m/v ANASTASIS and the m/v GOOD SAMARITAN, and including some young folk from YWAM Denver.
The LORD spoke to us out of Acts chapter one, verse eight, that we were to minister in four places at once, revealed in time as Santo Domingo (the capital), 6,000 villages throughout the Dominican Republic without a single church, Haiti & Cuba and also to an unreached nomadic people group in North Africa.
One of our four places (“Judaea”) was to raise up church planters and send them among these unchurched villages. As the only ones coming forward for the job were fairly young girls, and born on the back of a sermon from the YWAM founder who was urging the mission to release women into ministry, two of them began to pioneer a successful church plant in one mountain village in the north of the country, which spawned another two churches and one granddaughter church. In two years they were able to leave the work to continue in the hands of locals.
Another woman approached me—a grandmother—and she had a heart for one village on the Caribbean’s highest mountain (Pico Duarte) , also in Dominican Republic. I was very reluctant initially to release this lone grandmother, despite her strength and stability. However, after prayer, I knew that this was actually God’s will and as a national ministry we commissioned her to the task.
I had married my Dominican wife by the end of 1990 and left the country before this grandmother finished her placement and work in the mountain village.
Leap forward now thirty plus years and last Sunday my wife and I, and some of our family, were attending “my Dominican church” for the first time in a decade.
Imagine our surprise to see a group of people take the stage from the very village where this obedient grandmother had laboured long and hard! They were from the very church planted by this woman, and they would not normally be in the capital at all, let alone at this church we were visiting this month.
Our Dominican pastor introduced this group as fruit of what YWAM pioneered in the late ‘80s and connected my role to it, but it was the people themselves who, together with our pastor, who talked more about the grandmother (by name) who had worked among them faithfully, and one woman even told at length how she had accepted Christ all those years ago when this granny had prayed with her.
We later discovered, after the service when the woman came forward to talk to me, that the grandmother YWAM worker had also taught her how to read so she could read her Bible and helped ground her deeply in her faith too.
The woman in turn confessed to praying daily for over thirty years for this grandmother who now continues to serve the LORD in a difficult place in Asia Minor.
What a heartening testimony it was to see before our tear filled eyes the fruit of a faithful saint who dared to step out initially with hardly a word of the local language and how our faithful God has grown this work for over three decades, a ministry that is now impacting the whole community where this village church is located.