Chapter 15 of
Journey to the Dark Nations
“For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21)
And he said unto them, Let us go into the next towns, that I may preach there also: for therefore came I forth. 39 And he preached in their synagogues throughout all Galilee, and cast out devils. (Mark 1:38-39)
Certainly, it is impossible at this point to write the last chapter of my life. Like Apostle Paul indicated in Philippians 1:21, my resolve is to live out the rest of my life for the one who paid the supreme price for my salvation with the consciousness that when death come knocking, I will be remembered for my input in taking the light of the gospel to the darkest part of the earth.
Looking Back
In October 1982 when we came into the scene of world evangelization as a student, little did I know there is world of darkness out there that needed attention. The presence of God was very conspicuous in our campus fellowship and by extension, the entire campus such that those who were not born again were out of place. In 1984, it was like Jesus spoke to His disciples in John 4:3 to lift up their eyes and look on the fields. I had the reality of the field beyond the campus when God led me to work among the Aiona people and from that point, my view of the field continued to enlarge by the day.
In 1997, the Global Consultation for World Evangelization (GCOWE '97) was mind blowing. Research reports made available at the event especially the one by Joshua Project on the status of world evangelization and the remaining unfinished task were very revealing. The Nigeria Taskforce on the unreached people powered by the defunct AD2000 and Beyond Movement were not left out.
One of the Project they embarked upon was a survey of 300 people groups in Northern Nigeria. The result was staggering. It was established that 178 of the 300 groups were confirmed to be unreached people. Out of the 178 Unreached people are 100% Unreached, 76 are African Traditional Religion adherents, 172 are Muslims and 70 of them are classified as top priority and mission agencies/Churches are advised and encouraged to consider for urgent attention.
Some of the people groups includes the:
- Achipawa in Sakaba local government area of Kebbi State and Marige local government area of Niger State where we have only 25 converts in 3 villages.
- Baruba in Baruten local government area of Kwara State with no single Christian.
- Buduma on the shores of Lake Chad with no known Christian.
- Bolewa in Fika and Nangere local government areas of Yobe State with no known Christian.
- Laru in Borgu local government area with no known Christian.
- Shangawas also known as the Kyengewa, descendants of Kishera who left Badr near Meda to escape Islam. They are found in Dendi, Bagudo and Yauri local government areas of Kebbi State. The only Christian convert is reported to have gone back to Islam. They are 100% Muslim now.
- Bashar in Wase and Kenan local government areas of Plateau State, with no known Christian.
- Bisa in Borgu local government with only two Christians.
The Great Commission has not changed and I felt I don't need extra call to be challenged to contribute my quota in enthroning the Lordship of Jesus in some of these places. It is against this background I concentrated my life in pursuing this course. With the birth of Grace Foundation Inland Missions in 1989 we reinforce our labor in places where ordinarily they may never be able to access the gospel.
After many years of labor as an individual and 25years of Grace Foundations labor in the dark places, we have not only succeeded in our target but have mobilized many Churches and individuals to engage scores of unreached people but going by current statistics, the volume of the unfinished task is even more staggering.
It is not because our labor is not yielding positive result but the more we lift up our eyes, the more we discover more unreached people that were not captured in earlier missions research reports and also very sadly some other lands are lost to the enemy.
Current Sobering State of World Evangelisation
Currently, the total population probably is 7.178billion. Out of these number 2,997,692 globally are yet to be followers of Christ. The total number of people groups globally is said to be 16,800. Unreached/least reached people is 7,300. Out of the 7,300 30% have had no exposure to God's word. India leads with 2365, China follows with 455, Pakistan with 453, Bangladesh 345 and Nepal 332.
It is no longer news that many nations that were captured by the early Church have slipped into darkness. Turkey is a good case study. It is located in the present day Europe and partly in Asia. Christianity existed there for 1023 years. Some people said Mary the mother of Jesus actually taken to Turkey by Apostle John. The Christians were first nicknamed so at Antioch located in today Turkey. One of the largest church in history, The Hagia Sophia was located in Turkey. Sadly, Turkey is now 96% Muslims and 0.02% Christians.
North Africa is an eye sore. That was the region of the world that hosted Jesus when Herod attempted to kill Him. It had the best of seminaries and theologians at a time. The term Trinity was coined from this region. Sadly, the same region is today the heart of Islam.
The worst of all is the Western world. This part of the world had contributed immensely to the evangelisation of the world. Great men and women like William Carey, Mary Slessor, John Knox, John Wesley, Robert Moffat, David Livingstone, and many others too numerous to mention will be wondering what went wrong when they exited the scene for eternity. An author recently analysed the region and explained that birth rate of 2.11 is required to perpetuate any culture and the general Average for the region is 1.9 with the following breakdown: European Union is now 1.38, Canada is 1.6 and USA is 2.11 while the Muslims that migrated to the same region is 8.1. According to the author's calculation, if nothing is done to alter it, in the next 35 years, France will be Islamic Republic. By 2050, Germany will become Islamic Republic and in 25 years time, USA will have 50million Muslims.
Gordon-Conwell's Center for the Study of Global Christianity's Survey
A recent survey by Gordon-Conwell's Center for the Study of Global Christianity's titled Christianity in its Global Context, 1970-2020 came up with very staggering revelation. According to the survey, one out of five non-Christians in North America doesn't know any Christians. Missiologist Todd M. Johnson and his team found that 20 percent of non-Christians in North America really do not "personally know" any Christians. That's 13,447,000 people—about the population of metropolitan Los Angeles or Istanbul—most of them in the United States.
And that number includes atheists and agnostics, many of whom are former Christians themselves and more likely to have close Christian contacts. Without that group, 60 percent of the non-Christian population has no relationships with Christians.
Worldwide, the numbers are much worse: more than 8 in 10 non-Christians do not personally know a Christian. But Christians only make up a third of the world's population. The United States, meanwhile, ranks in the top 10 Christian countries, with 80 percent of the population identifying as Christians.
The biggest factor in explaining why so many North American non-Christians don't know Christians is immigration, Johnson said. The U.S. attracts more Buddhist, atheist, and agnostic immigrants than any other country in the world. It ranks second for Hindu and Jewish immigrants, and seventh for Muslim immigrants.
But immigrants are also keeping the percentage of those who don't know a Christian from going higher. That's because the U.S. also attracts more Christian immigrants than any other country. And the region that sends the most immigrants to the U.S. is (by far) Latin America, where 90 percent of non-Christians know Christians. (In the CSGC study, Mexico was categorized as Latin America, not North America. As per U.N. categorization, North American countries included Greenland, Bermuda, Saint Pierre & Miquelon, Canada, and the U.S.)
Migrants move into enclaves and don't venture out. But even Christians who live close to Chinatowns and Little Italys don't often venture in, Johnson said.
Separation between religious groups isn't limited to the United States and Canada. But North America has a unique opportunity to connect across religious lines, he said."The United States is a very strategic place for people to interact," he said. "It's ironic in a place with all the freedoms to interact that people don't do it. In light of the deficit of contact, what better thing could happen than to have a bunch of people move into your neighborhood and build houses of worship?”The Journey Ahead
Against this background, I have laboured alongside with my team at Grace Foundation and the Network of Mission Leaders to do my best in the past years and by the grace of God spend the rest of my life to do far much more than I have ever done if Jesus tarries and as the Lord enables me. My primary focus is to change paradigm and raise at least:
- 50 market place missionaries for closed nations in the next 10 years. I have taken the last 10 years to build network relationship in North Africa and across the Arabian Peninsular and a lot of prayers have gone into it.
- Also, 50 more missionaries will be recruited for the local work in Nigeria.
- To accomplish these, intensive mission mobilisation will be carried out using various platform across different nations of the world especially countries with enormous human resources and very low mission awareness. Some of the platforms include mission conferences, publication of magazines, books, etc. To sustain this, our GFIM team and I plan to start off mobilisation offices in at least 10 nations across the world that will facilitate the recruitment of the marketplace missionaries as well as raise logistic workforce, prayers and financial squadrons. The prayer squads will in addition to facilitating the work of the missionaries focus on praying for restoration, revival and the nations.
- Thirdly, our training arm will move to her permanent site at Lamingo with the target of training 300 regular full-time residential missionaries, 200 mission leaders at our Advanced Mission Leaders Institute(AMLI), 400 indigenous leaders through our Indigenous Leadership Course(ILC).
- We also plan to enlarge our Mercy Ministries to increase the number of orphans and vulnerable kids from unreached people background we are taking care of at our Home of Grace(HOG) to a minimum of 75 and train 15 of the ones present now to degree level and sound in the things of God to the point of making significant input in ministry between now and the next ten years and consolidate the ones in other nations.
- We may not be able to accomplish this huge goal in isolation. We will therefore continue to provide leadership to the Network of African Mission Leaders (AMLI), mentor younger missionaries with other mission agencies and network with many other individuals, agencies and church organisations nationally and internationally.
- As the Lord may permit, the next generation should have been made ready to take over the leadership of the ministry in the next 10years if Jesus tarries.
Partnership
God used the input of friends and partners to make the journey to the dark nations possible. It would have been absolutely impossible to get to the height we have attained without their active role of providing the needed moral, prayer and financial support. Groups like Gospel Bankers Inc(GB)., Missions Supporters League(MSL), defunct Rescue Fellowship of Nigeria(RFN), Missions Challenge Network(MCN), Missions Exposures and Training(MET), World Mission Resources, Christ Anointed Hands Fellowship, Our Daily Need Ministries(ODNM), National Hospital Chapel, Chapel of Good News, Women and Children Departments of Oritamefa and the Express Road Baptist Church, ATBU Chapel of Victory, Kingdom Outreach Ministries International, Calvary Bible Church, Christ Redemption Mission, etc. had partnered with us in providing support for some of our missionaries and funded some of our projects on the mission fields at one point or the other. Many individuals too numerous to mention have been used by God to put smiles on our faces. We are eternally grateful to all of them. God will certainly reward you for your labour behind the scene.
The journey ahead is no doubt certainly capital intensive. It will gulp so much in terms of prayers and finance. A lot of this work especially the ones in closed nations will be done under cover because of the security implications. Little and sometimes absolutely no publicity will be given electronically or otherwise and as such may not attract support. We will be depending on God and the confidence you have for us the past 25years for future funding. We pray earnestly that God will lift you financially so you will be able to give sacrificially. We also pray for the Spirit of supplication to come over you so you can consistently support us on your kneel. We trust the Lord to raise those that will independently start prayer squads/chapters across nations that will labour in prayers to bring the ministry vision to reality.
Numbering My Days and The Finishing Line
It was the Psalmist who prayed: So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. (Psalm 90:12). If Jesus tarries to come, we will all certainly die to exit this world. This is one basic truth we sometimes shy away from. Jesus was in tune with this reality when He said in John 9:4: I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. 'The night' is when our life on earth is ended. It also implies when doors of opportunities are closed and when for reasons of age or ill health one may not be able to contribute significantly to world evangelisation any more. 'The night' is not static. It moves and Jesus said with all certainty that it is on the way. In His words: " the night cometh".
In the past few years, I have seen many things happen that substantiated Jesus' statement. First was my health. I have had a running battle with diabetic such that it has drained a lot of the needed strength for the work. Fasting, a very integral part of the life of every successful minister had become very irregular as a result because of the implication on my health. I am thankful to God for modern technology and medicine that has helped me to manage this challenge for many years. I am also thankful to Him for provision of healing in His words but the truth still remains that I can no longer cope with stress as much as I did in my early days in ministry. It serves as warning that whatever is left for me to do, I must get them done now before it is too late. I therefore live my life with every sense of urgency.
Also, with the little strength left, I noticed that many part of the world I could easily access in the past, the doors of the opportunities are shutting up. The North East of Nigeria with the continuous menace of the Jihadists, Boko Haram is one of such. Missionaries and other Christian leaders are being killed and threatened. We recently had reasons to withdraw some of our missionaries from this part of the country for safety. This is a place where in the past we travelled day and night in the past. The story is different now.
At Jordan, we received report of massive conversions of Syrian refugees and had prayed, planned and raised fund to deploy a missionary to join the team on ground to disciple the converts. Just at the last minute, we have to suspend the trip indefinitely because of increase in volatility in the country, to access it, we were to be assigned Tourist Police which is detrimental to our work mainly done under cover. Again, the night seems to have come in some ways for that part of the world. Another case study is that of Mauritania, an Islamic State requiring urgent gospel attention. It was part of West Africa and was easily accessible by citizens of Economic Community of West Africa State(ECOWAS). They have pulled out and joined the Arab League making it absolutely difficult to access now.
At Jordan, we received report of massive conversions of Syrian refugees and had prayed, planned and raised fund to deploy a missionary to join the team on ground to disciple the converts. Just at the last minute, we have to suspend the trip indefinitely because of increase in volatility in the country, to access it, we were to be assigned Tourist Police which is detrimental to our work mainly done under cover. Again, the night seems to have come in some ways for that part of the world. Another case study is that of Mauritania, an Islamic State requiring urgent gospel attention. It was part of West Africa and was easily accessible by citizens of Economic Community of West Africa State(ECOWAS). They have pulled out and joined the Arab League making it absolutely difficult to access now.
There are however many needy nations still open and beckoning for help. May the Lord help us to engage them before they draw the curtain. Like Jesus said in John 4:34-35 which is my resolve and prayer : "My food, is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work". Let us join hands together to get the job done now before it is too late. When you are dead, opportunities for you to make input will be over. There will be no mission work in heaven.
