“Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.” -Ephesians 4:25

That verse is PACKED with what the LORD sent us out to do today! What a blessing today was on so very many levels. We had our regular Sudanese breakfast of Mundri bread and scrambled eggs (or fried, whichever you want to label them) and then we packed up in the truck and headed out for the village of Buagyi (pronounced /bua gi/). This trip was just a bit shorter than yesterday’s, so today it only took us about 2 hours and 15 minutes to get there. What a relief, a total of about 30 minutes knocked off the journey. Although, some of the guys got a little creative, and John and Eric were able to use some diapers (such a sweet gift made for the ladies by John’s wife and some friends back home) as cushions until it was time to get out of the car. VERY INVENTIVE!
Now, to get to why this is the verse that I felt most appropriate for today… this is exactly what we did today! We proclaimed truth, God’s truth about Him to the people of the village of Buagyi. And what a privilege that was. We decided last night to change the order of our days today and instead of doing teaching first, the men were able to spend concentrated time with the other men getting an understanding of their knowledge of the gospel. Eric and Yancy were able to spend time with the pastor, and John and Fred spent time with the other men from the church that were there. This took up the entire morning for the men, and they provided the teachings in the afternoon. One statement that a gentleman made after it was presented was, “we know that you have brought the Word of God and that it is true. Because we know it is true, we have no questions.” WOW, what a blessing to have been a part of that teaching!!!!
The ladies continued their regular schedule of teaching the gospel and oral hydration solution in the morning. However, since Paul (the Archbishop of the world- if you know him, you’ll completely understand this) was our interpreter, we started with a song that repeated “Jesus is #1, Jesus is #1″ with various hand motions. This served to liven the ladies up to be ready to engage in our presentation. They loved the pictures and stories that we shared with them and because over 1/2 of these ladies had Bibles, we were able to look up the individual scriptures of the salvation story and read them in English and then have a lady from the church read the same verse from the Moru Bible. WHAT A TREAT!! This really seemed to bring the message more to life for these ladies. After lunch, while Eric and John were teaching the men, the ladies were able to complete the asessment of Biblical understanding with 3 of the ladies in the church.
At our nightly debriefing and devotional time, Daniel shared some with us regarding unity in the body of Christ. This simply propelled our conversation to “how can we best be unified with our South Sudanese brothers and sisters?” We discussed the information that we obtained from today’s assessment and from yesterday’s assessment and realized that what is most needed for these people is Biblical training. Pastors are included in this need, by the way. They need a hunger for the Word of God, and they need to be able to understand it. They are aware that the Spirit interprets the scriptures for them, however they did not show us any evidence of where to find a story in the Bible about sin/corruption, redemption, changing after the new birth, etc. This led to a conversation that informed us that we are probably the first people to be in any of these villages specifically for teaching. Each of these villages has been visited by Neverthirst to make certain that they have a clean source of water for drinking, cooking, etc. They have also been visited by teams from BrookHills and other Four Corners Ministries’ teams, but these have typically focused on medical needs, not teaching. So, at the end of yesterday, we were so hard on our South Sudanese brothers and sisters who believe in a works-based salvation (or really, God PLUS ); today, we walk away very burdened knowing the amount of training that is needed. Jeffreys was very open and honest with us about his needs, and he expressed a desire to provide training to the pastors specifically of each village and to help them implement “Sunday School” so that they will have an organized fashion in which to learn more of God and His relationship with man. He also asked that we pray for him, and we ask that everyone reading this message will pray for Jeffreys and his team and the work that they are doing to diligently work to make the gospel known amongst the people of South Sudan.