Chris Davis, pastor of Whitton Avenue Bible Church in Phoenix, Arizona, also contributed to this story.
As two young men rode donkeys toward their parents’ farm in the small West African country of Burkina Faso, they met Pingdewinde Sam, who was traveling to the village of Goumsin to assess results of an agricultural assistance program. This could have been an everyday encounter between travelers, but this meeting was different. Sam carried French-translation copies of John Piper’s The Dangerous Duty of Delight. He stopped to chat with the two, gave each a copy, and encouraged them to pass it along to their friends after reading.
The young men received the books with excitement. “There is definitely a real hunger [in Burkina Faso] for the gospel and for Jesus Christ,” Sam observes. “And praise God, people are really open to hear and to listen.”
Sam is from Burkina Faso’s capital city of Ouagadougou and is a Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University. In 2011 he started Teêbo, an outreach ministry that provides humanitarian aid, educational resources, and opportunities to share the good news. One of his methods of outreach is a partnership with The Gospel Coalition International Outreach (TGC-IO) to bring theologically sound resources to his country. Sam has helped distribute three IO Packing Hope projects; during the summer of 2014, he brought 112 copies of The Dangerous Duty of Delight to Burkina Faso.
Fruitful Harvest
Located in the western curve of Africa, landlocked Burkina Faso shares borders with six countries including Mali and Ghana. According to Joshua Project, its current population of around 18 million is comprised of 79 people groups. Seventy different languages are spoken, with French as the official language.
The majority of people are Muslim; however, Sam says Islam is frequently combined with animism, especially in rural areas. The 2010 edition of Operation World reports a Christian population of slightly over 20 percent, which represents a huge increase from around 10,000 evangelicals in 1960 to 1.44 million in 2010.
“What I really love about Burkina Faso, one of the things, is that when people decide to give their lives to Jesus Christ . . . they do it with all their heart,” Sam says. “They do face struggles and difficulties, but once they make up their mind to really embrace the life of Jesus Christ, they do not give up.”
Many in Burkina Faso are affected by poverty, lack of access to education, and unstable food resources. In 2014 the country was ranked 181st out of 187 countries on the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index.
The fragile economy adds to difficulties for Christians as a religious minority. Through Sam’s experiences with Teêbo, he has seen new Christ followers ostracized by their families. Women and children who become believers are particularly vulnerable without family support; Sam says husbands can ask their wives to leave their households, and parents can stop paying school tuition for their children. Even when experiencing persecution, Sam notes there is a “radical commitment” to “surrender everything to Christ.”
Nurturing Hearts for Christ
The swift rise of evangelical Christianity in Burkina Faso requires solid church leadership, which is largely dependent on the availability of sound biblical materials. Such resources are not affordable in Burkina Faso, however, and people have difficulty accessing theological support.
As a minority, Christians here are further challenged by unreached people groups.
“In the city, you can take a specific district and you will see at least two to three churches,” Sam remarks. “Unfortunately, some of those churches are not really going out into rural areas or trying to reach people who haven’t heard the gospel.”
Through Teêbo’s outreach and his partnership with TGC-IO, Sam has seen God faithfully provide for some of these needs. He brought many copies of The Dangerous Duty of Delight to be distributed at Teêbo’s evangelism conference in Ouagadougou last summer. The two-day event focused on inspiring young adults to share Christ in the city and in the villages.
“We gave them the books so that they can actually read and also share with other people, or perhaps nonbelievers, or even believers who are seeking to grow in Christ,” Sam says.
Would It Be Possible?
He carried a few more copies of the book to Goumsin on that day he met the two young men. He also gave books to farmers in the agricultural assistance program and to church leaders in the village.
When Pingdewinde Sam returned to Burkina Faso in December 2014, many of the conference attendees had the same question: would it be possible to receive more books?
Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?
In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
