Discipling new believers is full of blessings and challenges. Discipling new believers in a cross-cultural context magnifies these blessings and challenges in a whole new way. From mentoring them as they grow in their daily walks with the Lord to watching helplessly as they fall into sin, the role of discipleship as a missionary brings out a new level of emotional highs and lows.

 

We began discipling these believers with a short, eight-lesson series of stories we felt would be helpful to them as new Christians. These stories covered everything from assurance of salvation to baptism and the Lord’s Supper. During this time, a few issues became apparent, which would continue to challenge us over the course of our ministry. How could we consistently and in a timely manner baptize people in a land stricken with drought? How much time do we take on a lesson when the people are not picking up on it as quick as we planned? Just how “indigenous” does this indigenous church planting need to be? How do we balance reproducibility with the desire for efficient church planting? This was just the beginning of what would become a never ending list of problems that needed solving. This church planting thing wasn’t going to be nearly as easy as we thought! Fortunately, God is continually reminding us that we aren’t in charge of “solving” the problems. We need only to be obedient and God will work them out.

 

During this time, our team took on a story-crafting project. The goal of this project was to craft Bible stories in the heart language of the people, not only creating a culturally and linguistically accurate set of stories, but also providing a resource tool to be used for these new believers.

 

Our long-term discipleship plan was to begin by going through the creation to Christ story set, using the newly crafted stories. The new, Mahafaly believers were already familiar with the stories, having heard them during the evangelism time. Now, they would really learn the stories. We followed the ST4T model of sharing the story, having them learn and repeat the story, and then study the story through a set of questions which taught them how to truly learn about God, man, and themselves. We uploaded an audio version of the story set onto a solar powered device, which we distributed to the groups of believers. Each night, the eager believers would sit outside their huts and listen to the stories. The process of discipling them through this oral method was much trickier than we anticipated, but looking back we can see how, with patience and commitment, God used His stories to change not only individuals, but whole communities.

 

It took us about one year to work through that original story set with the new believers. During that year, we watched as they grew and struggled in their new faith. Many “fell away” and stopped coming to our meetings. But as a core group formed in each village, we witnessed God do an amazing work. The people began meeting on their own. They were diligent in not only learning the stories but in sharing them, and leaders arose. We encouraged and challenged them as they learned what it meant to be Christians in a Mahafaly context. More often than naught, we felt helpless during this time. Who were we to tell them how to handle the problem of having three wives or how to respond to the constant threat of cattle thieves and the brutal violence it created between villages? Instead, we prayed for, encouraged, and discipled them in God’s Word. And amazingly, though not always in our own time, God’s Spirit transformed these people from the inside out.