This was my first trip to Africa. I went as part of my work with Team Expansion and Hope International University and in general the Kingdom of God.  And what a trip it was.  I went at the invitation of Jim Phillips.   He has been working there for 3 years, making several trips a year.  He started a leadership program with dozens of different Christian denominations and evangelical churches 3 years ago.  During that year the 60-70 churches reported having 50 baptisms.  Two years ago Jim first introduced them to It’s All About Relationship, the evangelism tool I use and teach in the Relational Evangelism online course I teach with Hope International University.  It was a simple 5-6 hour training.  And with that little bit of introduction they started using IAAR.  In the following year and a half those same churches reported over 900 baptisms and that was with 16 of them not giving a report.  So in January we did a three day training (a whole lot more than 6 hours) with better materials and resources.  We had 263 attend the training in three major areas/cities.  It was one of the more amazing times of my life. The people were open, hungry, smart, committed, eager.  One pastor after another said “We have never gotten this kind of training before.”  The pastor of the congregation where the training was held in one of the large cities (the picture above is of the men who attended that training)  told Jim about 2 weeks after the training, “Bucia (his city) in on fire.  We have never seen anything like this.  We are getting reports of lots of people already being lead to the Lord by our pastors and others going out and teaching IAAR to them.”
              They took the training and are going out.  Wow. What a novel idea!!!  Jim Phillips has a goal of training 4000 TRAINERS in IAAR in Africa over the coming 5 years.
He has asked me to help carry that task out.  I’ll tell more about my thinking on that in the near future.

   Oh, I long to see what I saw happen in Africa happen in other countries including the U.S.  Praying to God for this.  You can get introduced to IAAR through the 8 Relational Evangelism course offered through HIU 5 times a year.  Write Phil Towne at pbtowne@hiu.edu  for more information.  The next course starts in March.
              Your’s for the World
              John Hendee