Until The Lost Know They Are Not Forgotten
By Sika Yawo
Despite the government’s green light for the expansion of churches all over our country, church planting in Togo remains a tedious task and faces a lot of challenges, especially for the missions who teach the truth of the Gospel as it is. Most communities, therefore, display hostility to true Christianity in various ways.
Sometimes church planting attempts face spiritual and physical challenges as well. In the town of Aneho, one of the areas in the South of Togo, the indigenous openly display their pagan beliefs and spiritual powers during evangelism campaigns. The aims of these challenges are to frighten evangelists and instill fright in the minds of those likely to repent. In some other areas, evangelists face verbal threats, violent oppositions, and mockery. In some rural areas, village people use powers of darkness to cast spells onto God’s people but in vain. Sometimes, failing in their attempts to harm Christians, they rather use their powers to destroy materials used for evangelism, provoke accidents, or even make rain fall in order to make open-air evangelism impossible.
In my own native village, during my last evangelism campaign, personally I was openly threatened with death by an old witch. But praise the Lord that, though I was victim of a car accident, I was miraculously protected by the Lord.
When we first visited the village of Fiokondji, we were openly threatened and chased away by a group of people who displayed their hostility to our evangelistic efforts in their area. But we knew we must return, they were among many Togolese unreached areas, truly lost, but we could not forget them, no matter the danger.
The Lord brought us a school teacher from that village who moved away many years before and became a Christian. His desire had always been to return with the Gospel. Using the vehicle of education, we worked with him to establish a school, the only one available in this village. This would be the springboard and catalyst for the Gospel in that town and to start a church.
Following the start of the school, the village leadership was still quite antagonistic to the use of our Bible lessons with the students, which had spread to some adults as well. We decided to use the visit last spring of our General Director, Ron Barnes, as an occasion to have him preach, give an invitation, and then announce we would begin a church the following Sunday with those new believers. We felt his visit might soften the hearts of the villagers and leadership.
It was truly an anointed event and as he shared, the leadership seemed to soften as he spoke and seemed to pay close attention to his message. Many were saved that day and the church was established right on that spot.
But it wasn’t long before the church in Fiokondji began to undergo excessive persecution and the population told us to leave the school premises where we started worshiping God. They refused to rent us a place to worship and now we either have to buy land or leave the village. They have also made the prices so high it is not affordable, not to mention unreasonable. Workers from the village are refusing to help build it. So the high price of land, the need to bring in outside builders, and the escalated prices of materials will make it very difficult to build.
Further complicating things is the false accusations, by the villagers, against the headmaster of the school that helped us to start this work and who unfairly put him in the prison of Aného. As of this writing the director is still an inmate there.
The church that began with 87 people, today is reduced to 27 including eleven teenagers, nine adults, and seven children because the parents forbade their children to no longer come, fearing that their animist belief will disappear completely, and others feared the retribution and persecution.
But we’ll not stop, not in Aneho, not in Fiokondji, not in Togo, no matter what the cost, until the lost know they are not forgotten.
