How did we get started?

Churches in the villages of Burkina Faso see children as a nuisance rather than the future of the church. Children under the age of 15 are mostly babysat through church and ignored during outreaches. There are complicated cultural reasons behind this, but it has stunted the growth of the church.

We have teamed up with a dynamic African pastor named Joseph Dayamba to begin training village churches in children’s ministry. We quickly realized that a 2-week seminar would not be enough to overcome the cultural obstacles, so we came up with a one-year program that would be extremely “hands-on” and practical.

In January 2005, we chose a region that has about 15 churches and told each of them to give us one believer to train in children’s ministry. We brought them in to the capital city of Ouagadougou for 2 weeks of training on how to have kid’s clubs with games, songs, skits and Bible stories. All of this was very new to them, but they loved the training and seemed very enthusiastic. Each one made a commitment to do a kid’s club once a week in their village.

Three weeks later, we decided to make a “surprise visit” to one of their clubs to see how the clubs were going (or if they were going!). We were amazed! Through the 15 clubs, over 500 Muslim kids had committed to Christ! Some kids were being persecuted for accepting Christ, but they continued to attend the club.

Many of the clubs had over 100 children come each week, along with another 50 to 75 adults. Churches were growing and there was a church that was about to be planted through the clubs. We knew we were on the right track and have continued in the frequent follow-up visits to each children’s pastor, encouraging and offering advice.

The head pastors of these 15 churches were seeing the fruit of the training and requested for Joel and Joseph to do some seminars for them as well, which they gladly accepted. After the first pastor’s seminar, one of the older pastors spoke up and said “I used to view children as a nuisance, but now I realize that it is the children that are waking us up spiritually.” Wow!

There are still millions of children in Burkina Faso who have neer heard of Jesus