Nigeria Missions: Dir Field Update

I is great to be kept secure in the face of the various weapons the enemy daily fashion against us. Though few, we are delighted to report that the Dirawa converts are beginning to give helping hands to the work among their people. It is sweet to see how God is using these first fruits to share the gospel and live the life of Christ.

The converts and I go out frequently to evangelise the people and the responses were quite positive. Our greatest battle has consistently remained getting them to come to church. They kept promising to come but do not fulfil their promise. The School of Cross-Cultural Missions students who came on field trip for two months also gave helping hands in house-to-house evangelism. They took advantage of praying for the sick to get some persons to surrender their lives to Christ. Elise Maliake had problem with language but her colleague Matthew Ganu helped in interpretation.

At the Church level, we concentrated on teaching then how to live above sin and the basics of the Christian faith. About 13 of the converts were relatively regular in church. We hosted the Christian medical students from University of Jos and some medical doctors from Jos for medical outreach. They brought drugs and treated the people free of charge. They also left behind drugs which we use to treat people even after they left.

The level of the people’s suffering in the area of grinding their food was so high. They trekked several kilometres to grind their grain since our grinding machine broke down. To the glory of God, we have repaired it again and it is serving the people even though the little profit that comes in is being use to maintain it. We are particularly glad that, as usual, it attracts the villagers including the hardened ones to the mission house which provide opportunity to reach them with the gospel. We are grateful to the Missions Supporters League (MSL) Wukari for providing the machine over 6 years ago and for investing heavily to repair it earlier this year before the latest breakdown. We covet your prayers for the machine that it will not be counter productive. Sometime, the missionaries have no option but to sink their little upkeep allowance on the maintenance of the machine and before they recover it, it breaks down again.
The literacy programme has started yielding result. Yusuf Chiroma is in class four now while Ayuba M. Sani is in secondary school form 1. Salisu is in form three now. God blessed Joel Dukiya and his wife with a baby boy on October 27, 2005.

We are facing very serious distraction from the man who donated the piece of land that we built our mission house. He is insisting that we pay a ridiculous amount for the land now as against the earlier donation. He is charging us N70,000. We discovered that the Muslims are instigating him to do so in a bid to drive us from the land. Initially, we wanted to ignore the threat but with the constant pressure, it is either we pay him or move. We already have a big church on the land and seeing that it is a demonic attack, we resolved to pray and trust God for the money. Please pray along with us.