How 57 people came to Christ
after a car broke down

Intrigued by the number of churches being planted among the Dagbani people from FCBH listening groups, Hosanna decided to investigate. Morgan Jackson, International Director of Hosanna Ministries, recounts the amazing story the program’s overseer told him about one of them:

Dagbani village. Tamale, northern Ghana. Photo: UBS/Geoffrey Stamp (GHA00T-39)

NORTHERN GHANA — Three years ago I was in Northern Ghana and I’d been asking the overseer of the Dagbani program to explain this phenomenon – how they were planting [so many] churches. He explained through a translator.

He was out [in the countryside] delivering some of the cassettes to workers. He has just an old, beaten-up little car and in these areas there are really rough dirt roads and his car broke down. He was with his wife and so he sent her to get a part! Now it took her three days catching rides on different trucks and vehicles to get back to a market village where she could buy the part and then come back.

Played cassettes

He stayed with the vehicle because if you leave the vehicle, when you come back, there won’t be anything left! It will be stripped! So he stayed with the vehicle but he had the New Testament in Dagbani with his cassette recorder and nearby there was a Dagbani village. So during the day and the evening, he would go over there and play the cassettes for the people and the people were gathering together to listen.

The Dagbani are farmers and they’re poor and 98 per cent of them are Islamic. These farming villages – they range between 60 and a couple of hundred people normally. Then you get larger market villages where there’d maybe be several thousand. But this was one of these small farm villages and so as he would play the cassette, they would just gather under the tree and listen, hear it, discuss it, argue about it, and then the next night he’d bring it back to play again.

Well, when his wife brought the part back, he fixed the car. Then he went back to the village and said, “How many of you want to become Christians?” and 40 of the people – almost half the village – raised their hands. So he went to the chief and said, “You have these 40 people who want to become believers.”

So the chief gave them a plot of land where they could build a church. Now, two-and-a-half years later, there’s still no church there, but people are still a community or a church. So I asked, “Well, what’s happened in the two and a half years since you left a set of cassettes there?”

“Well,” he said, “one person has backslid.”

“There are still 39 people in the church?” I asked.

“No, no,” he said. “There are 57! – and 18 more have come through the listening.”

So 57 people have come to Christ simply because his car broke down. And he was trying to explain to me how easy it is to plant a church in these villages if the Word of God is in the language of the people. It is unbelievable.

(WR 376/16 - 4/5.03)