Vincent helps young people learn
from his mistakes

CONGO, Republic — Vincent Ngoye’s family are what you would call ‘well off’ but in his teenage years Vincent began to lead a double life: feigning good behaviour at home, when spending a few hours with his friends he would easily smoke a couple of packets of cigarettes and he drank until he was drunk. In short, he liked ‘the good life’.

 Then one day the girl he was going out with invited him to a charismatic Catholic prayer meeting. That was the start of a transformation of his life by the Word of God.

Impression

As he listened to the sermon, he got the impression that the preacher was addressing him in particular. He was amazed. “How can he know these things about me when we’ve never met?” he thought. But with a shrug he concluded that the girl must have told the others in the group what his life was like.

 But the occasion marked the return of order to his life, and the beginning of a quest for God to whom, in his darker moments, he prayed – though he did not, at that stage, really know him.

Lord and Saviour

 Thus began a series of meetings with the Christian group who were to lead him to the experience of being born again as he accepted Christ as his Lord and Saviour. The transformation was not long in coming, and he took advantage of every occasion to deepen his knowledge of the God who so loved him. He took part in Bible studies organised by the diocese of Pointe-Noire.

 Happy at the change, Vincent, now 47, wanted to share his experience with young people and he became the moving spirit behind the Bible Savings Club, a group which was formed within a Catholic parish with the idea of making young people aware of the need to acquire a Bible.

He urges the young Christians to put money aside to buy their own Bible as a way of teaching them to give more value to the Word of God – like Mary Jones, the young Welsh girl who, at the end of the 18th century, walked 25 miles in the hope of exchanging her savings for a Bible of her own.