Let me introduce you to Jepthe Sawadogo from Burkina Faso, West Africa. His story illustrates how God is working through trained leaders to bring redemptive life to Africa.
When Jepthe was born, his father, Issofou, was not a Christian. Prior to Jepthe’s birth, his parents went to a local witchdoctor for help because they had not been able to have children. When they did conceive, the witchdoctor said their son must be called Yoiro. However, Jepthe’s father came to know Jesus and discarded the name the witchdoctor had chosen for his son.
After taking that stand for Christ, Issofou struggled to follow Jesus while living in that village. He decided to move his family and follow a call to ministry by enrolling in the Bible school in Koubri. While growing up, Jepthe watched his father carefully and, as a young boy, accepted Jesus as his Savior and was baptized in water.
Two years later, Jepthe was baptized with the Holy Spirit while praying privately in the chapel of the Koubri Bible School, and at the same time he received a call to preach the gospel. But without financial help, he was unable to attend Bible school. Jepthe became a successful machinist, and the money he earned paid for his secular education and enabled him to enroll at the same Bible school in Koubri as did his father.
After graduation, Jepthe planted a church in Kaya in the central-north region of Burkina Faso. In time, the church grew to over 700 people.
With scholarship help from Africa’s Hope, Jepthe earned first a master’s degree at West Africa School of Theology in Lome, Togo, and then completed a doctoral program at the Assemblies of God Pan-Africa Theological Seminary (PAThS), a multinational school offering PhD programs in Bible-Theology, Missions, Education and Leadership.
During his doctoral studies, Jepthe was asked to become the director of the Koubri Bible School. Today, he also serves as the general treasurer of the Burkina Faso Assemblies of God.
About 280 resident students are trained each year under Dr. Jepthe Sawadogo’s leadership at the Koubri Bible School. The students with their wives and children plus the Bible school staff comprise a community on campus of over 900 people.
While attending school, students plant new churches in the Koubri region. After graduation, church planters are sent throughout Burkina Faso and to the surrounding countries of Benin, Chad, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mali and Niger.
Like Jepthe, those students have tremendous potential but they depend on gifts from friends like you for textbooks and training materials.
Africa’s Hope is planning to resource the schools in and around Burkina Faso with a shipment of 3,500 Discovery Series textbooks and other training materials, but we need your help to print and ship them. A gift of $5 will provide one textbook, and $150 will fund 30 textbooks for a class. Any amount is welcome, so please give as you are able: $10, $50, $100 or more.
Your gift will help students, who are called to ministry, to take the gospel to people in their country and surrounding countries, many of whom live without a meaningful witness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Yours for an increasingly redeemed and transformed Africa,
John Easter, Ph.D.
Comments are closed.