ONE Prayer Update: Sudan

As many of you know that we are coordinating the missional elements of the ONE Prayer campaign, i thought it would be fun to list the weekly updates that we are receiving from each of our field partners in Sudan, India, Cambodia and China. As a result, please see below for what we recently received from our partner in Sudan.
-sj
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Jesus walked from town to town with his disciples, but Sudan, Africa's largest country, is more than 100 times larger than the territory of Judea and Samaria. 55 church planters in two groups are already in training and have begun to share Christ in the villages of two unreached districts. Planting churches in rural towns and villages in Sudan can be very difficult because people quickly recognize and are suspicious of strangers. The church planters learn to go first to one of the village elders and ask for permission to visit the village and start a school. The word "school" does not mean an institution with a building, but something as simple as a teacher sitting under the tree or in the shade of a hut with any "students" willing to learn.

One of the church planters currently working with/through the ONE Prayer network (we will call him Michael) approached an elder in the village he was praying for. He asked the elder for permission but was refused. The elder said that everyone in the village was Muslim. The elder walked with Michael through the whole village to prove that there were no Christians there. Michael left, but returned regularly to the village, always visiting the elder and reading to him some passages from the Bible. Finally, he confessed that he had grown up in a Christian family, but did not know anything about the Bible. In order to live in this village, he had converted to Islam and taken a Muslim name. But now that the elder was hearing the Bible, he wanted Michale to start a school in his home. On the first "official" day of the school, almost 50 people came to listen.

Michael and all of the church planters visit several villages each week. The bikes that they use (like the one featured above in the inset picture) greatly improve their mobility and outreach capability. The early stage of church planting involves a lot of conversation and relationship building, and the model offered is based on Ecclesiastes 11:6 ("Sow seed in the morning and at evening, let not your hands be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that or whether both will do equally well.").
8/1/08
rvg