Years ago, he saw the “Jesus” film and became a Christian. Today he travels around Guinea, showing the film to people who have not yet heard the film’s story, driving as much as 20 hours to reach a group.
This pastor in the west African nation is one of many passionate Christians a team from Greenfield met on a trip there in November, one of many they hope to partner with and encourage.
Brandywine Community Church wants to work with Christians in this French-speaking nation of 12.7 million people, hoping to transform health care, education and other aspects of life there.
A team of four leaders from the church in Greenfield traveled to Guinea to meet local church leaders and prepare to launch the PEACE Plan there. They landed there with Bob Bradberry, a missions pastor with Saddleback Church in California.
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Saddleback, where “The Purpose-Driven Life” author Rick Warren is founding pastor, began partnering with the country of Rwanda about 15 years ago. The aim was to combat five problems identified as most pressing: spiritual emptiness, lack of servant leadership, extreme poverty, pandemic diseases such as malaria and yellow fever, and illiteracy and lack of education.
“Only the church of Jesus Christ is big enough” as a group to tackle such problems, said the Rev. Mark Wright, senior pastor at Brandywine. So Christians from Saddleback and within Rwanda faced them together with strategies that form the PEACE acronym: Planting churches, Equipping servant leaders, Assisting the poor and helping them be self-sustaining, Caring for the sick and Educating the next generation.
“As churches stepped up, renewal spread across communities,” reads an annual report on the PEACE Plan issued by Saddleback. “Vulnerable people gained access to clean water, orphaned children found loving families, the poor developed money management skills, children were educated, and the sick received care.”
Wright said these gains drew the attention of neighboring African nations that became interested in the PEACE Plan. Saddleback gathered with leaders from 19 countries in Africa at the annual All-Africa Pastors Gathering in Rwanda in February 2019, along with church leaders from the United States, Brazil and Costa Rica.
Wright and a group from Brandywine were there. They helped with a national work day doing cleanup on the streets and saw some of the other results of the plan: malaria medicine and basic medical training given to local churches, drastically cutting the distance to medical care; and orphans of the past genocide adopted, with the country’s last orphanage about to close.
Saddleback has invited other churches it deems healthy to be matched up with an African country as partners.
“Most every country in Africa knows what happened in Rwanda in the 15-year period,” Wright said. “They’re saying, ‘Hey, come to our country.’”
When Wright and three other leaders — mission and students pastor Paul Galbraith, teaching pastor Mark Tabb and elder Jim Flood — traveled to Guinea, they knew many there had already heard about the PEACE Plan and Rwanda. They also knew Warren’s book is well known all over the world. But the open door to talk about the plan went far beyond that.
Unknown to the team, a large annual gathering of churches was going on during their stay. A bishop met the group at the airport, asking Saddleback’s Bradberry to be main speaker at the gathering. Bradberry deferred, saying the team from Brandywine were the ones they’d be seeing over the coming years. He said Wright should speak. The bishop agreed.
“I was excited,” Wright would later tell his congregation in Greenfield, “and felt like I was going to puke all at the same time.”
Word spread via social media that Wright would be speaking during the four-hour service, so many in the Brandywine congregation were praying for him.
“What you’re doing here is beautiful,” he recalls telling those gathered, “but God is calling you to go to a new level of unity like you’ve never gone before … a unity in action … I believe God wants to do in Guinea what he did in Rwanda.”
The message was enthusiastically received by the thousands gathered.
“What just stood out to me was the passion they have for their country and their people,” Galbraith said. “They know that they can thrive as local congregations as they partner together.”
Several government officials in the audience later voiced their support. After speaking to the crowd, a crew interviewed Wright for television, which happened often during the trip and was another surprise.
Three more Brandywine trips are planned for 2020. In between, a team of 14 church leaders in Guinea receives monthly leadership training from the team in Greenfield through videoconferencing.
Over the next few years, the church plans to send some 500 of its members to Rwanda to participate in ministry there. Wright said it’s good any time people can gain a broader vision to pray and to care about people.
He’s looking forward to the next trip and the next monthly “meeting” via technology.
“We’re looking forward to seeing the people we met,” he said. “Our heart is with them. We already miss them.”
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Guinea is the 29th African country to be paired with a church as part of the PEACE Plan. Eight other countries, among them South Africa, remain available.
Guinea, which is predominantly Muslim, is on the west coast of Africa
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