Jos, Nigeria …. [ANN Staff]
The first overseas Seventh-day Adventist visitors in nearly 20 years to Northern Nigeria were a Korean New Testament professor, an Irish pastor/evangelist, and a Danish missiologist who was a missionary there
35 years ago. Hyunsok Doh, Patrick Boyle and Borge Schantz spent a month in Nigeria working with 49 local pastors to teach the message of the gospel. The ministers had varied backgrounds in African cultures and insights into the challenges Adventist Christians face living South of the Sahara Desert.
The meetings, titled “A Path Straight to the Hedges,” was to “expand the Adventist Church in a somewhat hostile environment, lecturing and encouraging pastors and church members in the special situations,” said Schantz. “[We] also wanted to explain the biblical message in such a way [that] it will meet the special needs local cultures and religions have created.”
Doh, Boyle and Schantz led separate public evangelistic campaigns simultaneously on 10 consecutive nights and saw an average attendance of 3,000 at all three meetings total. With a team of nearly 30 ministers, the speakers met daily for instruction, prayers and reports.
Nightly meetings were followed by three days of visiting people who showed interest in the message, and three nights of advanced Bible studies or baptismal classes.
Schantz said the addition of new members — 86 were baptized — was significant for the small Christian fellowship in the predominantly Muslim area just South of the Sahara Desert. Here, just a few months before the group arrived, a fight between religious groups resulted in the murder of 160 Christians, among them two Adventists.
“You came at [a] time you were very much needed. [The] programs have brought a spirit of reconciliation and the promotion of peaceful coexistence in the various campaign areas,” S.D. Magaji, president of the church in Northeast Nigeria, wrote in a letter.
Schantz said they had to understand cultural differences in order to explain the Christian message in a way that people who were longtime adherents to traditional African religions would understand. “We did not go overboard in attempts to act as Nigerians, although we paid respect to their customs and cultures. We focused on the challenges, even dilemmas, of the non-Biblical religious and cultural backgrounds of the people. A neglect of these thorny problems has in many cases led to a syncretistic kind of Christianity,” said Schantz.
Schantz said his team did not focus on the number of people they baptized — their goal was to see that those who wanted to join the church would be well-founded in the message. “We only accepted for baptism those who were approved by the local Nigerian pastors,” Schantz explained. They encouraged local pastors to continue visiting new converts.
The evangelists also spent two Sabbaths, or Saturdays, with nearly 4,000 members in the Adventist Church to clarify and explain certain beliefs.
Copyright © 2005 by Adventist News Network.
