I recently was in Ethiopia to train national church planting leaders from several countries in Africa and the Middle East. A leader who overseas the countries in the northwest part of Africa, typically called Francophone Africa because French is the predominant trade language, shared with me about the way God is working in Côte d’Ivoire, also know as Ivory Coast.
Here is the story of a young believer and his passion to make Christ known to his fellow students:
“I come from a very active Muslim family. As a teenager, I had a lot of questions that I asked myself that remained unanswered. As my parents prayed at the mosque I went there too but I did a lot of things that were not interesting. Among these things, I was sneering up honest citizens through the internet. One day while I was at the Cyber, I heard a pastor talk about hell with the manager. This intrigued me because I was afraid of dying and worse still I did not want to go to hell. A second time, the same pastor came to the cyber giving us brochures and then he invited us to his church. I felt I had no peace in myself because I was really disturbed. In the days that followed, I decided to go to church. That day, I was really touched by the preaching and then I felt a deep peace that invaded my whole being. So I decided to become a Christian. I hid to go to church but my parents eventually found out. Having known it, they used every means to stop me from going to church but to no avail. My father, meanwhile, decided not to pay my classes. So last year he did not pay for my classes but I was able to go to school by God’s grace and this year, seeing that I did not stop classes, he was confused and paid my classes. I continue to go to church and pray for their conversion. It is true that I only have a year of conversion but I am burning to win my university to Christ”