Adopt a Village

Your church can adopt a village on its own or partner with other churches to share the task. Send a small team of people to Mali for a vision trip and choose a village where Jesus is unknown. Then send consecutive teams of four people to the same village, maybe even as often as every two months. Each team will stay in the village a week or 10 days, returning home to train the next team. Keep sending teams until a Bambara church is established -- one that is actively planting churches in other villages. You'll tell simple Bible stories using translators. You'll sit around fires at night and drink tea. You'll dip your hand in the rice bowl with them and share their lives. Your church might even choose to build a simple house where the teams can stay. Or, you might choose to just rely on the ready hospitality of your Bambara friends.

A Bambara village is a community of closeness lead by the chief and his elders. It's a world of mud huts and cooking fires. Marriages are polygamous, and life is hard. Men and women spend their days in the African sun, farming peanuts, cotton, corn and millet in the dusty soil. Mothers tie fetishes around their babies' waists to protect them from evil. Most Bambara follow the form of another world religion, but for many it's a veneer over their traditional beliefs in sacrifices, fetishes and spirits.

Will your church come? Adopting a village is reaching the unreached. Contact us if you want to explore the possibility.