Home Field

Missionaries guide Nigerians to evangelize their own

By Emily Peters

NIGERIA, West Africa—Becky Stonecypher smiled like a proud mother as she watched thousands of Nigerian believers parade out of the big tent-meeting into the sweltering city streets of Owerri to spend the day sharing the Gospel.

They marched out to the cadence of a tribal drum, wearing matching yellow T-shirts printed with "Operation City Storm" – a long-term project to reach all of Nigeria's large cities.

It's just one example of how Baptists in Nigeria are catching the missions vision.

"This is everything that we as missionaries work for," said Stonecypher, who has served with the International Mission Board in Nigeria for almost 20 years. "We love to see them with a passion to reach their own people for Christ."

The Nigerian Baptist Convention, known for its colorfully clad congregations and lively preachers, has bloomed into one of the largest Baptist convention outside of the United States, with an estimated 2.7 million baptized believers.

With 150 years of encouragement from IMB missionaries, the future of the convention's mission programs are bright despite the shadow of volatile, often violent, relations between Christians and Muslims in some parts.

Stonecypher and her husband, Mike, have worked with the Nigerian convention leadership to pass the missions vision, an especially important maneuver should foreign Christian workers be forced to leave in coming years.

"There were 150 missionaries when (we) came here (in 1982)," Mike said. "Now there are about 36. As we're decreasing in number, the convention is picking up the responsibility."

A few dozen Nigerians now serve as missionaries in different parts of the country, and a handful of others are serving Nigerian populations in other countries.

But that's not keeping Nigerian Baptists from forming their own low-cost ideas to involve everyone in missions, like Operation City Storm. Here are some more examples:

The Volunteer Service Corps enlists professional lay people such as contractors and accountants to give free services to indigent churches and missionaries.
Two new schools train volunteers who want to spend their vacations helping with missions.
IMB missionaries are teaching church-planting concepts at a grass-roots level. Individual congregations are sending lay people to evangelize neighborhoods and start churches that will reproduce themselves. In one area, church members planted 12 churches that way, and 92 churches total were planted across the country.

The projects are impressive, but the work is not done.

IMB missionaries still need prayer as they remain in Nigeria to train pastors in seminaries and evangelize people groups still unreached. Most of those unreached people are in the mainly Muslim northern states.

But Nigerians are taking the torch.

Pastor James K. Auta, of a church in Kaduna, returned from the evangelizing event, his yellow Operation City Storm T-shirt drenched in sweat.

"We are back," he said, waving the worn Bible in his hand. "We have shared the Gospel in the street, we have handed out tracts and we have invited them to come to our services and hear more about Jesus. This is a good thing to do. It is something we should be doing."