Field Story: Pastor T

Where the water goes, the gospel follows

One of the great privileges of this work is getting to travel and see what your generosity makes possible. Recently I sat down with a pastor in a very remote village in sub-Saharan Africa. Behind him stood the church where he serves. He kept his back to the camera, a small but necessary precaution where following Jesus can cost you everything.

That's not an exaggeration. In his community, most people are Muslim, and for years he and the believers there were unwelcome. "Since we are followers of Jesus, they would hurt us when we worship," he told me. About 4 years ago, their church buildings were burned. They were told they had no right to spread the gospel or even to gather, and they were put in prison for it. The challenges haven't stopped, in their preaching, in their worship, in their daily lives.

And yet the story doesn't end there.

For a long time, water was the community's deepest problem. There was nothing clean to drink and nothing for daily use. Most families pulled what they needed from a dirty river. Then the water projects came, the ones you make possible. Something shifted. "Because of these different water projects, they began to love us," the pastor said. "They are becoming familiar with us."

Clean water opened a door that years of preaching alone could not. In the past 2 years, more than 30 people in that community have come to Jesus. Where there was once a single Bible study in the town, there are now 8, and the teachers leading them are being trained, again, through partners like you. The church has grown to 5 congregation sites.

Here's the heart of it. The water you provide is a pathway. It's the open door through which people who have never once heard the name of Jesus finally hear the gospel, carried by faithful men like this pastor who keep laboring in places most of us will never see.

Before we finished, he asked me to pass along 2 things. First, gratitude: "God bless you, all of you." And second, he asked for boldness. "Most of the community is not listening to the gospel, so please pray for us to preach the gospel boldly and faithfully." He asked that the work continue, for the sake of the community that still has no water, "so that we are preaching the gospel and bringing the water of life."

When you support neverthirst, you're standing behind hundreds of pastors just like him, carrying the gospel into the hardest, most unreached corners of the world. We couldn't do this without you.

So thank you. Truly. And would you pray for him today?