How Sammy and Josephine’s Holiday Turned into a Gospel Mission

Jan 25, 2015 2505

Market in Rwanda

What a better way to spend your family holidays after years of planning than to turn every moment of it in an adventure for Jesus only?

This is what Sammy and his wife Josephine did in Rwanda and as a result we are getting to know the tip of the iceberg of what the message of the book Jesus Only (by Desmond Ford) has been doing in Rwanda. The month of December 2014 was a busy time for this family.

Sammy and Josephine live in Brussels, Belgium, and they had been saving for years to finally return to Rwanda. They are not trained pastors or preachers. They are just simple and humble people whose hearts are on fire for the gospel of Jesus.

When they arrived in Rwanda, Sammy and Josephine tried to find the remaining Jesus Only books so that they could minister for Christ in their own homeland. They were disappointed to find that they could only find 40 remaining books. They thought that they would only be able to do a small work for the gospel.

What did they do? They spent their holidays preaching in the local market, and they gave the books away as gifts only to those people who were the most passionate in responding to the gospel. As word spread throughout the local community, many more people came begging for books than the number of books available. Sammy and Josephine could only take their names and contact details.

People returned to Sammy and Josephine in the market to tell them that they were the first people who had ever come to preach Christianity in this market. They were overwhelmed with gratitude to Sammy and Josephine for having come to preach Jesus to them. They reported that the Jesus Only books that had been handed out were so popular that they were already being borrowed from person to person in the community. Sammy and Josephine prayed with these people and they sung a song together, “Remain in Jesus.”

But that is not all, having read the book Jesus Only, some of these people returned, seeking them out in the market, professed their new faith in Jesus Christ, and asked to be baptised. There were amazing scenes of crowds dancing in the streets because they had found out the good news about Jesus Christ!

One lady named Vestina was given a book and read some chapters overnight. The following day, while Sammy and Josephine were preaching in the market again, Vestina returned excited about what she had read. So Vestina took over the preaching! Vestina spoke courageously to the people and said,

In this book I have read  about how God became man, how he humbled himself to become a human being, how he accepted to be  accursed and yet he was not,  and how was mistreated and punished for the things he did not do. I clearly saw how he was made what he is not. I read about how he came in love for us, and our response  to his love was hatred. I am still reading. I must finish reading this book so that I can be a witness of all of this to the people in this area.

Sammy and Josephine encouraged these people to seek out Christian community and to start gospel fellowships in their homes. They took the telephone numbers of all the people who were given books, and they are being followed up so that this work may be encouraged and fanned into an even bigger gospel work.

By any and all means, the ministry of Good News Unlimited is spreading everywhere. Praise God that word spreads fast!

Note: Unfortunately we don’t have photos of this story that are of a suitable quality so that we can post them here, but soon we will be putting up some videos taken at the market – Eliezer Gonzalez.

Written by Sammy, translated by David Kayumba, and edited by Eliezer Gonzalez