The Beauty of Salvation
December 29, 2025Hope of the Nations
January 5, 2026
Why form ladies’ Bible reading clubs in churches? Because God’s word is powerful to effect the transformation that Africa desperately needs – but barriers including illiteracy, poverty, and disinterest keep rural women from reading it. That was the burden on my heart in 2022.
Our pilot year in 2023 was a success, so in 2024 the program expanded to nearly 100 congregations in three districts, with women reading the Bible at home and gathering to discuss what they’d read. Many groups gave up along the way, and year-end meetings suggested that most women hadn’t actually read the indicated chapters. But there was enough excitement about the program, and enough ladies who had read more of the Bible than they would have otherwise, to convince us to push forward in 2025.
So I hired Francelina a year ago to direct the project. She spent 2025 encouraging the progress of 80 clubs in eight districts through phone calls and personal visits. We scheduled year-end meetings in all the districts for the second week of December, inviting all club members from all participating churches together to celebrate their accomplishments and receive their rewards. My family member Matthew joined Francelina and me for the five full days of ministry.
It took four hours to drive to our Monday morning meeting, with 73 women from 6 churches who had undertaken the first-year challenge to read the book of Genesis. According to our protocol, when a club reported that they had finished the book, Francelina selected a random story from it for the ladies to recount, each one in her turn telling a little. Each of the 33 ladies who passed this test received a Bible and a completion certificate, while the other 40 received participation certificates. We took 2026 registration forms from the 6 churches represented and 3 new ones who want to start.
On our way to the afternoon meeting, we witnessed God’s protection in a close call with a motorcycle. On a winding dirt road laden with rain-filled potholes, an oncoming motorcyclist hesitated to evaluate on which side he should pass us, and I braked hard to avoid hitting him straight-on. He finally attempted to pass on our right side, where there was precious little space before a drop-off; he scraped against my pickup and fell down.
Fatal motorcycle accidents are unfortunately commonplace here, and blame is not always correctly assigned. But in God’s providence, the motorcyclist unharmed, having avoided the drop-off and stayed up on the road’s surface. Of his copious cargo, the only apparent damage was breakage of four of his sixty well-packaged eggs! He repeatedly tried to restart his motorcycle; I prayed, and then it started right up. Matthew helped him re-secure the sacks and boxes he was carrying, then he shook our hands in gratitude and went on his way. We praised God that the incident wasn’t worse.
Our afternoon meeting, in a town on our way home, included 17 ladies from five churches. We gave Bibles to the ten ladies who reported finishing Genesis and successfully told the requested story, and participation certificates to the others. When we arrived home tired after the 14-hour day,
I learned that the road leading to our next destination was in bad condition, so I prayed with concern for God’s direction and protection as I tried to ask around about whether my sturdy, four-wheel-drive, high-suspension pickup could pass.
God remarkably answered my prayer with perfect timing on that Tuesday morning by sending a Land Rover, driven by a friendly man who routinely takes paying passengers back and forth over that road, directly in front of me on the scarcely-traversed path, to guide me through the challenges of sand, water, holes, and erosion on the barely-passable African trail. I have no idea how I would have navigated it without a leader to show me exactly where to steer – but thanks to my caring Heavenly Father, I didn’t have to worry about that! When I took the vehicle for servicing afterwards, the mechanics found and fixed several problems apparently caused by the vastly uneven surface hitting the bottom of my vehicle despite the high suspension; but thankfully these didn’t interfere with our arriving safely at our destination to encourage five lady Bible readers from two churches, and back home again.
On Wednesday, we took a well-maintained highway to a district where we rewarded 26 of the 71 ladies from 9 churches who had completed the year’s challenge. For those in the first year, it was Genesis, and they received Bibles. Others had completed their second year in the program, reading Matthew, Proverbs, Ruth, and Esther, so for those who had already received Bibles a year ago, their prize was a hymnbook.
Our afternoon meeting was scheduled in a town on our way home, where we expected to meet both first- and second-year clubs. Unfortunately, though, no one showed up. Based on our conversation with the host pastor and vociferous complaints at our gathering there last year, we suspected political issues among church leaders. Please pray for wisdom in how we should proceed in that district.
Thursday morning took us an hour away to see 23 women from 7 churches and reward 7 of them – some for finishing the first year, some for finishing the second. That afternoon, in our city where literacy and education are higher, 41 of the 60 ladies who came from 12 churches went home with a Bible as a prize for reading the whole book of Genesis and telling the selected story. At Friday’s meeting, several hours away, we encountered five participants from one church and gave Bibles to the two who completed the challenge.
In total, 254 women from 42 churches came to the year-end meetings for the women’s Bible reading clubs, and 119 of them received a Bible or hymnal as a prize for proving that they had finished the reading. A few weeks later, I rewarded nine members of our pilot club for completing their third year by reading Exodus, Daniel, Mark, and I and II Corinthians; they’ll now proceed to the fourth year with Leviticus, Psalms, and Luke. We encouraged the women who didn’t finish the reading to continue onward with the goal of receiving their reward next year. As for those who reported finishing but couldn’t tell the story we asked for, we challenged them to pay closer attention to next year’s reading.
At all the meetings, we received registrations from churches who haven’t participated before but would like to enter the project now. We expect to receive more of these in several gatherings Francelina will soon schedule to promote the project in other areas. Please pray that many African women will accept the challenge of reading God’s word.
Pray also for Francelina’s challenge of typing all the club data from various notebooks and handwritten reports into Excel spreadsheets. This will enable us to better analyze the data, monitor progress, and identify groups in need of special attention. Francelina will increase her phone calls to the groups, now with specific checklists of communication points. We also plan for her to make many more visits in 2026 to encourage individual groups at their meetings. And we want to better train group leaders through a written manual, an orientation video, and an all-day seminar in our town. Please pray that Francelina and I will effectively complete these tasks; that the women will be faithful in reading Scripture; and that the Holy Spirit will bring them to know Christ through His Word. Thank you!
