Celebrating 64,000 New Testaments For Sierra Leone!

God has provided as precious resources for his precious word! Last fall God placed a burden upon Pastor Bob Hall's heart to assemble a container of New Testaments for the work Missionary Mike Peper is leading in Sierra Leone, Africa. Brother Mike Peper has been a faithful missionary to Sierra Leone for over a decade after serving faithfully as a Missionary in South Korea and then pastoring a church for over twenty years in the United States. 

Last fall we announced the vision and God provided likeminded partners with a passion for assembling God's word and getting it into the hands and hearts of the souls of Sierra Leone. Pastor Mike Peper challenged our church many years ago to get involved in Sierra Leone because it is one of the few places where revival is happening. He is right as thousands of Muslims are coming to Christ and Pastors are being trained to plant bible believing local New Testament churches all over the country. What a field white unto harvest! 

This project is too large for one small church like Heartland Baptist Fellowship to accomplish alone. God provided money and people from other sister churches to see the project to completion. Pastor Mike Blake of Maple City Baptist Church committed three mission trips from his church in Monmouth, Illinois to come and assemble the word of God. The Maple City Team is responsible for thousands of New Testaments. In like manner, Grace Baptist Church of Lee's Summit has their own Bible Publishing ministry similar to ours and they joined in to help us with assembly and to financially underwrite a portion of the project. They also assembled thousands of New Testaments at their church in Lee's Summit, Missouri. We really appreciate Pastor Brad Nelson and the wonderful church in Lee's Summit. In addition to those two partners that are like Aaron and Hur helping Moses, we also had teams from Midtown Baptist Temple and other likeminded local churches come and participate in the assembly work. Bearing Precious Seed  and Seeds of Grace Transportation Ministry were very helpful on this project as well as many others. Those Philadelphian partnerships are tremendous, and we cannot praise God enough for the partners God has provided. 

While we are now turning our attention to our Fall Bible Conference and then the upcoming Albanian Project, we still have work necessary to finish up the Sierra Leone project. We now move to the shipping stage where we are trusting God for $10,000 to purchase a container and ship the New Testaments to Sierra Leone. Missionary Mike Peper will make good use of the New Testaments in the church plants he has in the Capital City of Freetown. Upon Arrival Mike will distribute the New Testaments very discretely to Pastors who will share them with believers who are literate and will share the word of God with others also. it is likely that each New Testament will be read by more than one person multiplying the impact of God’s word mightily. The word of God is precious in Sierra Leone so it is important to place the scripture in the hands of faithful men and women who will not only hold it in their hands but commit it to their hearts. Would to God the dearth in God's word in Sierra Leone, remind us of how precious it is to have the words of God so freely preserved in our language. 

You will be hearing more about this project and other projects we are working on at the upcoming Word First Bible Publishing Conference, September 17-21 at Heartland Baptist Fellowship. That will be a great conference where we will celebrate the history of our English Bible as well as testimonies of other bible projects in other languages among other peoples. If you would like more information about the conference, please go to this link. We invite you to join us as a partner in Bible Publishing!