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The Africans took their baptisms very seriously
and wanted it done in the open air, but the sea
was very far away, and so there were quite
some logistic issues in gathering together the
group and taking them to a suitable river.
A minibus was rented, which ended up being a
huge coach, but it picked up around 20 of our
folks and journeyed as near as possible to the
baptism location. In scenes more reminiscent
of the African bush than Europe, our group
forded a shallow river to get to the deeper
river, which was very fast flowing with quite a
risk of sweeping some of them away.
So it took three of us to baptize them. We wel-
come our new brothers and sisters in Christ:
Richard, John, Blessing, Florence, Igbine-
dion, Osato, Success, Godspower, Queen,
Courage, Efe, Benjamin, Lovette, Charity,
Ejili and Emmanuel.
You’ll notice some have changed their names
to English names, or translated their African
names to English, whilst others retain their
African names.
Afterwards we forded the river back to shore
with them singing loudly and very happy. We
then prayed with each of them individually [as
well as collectively]. Who could doubt from
those private chats and prayers that these
were men and women who, through much suf-
fering, had come to the Lord Jesus in spirit
and truth. All the fruit of lots of phone calls,
messages, their browsing of websites and
reading the Bible with the commentary and
Bible Basics, emails, answering questions...
and an elderly man on his knees in a South
London suburb in the UK wrapping up endless
parcels of literature, sent out with your dona-
tions paying the hefty postal bill.
The baptism talk about crossing the Red Sea
as a type of baptism, crossing the desert
sustained by God and finally reaching the real
promised land (which they all now know is not
Italy or Europe)... had so much meaning for
those who had crossed the Sahara, seeing peo-
ple falling off the trucks or crushed beneath
the bodies packed on board, or randomly
~ continued ...