Dear friends,

In 2 days, on Sunday January 19,  I will be traveling to Burundi as part of a team of pastors to teach at a Pastors’ Conference. This is apparently the first conference organized to help train and encourage pastors, church leaders and workers in Burundi. A fellow missionary, Dr. Carlan Wendler, who is helping train doctors un Burundi, saw the needs in the church and asked me to be a part of this effort. We will be four pastors, two of us from France, one pastor from Madagascar, and another from Uganda, so we bring a mix of experience. The topics I was assigned are Excellence in leadership as seen through the life of John Calvin; Excellence in leadership as seen through the life of Moses; and How to deal with dissension in the church. All sessions are followed by discussion groups, a favorite way of learning in Burundi, we are told.
 
Burundi is a small landlocked country in Africa and has the same ethnic population as its neighbor Rwanda, and has had the same problems, just less publicized. It rated either as the poorest or the second poorest in the world due to the political unrest and civil wars between the ethnic groups. About the same size as New Jersey, it has a population of close to 12 million.
 
Please pray for our health and that of the pastors in attendance. Pray that God would use this to encourage the church leadership and let them see the glory of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, how to live it and communicate it to their people, and to know that they are not alone and that the church worldwide cares for them. Pray also that all of the details for travel and other parts of the conference all come together. 
 
Thank you!

In Him