Madagascar!

When they heard the news, the cheering and dancing went on non-stop for twenty minutes!  What made it all the more amazing, is that most of the three hundred people from surrounding villages had never seen a real, live white person before!

It was place called Anasibe, just a cluster of huts in the middle of the eastern coastal rain forest of Madagascar that doesn’t show up on any official government map. But it was also one of several thousand locations in the forest where a house church has been planted recently, thanks to the amazing efforts of the Islands Mission. Starting some eighteen years ago as the vision of a young native of Madagascar, Dinah R., this indigenous mission has had incredible success using the church-planting principles of DMM—Disciple Making Movements. Trained, itinerant church-planters not only have started house churches in remote villages and logging their geographic coordinates with a hand-held GPS unit, but also intentionally trained the next generation of church planters.  Islands Mission now boasts more than six generations of church-planters numbering well over a thousand.

So why the cheering and dancing? Along with my colleague, Al Hawthorne of Wycliffe Associates, we had come to share the news that there was a way we could help them translate God’s Word into their own language. Spoken by more than two million forest people, Bitsimisaraka is a language that does not have one sentence of the Bible translated yet. And because 95% can’t even speak Malagasy, the one national language that does have a Bible, all of those newly planted churches have to use strictly oral transmission as their means of communication—something that is eventually prone to mistakes and misinterpretation.

Dinah surrounded by his friends from Anasibe

Forty-eight hours after flying back to the Madagascar’s capital of Antananarivo by helicopter, curtesy of Helimission, Al had already scheduled the first translation event to occur in less than thirty days. We learned those villagers were particularly anxious to get started because the coming rainy season would inhibit forest travel.

It sure makes you wonder what this world would be like if everyone had the same hunger for God’s Word as the people of Anasibe.