Lake Victoria, the largest body of water in Africa, became a baptismal pool for East Africans who made professions of faith. Here, Michael Hodge baptizes a new believer from the town of Guta, just outside Bunda.When Michael Hodge tells of introducing Christ to a group of African men who stood on a busy street and called out to him, requesting that he tell them the good news they had seen him sharing with others, he says he understands a little of what Peter must have felt when he spoke before a crowd and thousands were saved.
“It’s just like God prepared their hearts before we came,” said Hodge, minister of youth and education at Gowensville First Baptist Church, who recently returned from a 14-day trip to Tanzania, East Africa, with a dozen people from Berea First Baptist Church in Greenville and Forest Hills Baptist Church in Nashville, Tenn.
The group, working with Samson Kisia, a Kenyan who is a Baptist preacher, fanned out with local interpreters across the village of Bunda on the east bank of Lake Victoria to do personal evangelism. In two weeks, the team recorded 2,800 professions of faith. On Sunday at the midpoint of their trip, they baptized 87 new believers.
Nine churches were planted. Other mission teams went to the area the following week to teach local pastors how to grow their new churches.
Hodge described a local population of “incredibly poor” people. In an ironic juxtaposition of poverty with Western consumerism, children who spoke no English wore T-shirts emblazoned with logos and icons of American popular culture.
“They lack so much, but you don’t see that they’re worried about it,” said Hodge, who added that the people treated him and his travel mates as “honored guests,” often offering him the only chair in the hut.
When he first arrived in Bunda, Hodge said he felt overwhelmed by the sheer mass of people thronging the marketplace. His nervousness dissipated when he began sharing his faith and realized that the people were open to his message.
These Southern Baptists from South Carolina and Tennessee recently returned from a mission trip to East Africa.“The people were waiting to hear what we had to share,” he said. “They were ready to accept; they were hungry for the gospel.”
Having responded to the spiritual hunger of some of the Bunda people, Hodge is experiencing a hunger pang of his own – an insistent desire to be a “bolder witness.”
“I’m more confident in my beliefs now,” he said. He and others are “door-knocking every week” in the community around Gowensville First Baptist Church.
“God is working in an amazing way,” he said.
The group of men from Bunda who called out to Hodge and asked to hear the gospel all responded with professions to follow Christ.
Plans are in the works for a return trip to the sub-Saharan region next year with members from Hodge’s church and Berea First Baptist.