Guest Post by Eric Rivera
“We need resources!” were three words we regularly heard from our pastoral contact in Liberia. Pastors and church leaders have a hunger for being equipped and they pleaded with us to bring books when we visited. We solicited the assistance from several publishers and received great help from two, one of them being Crossway. Crossway donated the ESV Study Bibles that we brought with us and left in Liberia.
From the moment we exited the airport in Monrovia we were struck by their genuine joy and excitement to see us. They were pastors, elders, and deacons of a young congregation in Liberia’s capital city. We were there at the request of local pastors to train church leaders in the areas of hermeneutics, interpreting and preaching narrative texts of Scripture, and understanding one’s call into ministry. We were a small but eager team of two sent from Chicago’s Good News Bible Church with our workshop and sermon notes and resources for biblical study.
When we showed the leaders the books that were donated, the room erupted with cheers and applause. Liberia has suffered much through its civil war in the 1990’s and is only now beginning to recover. Libraries, biblical resources, and avenues for formal training are rare in the capital city, let alone in smaller towns and villages. The resources we brought have become the beginnings of small libraries in each of the two cities in which we held workshops (Monrovia and Buchanan). These libraries are at a central location and are available to the nearly 240 church leaders from over 40 churches represented at the conferences.
Most of the leaders do not even have Bibles with cross-references. So handling a first-rate study Bible not only with cross-references, but also with book introductions, book outlines, study notes, articles, and a vast concordance was something new for them. We taught them how to use these tools and dig even deeper into the context of a book with the study Bible. We divided the leaders into groups of 4-6 and gave them this assignment: “What was the religious context in the city of Ephesus?” Using the study Bible, the leaders were able to read “The Ancient City of Ephesus” segment in the introduction to Ephesians which cross-referenced them to Acts 18:19 and Acts 19:29-40. It was a delight to walk around groups and hear them proudly discuss their findings.
God is doing a mighty work in Liberia and we were honored to play a small role in it. Our prayer is that God would continue to provide resources and training for these hungry brothers and sisters.
Eric Rivera is the Associate Pastor at Good News Bible Church in Chicago. He has a passion for urban pastoral ministry and the equipping of urban leaders. Eric is presently working on his PhD in Historical Theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He and his wife Erikah have two children and live in Chicago, IL. Eric tweets at hiphomiletics and blogs here. Watch the video from their trip to Liberia.
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