January 18, 2007

Cameroon

One of the lesser known projects of Christ Church is our support of a remarkable mission project in The Republic of Cameroon, Africa. Cameroon is in West Africa and is home to approximately 15 million people. The work of the United Methodist Church began there in 1999 and has expanded rapidly under the leadership of my colleague and friend Wes Magruder and his family. The goal of the Cameroon Initiative is to start churches, build church buildings, health care clinics, youth centers, and to develop pastoral leadership throughout the country.

Jan Davis will be spending approximately ten days in Cameroon during the end of January and the first part of February. When it comes to missions, Jan actually wears two hats: she not only supervises the missions staff and programs at Christ Church, but she is the secretary of The Advance for Christ, which is housed in our General Board of Global Ministries in New York City. She will be joining Bishop Larry Goodpastor and others as a teacher in the Pastor’s School in Cameroon. Bart Smith has also traveled to Cameroon in the past to visit this very lively mission field.

There are 19 new United Methodist churches established in Cameroon and the list continues to grow. Christ UMC is a partner with Bethesda UMC -- a congregation of about 50 people in Sa’a, a city outside of Yaounde, the capital. We plan to send our first mission team to this church in the spring of 2008.

I am hopeful that we will be able to speak with Jan via telephone during one of our Sunday morning worship services while she is over there. We are excited about this mission, and we are very proud of the leadership that Jan Davis is providing to the United Methodist Church in the area of global missions.

P.S. Thanks to one of our church members who sent me the following after reading my column about malaria a couple of weeks ago: “Don, thanks for opening up my eyes to this. Instead of going out to lunch today, I decided to save a life.”

Also, in my column last week I made the statement that in 2007 “we will build a new sanctuary. On Monday night there was an overwhelming vote to expand our current campus.” This statement was inaccurate. The vote was to appoint a building committee to design a sanctuary and develop a financial plan. Any final vote to actually build a sanctuary will come before the entire congregation after the building committee has finished its work.