Would we be willing to sell ourselves as slaves so that others would hear the gospel?
I know that is a challenging hard question, one that I have been asking myself lately.
One of our fundraising team members told us a gripping story about the
“The Moravian Slaves”.
It's a popular story about Christian Missions concerning Johann Leonhard Dober and David Nitschmann, describes how these two young men from Germany, were called in 1732 to minister to the African slaves on the islands of St. Thomas and St. Croix in the Danish West Indies.
When they were told that they would not be allowed to do such a thing, Dober and Nitschmann sold themselves to a slave owner and boarded a ship bound for the West Indies.
As the ship pulled away from the docks, it is said that they called out to their loved ones onshore,
"May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of His suffering!"
They were met with strong opposition but were successful they baptized 13,000 converts before any other missionaries arrived on the scene.
After returning from the West Indies, both men continued to serve in the Moravian church, and both were ordained as bishops. Dober remained in Europe, but Nitschmann traveled with John Wesley and helped to found the mission at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Here in the ministry, our goal is to get into the villages that have never heard the gospel.
It has been getting very hard and our teams face many options. So we have been praying about how to be more effective and build relationships with people within the villages.
That is why we are starting the grocery store business. We can start branches within these villages. We will be fulfilling a daily need for the village plus be building relationships and sharing about Christ.
The words "May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of His suffering!" still challenge us today.
We created a t-shirt that has this challenging reminder on it.
When you purchase this t-shirt 38% of the profits will be going towards our grocery store fundraiser.
Starting these stores will help us minister to though who have never heard about Jesus.
Click here to visit our online store
(The products in our online store are American-based so don't worry about international shipping.) Available only until November 22nd 2020