St. Michel – Our First Trip Ever – October 2013

This trip was totally different than anything we’d ever experienced before, and a little profound in a lot of ways.

Going into the trip we had told JT that we just wanted to be used, and we were happy to go wherever he felt like there was the greatest need.  So JT told us he wanted to take us to a place that none of us had ever been before – way up in the mountains of Northern Haiti, to a little village called St. Michel.

JT explained to us that this was a very special place to him, because 20 years ago he had gone to St. Michel, and baptized a man named Rolin (pronounced Olè).  He and Rolin then started the first Church of Christ that had ever existed in St. Michel, and Rolin has now been preaching at this church for the past 20 years.

Rolin’s church has now grown to over 750 members…those members have started 7 other churches in the surrounding area…and all of those churches now have several hundred members each.

So…we were pretty excited about going with JT up to St. Michel.

While we were in St. Michel, JT had arranged for us to conduct a Preacher’s Training Seminar for the local preachers.

There were about 40 men from all the Churches of Christ in the region who came out to meet with us that afternoon. JT told us that these men are all well educated, literate in French, and very hungry to learn the Bible.

I love this picture – you can see this guy’s worn out Bible, and he’s got his notebooks, and his pen in his hand.

When you go out to some of these smaller churches up in the mountains, you realize that they’ve created meeting places literally out of nothing.  Some of them don’t even have benches, just nothing but dirt floor – but they keep baptizing people, and in places like these they’ll have 150 to 200 people come together to worship on Sunday for hours at a time.

But here’s the thing that impressed us more than anything else: A few years ago, Rolin and his wife decided to start a Christian school that would operate out of the church he preaches at.  Without any outside resources or assistance at all, that school now serves more than 350 elementary age students.

On our last night in St. Michel we were sitting with JT and Rolin, and one of our team members – Jason Ayers – pulls out his iPhone, and asks JT if he’d like to say anything to the Holland Park Church, and record a message that we could take back with us.

None of us had any idea what JT was going to say, but Jason started recording…and here was JT’s message to the Holland Park Church: