Membership course

This Saturday we had our second membership course at the Eglise Baptiste d’Odza here in Yaounde. We are planning to have another baptism and membership service on the 1st of March, and so we held a course to explain who we are as a church and what we believe. This time we actually offered the course in English and French and had a pretty strong turn out – about 8 in the French section and 4 in the English section.

I’m not sure how most membership courses go, but here because we have had many people visiting the church, we started from square one with salvation and assurance. Steve actually took about half of the class time talking about salvation because we wanted to be sure that people understood the true meaning and weren’t just joining “the white-man’s church” or joining just because they liked the services. When he had finished explaining salvation, Steve asked if there was anyone who had never truly accepted Christ but wanted to right then, and three people raised their hands! Steve took a few more minutes to ask and answer some questions with each person and then had them pray to confess their sin and receive Jesus as their Lord and Savior. It was so exciting, especially as you could see the joy on their faces. I was sitting next to one of the guys and could hear the excitement in his voice as we talked about assurance of salvation and went through the rest of the class talking about what it means to be a part of the body.

It was such a blessing to have the opportunity to be part of this membership course and to see people come to trust Christ. We are looking forward to the next baptism service and trust that it will be another day of joy as people publicly demonstrate their desire to follow Christ. I will attempt to get some more video from that day and put it up on our website.