Haiti continues to experience unprecedented darkness. The tiny island nation is gripped by daily violence as three gangs fight for control of the country. These gangs are free to roam and terrorize the people of Haiti as the government is non-functioning and the police and military are under powered. Added to that is economic instability with food shortages and inflation.
The greatest darkness of all is the spiritual darkness prevalent throughout due to voodoo and demonic worship. People live in fear and captivity to the cosmic powers and spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places which fight against us (Ephesians 6:12).
But Light has come into the world and the darkness cannot overcome it. How is Jesus, the Light of the World, working through our partnership in Haiti to dispel the darkness?
We have the delightful privilege of working alongside a team of training partners in Haiti who are prayerfully and faithfully preaching the Word of God throughout Haiti and training other pastors to do the same.
In 2016, we began training a group of twenty pastors in Les Cayes. They graduated from our Core Training in 2021. From that group we selected and developed a team of four men who have gone on to start six new groups in Haiti. That means approximately two hundred pastors are being trained in expository preaching, which is a way of saying that the transformational message of the text of Scripture is the point of the sermon.
Three of our Haitian training partners (on right)
What might God do through these two hundred pastors and their churches to bring gospel freedom to spiritually captive people? Through their preaching, God will bring about His purpose “which has now been manifested through the appearing of Christ Jesus, our Savior, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10).
But our ministry is not limited to Haiti. Our Haitian training partners have been working in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic since 2020. The Dominican Republic has a Haitian population estimated at one million people. Our training partners will soon graduate a group of Haitian pastors and will multiply the training among the Haitian population there. Imagine the potential! Furthermore, there are two very gifted and godly trainers in the DR group who will join our team of training partners. Soon we will have six godly men to multiply the training to serve the church.
One of our partners training pastors in the Dominican Republic
Over the years I’ve noticed all of the missionary teams on the planes in bright-colored shirts as I have flown to Port-au-Prince. Undoubtedly many of them are doing great service to the church in Haiti. But I found myself asking, “Does the Haitian church also send people out?”
What would it look like if the church in Haiti sent their pastors to the French Caribbean, the Haitian populations in Florida, Montreal, and Paris? How about the sixteen French-speaking countries of Africa? What if our training partners in Haiti trained those pastors? What if that was part of the Haitian church’s gift to the world? What sense of hope, empowerment, and joy would that give to a people who think they have nothing to give?
God can always do infinitely more that we can ask or imagine!
