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Posted September 29, 2010
KANG, Botswana — Located in the middle of the Kalahari Desert (often called “the great thirst land”), Kang is filled with spiritual deception. Until recently, witchcraft, false teaching and ancestor worship ruled this village of 3,500 people.
Conditions are harsh. The wind blows the sand around constantly. “It reminds me of western Texas,” said Robert Fortenberry, an IMB missionary who has worked in Botswana for 16 years.
For years Fortenberry drove through Kang on his way to other locations in Botswana. Sometimes he would stop for gas in the dusty village, but he never stayed long. He remembers clearly the day God spoke to him, telling him to “pay attention” to the place and share Jesus with the Bakgalagadi people there.
Fortenberry didn’t know how he was going to begin this ministry from scratch; he didn’t know anyone who lived in Kang to help him get started.
The solution came about in an unexpected manner.
During a break between missionary terms, Fortenberry taught for a year at Mississippi College in Clinton, Miss. His students came to him expressing interest in helping him start churches in Botswana. He started to train the students then, and they joined a semester-long student missions program called Hands On. Through this program, four students went to Botswana in early 2009 to spend several months sharing the Gospel in Kang.
Fortenberry, his wife Margaret, and several local believers went to Kang to work alongside the Hands On students — Stirling Foxworth, Brett Barnhill, Allison Hunter and Hunter Clark. They split into groups of two or three and started prayerwalking through the village.
During their walks people would curiously ask who they were and what they were doing. The groups explained they were praying and asked each person to join them in a Bible study or to host a study, always praying for him or her. Several times, opportunities arose for the groups to lead someone to a relationship with Christ. Soon, about a dozen new believers “formed the nucleus of the church in Kang,” Fortenberry said.
Each Hands On student built strong relationships with the new believers and was reluctant to leave at the end of the semester.
“I loved the whole experience and the people,” Foxworth said. “I left already talking about coming back again.”
A year later, three of the students — Foxworth, Barnhill and Hunter – did return to Botswana to reconnect with and encourage the new believers and help start work in new areas.
“I can’t explain to you the joy of just being reunited with the people who came to Christ last year,” Barnhill said. “I have a picture hanging in my room of when I saw Jones the first time; I just went up and embraced him.”
Jones is a young man Barnhill helped lead to Christ a year earlier. This year, Barnhill spent time listening to Jones, hearing his desire to go out to the surrounding villages to share his faith.
“When the local people there in Kang saw that these young people loved the Bakgalagadi enough to come back again a year later, it gave us a lot of credibility to our work there as Baptists,” Fortenberry said. Many outsiders just come in for a short time and never return. “One of the first things they did was to go back in and just contact people they had met last year, to say hello to people.”
The three young missionaries brought friends and fellow students Kasey Ambrose and Ben Cross to minister in Kang and help start new work in other areas of Botswana. Ambrose, an elementary education major, and Barnhill, a Christian studies major, went village to village prayerwalking, handing out tracts and showing the JESUS film to find people interested in knowing more about Christ.
Foxworth, also a Christian studies major, said he enjoyed his work discipling believers who felt they couldn’t go to church and watching them reincorporate in the local church. One of the guys he encouraged to reconnect with the church started to bring others to church with him.
Hunter, also an elementary education major, and Cross, a Spanish major, worked in an orphanage in Lobatse teaching Bible stories and playing games with children. Cross said he had no intention of ever going to Africa, but watching God use his prayers as people listened to the Gospel and opened their hearts to the truth made the experience one he will never forget.
Although the student missionaries are now back in the United States, Fortenberry returns to Kang every two weeks to meet with the church and mentor and train the believers, who now number 20 to 30. Several in the church are now thinking about how they can share Christ with others.
In the near future “our work will be primarily to assist those folks to begin looking at other villages and places around them,” Fortenberry said, “… to start planting churches in the surrounding area.”
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