I have only one pair of good boots. I seldom get to use them, but they were the first thing I packed. For fifteen days I traveled through central Africa. Into the middle of the continent, and the middle of some of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world. Africa Inland Mission’s objective was to gauge the state of the church here, if there was one, and to learn how to re-engage these lands with a renewed missionary effort. What do you take on a trip like that? Good boots and a Bible. A notebook and an open mind. And, if you dare, an open heart.

Into Sudan, Congo, Chad, and the Central Africa Republic. Four countries with a combined land mass equal to two-thirds of the United States, but without the roads. So where the Land Rovers wouldn’t go, we traveled by air, motorcycle, dugout canoe, and foot – over thousands of miles of savanna, rain forest, mountain and desert. The landscapes were forbidding, and beautiful; giving way to sunlit villages of thatch and meandering footpaths, where smiling children and women carted the wares of life atop their heads.

But one has a sense, on a journey such as this, that there’s more to the story of the people and the land than you can catch at a glance. Where your boots meet the rich, red African soil, and where your itinerary makes time for a cup of tea and a conversation, you begin to see the real picture. It is largely a disheartening one. From the southern mountains of Sudan, all the way inland to Lake Chad, these four unique nations share one tragic history. Each gained independence from colonial rule somewhere around 1960. And each replaced one kind of oppression with another. What followed has been decades of human conflict and unfathomable suffering. Economies and communities were destroyed. Infrastructures crumbled. People scattered. The wicked prospered and the righteous lost their homes.

All four countries in recent years were listed among the ten least stable entities in the world. But those are only the political woes. For most of the people here, generations of spiritual darkness rooted in Animistic beliefs have led to a culture steeped in fatalism and fear. The “spirits” which they believe control their world are the most prominent and powerful forces in their lives. And the influence of Islam simply brings more fearful uncertainty.

My boots plodded through the thick elephant grass in the Datooga Mountains, tracing out a path up a hillside and back in time to an era when missionaries lived and worked here. Their house, like the Bible School they built, lay crumbling and bare, returning to the clay from which its bricks were cast. Sudan’s war in the 80’s drove them out and shut down the school. The Church scattered, but somehow, survived. Even grew.

How is that possible? It’s been said that “the local church is the hope of the world.” Jesus said as much. He told his disciples, “You are the salt of the earth, the light of the world.” And in central Africa, glimpses of that hope still remain. But they are like the courageous flickers of a lamp in danger of going out.

I sat and listened to James and John, two young Sudanese pastors aptly named, as they told the story of reclaiming a village for the Lord, and how they fought for it, literally, on their knees next to a slab of concrete that was once a whole church. I listened to a Zande choir rock their church, and my soul, with the sound of drums and voices lifted above the vaulted roof of a sanctuary built long ago, above a canopy of trees in the rainforest of C.A.R. I traveled down the Chari River with pastor Samuel, his face a mixture of uncommon humility and unpretentious humanity. We ventured onto the waters of lake Chad and prayed. Prayed, boldly it seemed, for the Gospel to one day take root this far inland. And for his little mud church upstream to simply stand. I saw Pastor Lalima praying over a thousand ravaged and displaced people in Adi. I saw the gleaming faces of the graduating class from the Bible Institute in Obo. I saw an old man, his life long ago transformed, rebuilding that old Bible school there in the Datooga Mountains.

The local church is the hope of the world. And it’s the hope for central Africa. It is God’s chosen instrument to transform lives and bring people into His Kingdom. It’s his instrument to preserve a community, a country, and the world from the debasement and destruction of sin. “But what if the salt loses it saltiness?” AIM’s Central Region coordinator simply looked north to answer the question. North Africa used to have a vibrant church. Today, it’s all but gone. He warned that this could happen here too. Are we a generation away? Less? The hard truth is that the Church in central Africa is but a remnant. Dealt a double blow from war and syncretism. It’s been scattered, persecuted, diluted. And, if you ask them, abandoned.

AIM’s initial missionary effort in these lands was not perfect. But the roots planted by those first pioneers somehow endured a forty-year absence. The danger now is that the “living stones” of the Body of Christ are looking much like the actual stones of many of the buildings. Crumbling. One wall where there should be four. Choked and overgrown with weeds. Over 124 million people live in these four nations. More than 220 unreached people groups. And a singular, impoverished church begging for help to reach them. It’s time AIM returned to central Africa.

Whatever the continued missionary effort looks like, it must be made of disciple-makers. All throughout this region, there are places where the church does not yet exist, and places where the church is barely holding on. And over countless hours in countless meetings with pastors and church leaders in the region, I heard their pleas. They ask for missionaries: people who love Jesus and are willing to share their lives and talents, to perhaps meet a practical need, while all along addressing the most important one – transformational discipleship.

It requires a coming-alongside to teach, speak courage, and ultimately go out together as One Church to the unreached. Central Africa’s transformation will begin here; in the hearts of people who are transformed into Christ’s likeness. Making more disciples who then make more. Is this vision for central Africa even possible? One thing is certain: we can no longer wait for it to become easy.

By day twelve on our fifteen-day trip I quit admiring my boots. I had grown to resent them, as well as the socks I had been wearing for three days straight. My feet were aching and slightly blistered. Gore Tex doesn’t really breathe when it’s 117 degrees. Some days prior, our pilot on the trip made a comment about feet that came to mind. I mentioned something about the “feet of those who bring good news” and he chuckled.

“Don’t know why they’re called beautiful,” he said. “The missionaries who have served here have trashed their feet. Only God could call them beautiful.”

This is a hard place. This is a hard calling. How do you live in a land of persistent instability? How do you minister to the spiritually oppressed and oppressive?  How do you learn the language, understand the culture, navigate the government abuse? How do you throw up your hands in frustration and embrace a friend at the same time? What do you do when the next war touches you, and it’s your turn to flee? What if you lose all your stuff? What if you lose more than just your stuff? What if it’s worth it?

I sat in the dark; in a semi-circle of Congolese pastors at Aru. They asked us, unashamedly, why the missionaries are not returning. “Because it’s hard” we told them. “Sometimes they hear the news of this place and are afraid.” And one of them said something I cannot forget.

“In the past there were missionaries who loved us… and they accepted to suffer with us.”

And I wondered if the past was just that. Past.

I don’t know what to do with this. God is calling me to something, but is it something this hard? I have these feet, and they can go. They are able, even if they are not experienced. But the question I’m asking is this: are they willing? Willing to walk some of the earth’s most beautiful and devastated lands? Willing to stand side by side with those of my African brothers and sisters? Willing to be trashed in the process, and one day be called beautiful? Are my feet willing to move against the fear?

I don’t know what to do with this. But one thing I know I can’t do anymore is walk away.

“I was a very bad man,” Timothy recalls, as we rocket along in a rattling old mini van, a matatu, heading straight for Kibera. “I was a fighter,” he continues, “The man you see before you would be dead if not for Jesus.” He bows his head and invites me to feel a divot on top of his skull. I place my finger into his once shattered cranium, like a doubting Thomas, confirming his story. “I was the biggest sinner in Kibera,” he adds. His tale unfolds into a drama of guns and despair and an old woman with a New Testament who found him on the street. Our matatu shudders to a stop and we alight into the blazing sun of a Kenyan afternoon. And a smell.

Kibera is perhaps one of the largest shanty towns in the world. A place bustling with life. And a place where it is painfully obvious that life is cheap. Today, the streets and footpaths of Kibera bear the marks of a war zone. This is where the violence and destruction first began after Kenya’s disputed election results were announced on December 30th. Row upon row of shops and businesses are razed to the ground. Half a brick wall remains where a butchery once stood–the slogan of a new year painted across its pitiful facade: “Peace Wanted.” At some places there is nothing left to post a slogan on–just a patch of blackened soil, and shattered glass trodden down into the earth.

Pastor Timothy has brought me to this place, his mission field, for a look into his life’s calling. And to see what difference it is making in a country still smoldering with the ethnic division sparked by recent events. He is a man of exuberant energy and uncommon sense, engaging the massive complexity of Kibera’s geography and culture with innovative ways to spread the Word. In his care are four churches, a Bible school and two orphanages, a network of volunteers, and literally thousands of new Christians actively being discipled. The very streets are a ministry for Timothy.

He walks with purpose through the meandering alleyways and I can hardly keep up. At every turn, someone seems to recognize the pastor, calling out to him. One student jogs across the road to intercept, his face all a smile. “Oh, you are alive!” Timothy exclaims. “I didn’t know where you had gone.” The greeting, anywhere else, would seem odd. They embrace and speak in serious tones about the trouble that has befallen this place. Against a backdrop of looted storefronts, they talk about the week’s classes at the Bible school, hoping some of the other missing students will also return.

We stop at a small shop. An elderly woman, one of Timothy’s many “captains,” holds out a wad of completed course booklets. These strategically placed lay-people from the church help distribute and collect Bible study materials for the 7000 slum residents enrolled in his makeshift discipleship classes. Timothy tucks the papers into his shoulder bag. Back at the office, his daughter will mark them and record the new names in a book–a sort of humble version of the Lamb’s Book of Life, I think. A frayed tablet of thin pages and meticulous entries. People who accepted Christ during a Thursday evangelism outing, and who are now working through a 17 lesson course on the Christian faith. If they finish, Timothy will award them with a certificate and a new Bible.

Unfortunately, there are more pressing needs in the slum these days. The riots have had a compounding effect. Shops and stores have been destroyed or deserted, and food is in short supply. I ask Timothy how Christians in his church are responding to the needs around them. He sighs. The situation is one of hungry people pleading for food from other hungry people. What’s a Christian to do? Timothy laments his inability to meet the physical needs. But even so, his church has found creative ways to get food to the worst cases. But options are running out.

“A man does things when he is hungry,” Timothy explains, without going any further. I gather that some of the destruction I see around us is the rest of the explanation. But we both know there is more to this present chaos than a food shortage. “One place is burned. Another place is not burned.” He looks around at random, and the selectivity of the destruction comes into view. We talk about the tribes living side-by-side in Kibera. We talk about the Church, seemingly so prominent here. “Why do we say that we are Christians?” Timothy pauses and holds up the discipleship materials. “People have not been taught to grow as Christians.” In this land of 42 tribes, even the church can be divided.

“When I see the church, I see an invisible Church, of those who call Jesus Lord.” Timothy’s words are filled with meaning and passion. This is his heart, and in the present climate of Kenya’s ethnic divide, this is perhaps his most important message. “We are one tribe in Jesus.” He holds up one finger. “One.” It is a hard lesson. Timothy explains that a new Christian is like Lazarus, newly raised from the dead. He is alive, but wrapped up in all these burial clothes. Tied down. And it takes time to unravel.

Walking from his church compound we meet up with a younger pastor named Mwangi. He was once a student of Timothy’s and now serves with him in ministry. They agree that the time has come for the Church to break free from tribal divisions and lead the way. As the two pastors are standing beside one another, Timothy gives me a picture of what he means. “I am a Luhya. Mwangi, he is a Kikuyu. But we are one.” He moves one step closer to a friend who should be an enemy and puts a hand upon his shoulder. “We are working together.”

“I am the most happiest man in Kibera,” Timothy declares, which puts a smile to my face. Kibera’s “biggest sinner”–now the happiest man. Once a man bent on self-destruction. Now a man spent for the Lord. Timothy is a living, breathing display of a God whose love is relentless. The humble pastor cannot walk these streets without testifying to this. And when he walks with his enemy, shoulder to shoulder in the ministry of reconciliation, people cannot help but notice.

I recently visited Banda station with Richard and Carrell, two of the Dix children. Not children anymore, both of them nearing seventy-years-old now, they travelled here for a reunion of sorts, returning to their childhood home atop the hill and down a curious avenue of memory lane. Richard not only grew up in the Congo, but he returned with his wife to work as missionaries at Nyankunde station in the eastern part of the country. During those years, they would make occasional visits to the old homestead in Banda, but it had been a long while since his last return. Carrell, his older sister, arrived at Banda this day after a fifty-year absence. Her memories of the place resurfaced in smiles and stories and a few happy tears.

Earl Dix, ever innovative, set out to Africa somewhat unintentionally, but nonetheless wholeheartedly, in 1929. Supported by a single wealthy businessman who soon after lost his fortune in the throes of the Great Depression, it might appear that Earl’s mission would be short lived. But a minor setback such as being completely broke in the rain forests of the Congo was not going to stop him. It didn’t even slow him down. He married his wife Helena there on the field in 1930, built her a little mud hut to get started with, and then rolled up his sleeves for fifty-four years of ministry. He traded a pig for an old truck, and with it built a mission station.

Homes, workshops, schools, churches, a hospital… “I hauled a lot of bricks up this hill,” Carrell smiled, looking over the station with young eyes again. The earth usually swallows up the works of men here in Congo, ever tending back toward the wild place that it is. Yet somehow, Earl’s work has remained. I leaned against the smooth mahogany frame of an open doorway in one of the old homes, listening to Richard and Carrell tell stories on the veranda, and I began to glean bits about their father and mother through shared memories punctuated by rounds of laughter or quiet reflection.

Looking across the lawn I could imagine their ubiquitous pet lion, as it paced to and fro on the porch, waiting for Earl to emerge from the house and causing the local Azande workmen some concern. I could see Earl, in story after story, putting his clever mind and Nebraska farm-boy know-how to take on the challenges of the day. I learned how he involved his children, and adored his wife. I discovered how he once fixed the old truck with a potato. I saw him laying the foundations of buildings, trekking through the forests, and constructing bridges on the spot.

In a way, building bridges is what Earl did best. He is remembered for his talent at working alongside the Azande people, bringing them together, and leading them to the Lord. Bwana Dix, as he was known, worked tirelessly in all things, including his relationships. Perhaps this is why his legacy lives on long after he and wife have gone. At the end of the day, or at the end of lifetime, a mission station is still more than buildings or the presence of a missionary. It is a place where out of the chaos of a forest, a hospital emerges, and out of the darkness which engulfs a society, a church emerges. It is the work of men and women like Earl and Helena. And it is the work of God.

Such works can bring about a transformation. The Azande, I learned, were once a people living in deep and terrible fear. But on this day, I stood in a magnificent church with high vaulted ceilings held aloft by massive timbers, and at the same time supported by the vibrant sounds of two hundred secondary school children singing hymns in French, loud and beautiful. There was no fear there. Only light.

Richard gave a short message in a language he has not forgotten since he was a boy. With a tattered Bible matching the smooth, worn wood of a small table at the front of the sanctuary, he stood and preached both in his father’s shoes and upon his father’s shoulders. Light from the forest spilled in – hues of golden brown and green – rich, soft, substantive colors that seemed to blend in naturally with the bright uniforms of the school children. And in the mix of light and song and Scripture I remembered a short message that Jesus once gave to a crowd on a mountainside.

“A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.”

What brought Earl to choose that little hill upon which to build his life’s work, I don’t know. But seventy six years after setting foot on it, it is still a beacon of light to the Azande.

“In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

Likewise, Earl and Helena are still lovingly remembered by an isolated community of people no longer lost in darkness. Carrell and Richard brought many of those memories to surface again during their short visit. And in the radiant light of a weathered mission station set providentially atop a hill in the middle of the Congo, we all caught a glimpse of the unfading glory of God.

Home is a concept difficult for Panther to frame. He is one of Sudan’s “Lost Boys” – children separated from their parents or orphaned in the onslaught of Sudan’s civil war. These children fled their villages in small groups and eventually converged into an exodus of thousands. They ran for more than a decade, grew up in the bush as refugees, and were witness and victim to every kind of horror imaginable. Their story is both remarkable and terrifying. It has been publicized in books and articles through the years, and recently documented in a feature film by National Geographic entitled “God Grew Tired of Us.” The title seems fitting to describe these boys who became men without a home or family, without a country, and sometimes without a prayer.

A few hundred survivors eventually ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya’s northern wasteland, and from there, all over the world. Scores of them came to America, on invitation, to begin new lives. In some of the destination cities churches stepped in to “adopt” the boys, becoming a refuge in the purest sense of the word – taking in refugees – and in the act becoming unwitting ambassadors to the Sudan. After a decade of guiding the boys through the strange landscape of America, the roles would be reversed.

Settling in New York, Panther’s life had taken a turn toward the surreal. But he kept in close contact with some of his fellow “Lost Boys” and together they fostered a vision to go back to Sudan – to bless their people as they had been blessed. In the wake of this boyish, and contagious dream were a mixed assortment of Americans whose eyes had been opened to a world beyond the one they knew, and who were driven to follow these boys home, however reluctantly, by their restless hearts.

And so, as I steered the Caravan toward the coordinates handed to me on a scrap of paper, Panther wasn’t the only one peering out through the haze. Four middle aged men, engineers and builders from North America, strained to see. The nearest usable airstrip to Panther’s home sits at an abandoned outpost on the waterless Jongeli canal – a massive, unfinished project to bypass a length of the Nile river lost in the Sudd, one of the world’s largest swamps. The town and the impressive fleet of rusting, heavy equipment scattered throughout it are a telling picture of Sudan’s stunted growth. During the war, both national development and individual lives stopped moving forward, and in fact, began to move backward. Ironically, these “Lost Boys” were returning to a Sudan that, in some ways, predated their departure. We landed on a dusty strip set between a thatch village and a thousand grazing cattle. The men stepped from the plane and Panther, dressed in a new suit, melted into the waiting crowd.

I caught glimpses of him every few moments, bobbing in and out of a sea of excited people. His expression was sometimes joyous, sometimes pensive. But the instants of recognition or disbelief over the faces of his fellow Sudanese were the moments when I saw a man like Joseph. Panther, like Jacob’s favored son, was found, and he had a story to tell of God’s goodness and divine intervention – and a captive audience to hear it.

Panther Bior fled his home village when he was seven-years-old, naked, and afraid. He returned twenty years later in a modern airplane, a man with a miraculous story. The tale is wrought with danger and amazing good fortune. It carries legends of the big city and a new world in America. But it is also a story of a God who did not abandon him in his darkest days. Of all the elements in Panthers story, it is the grace of God he talks about most. For the myriad of people caught up in his remarkable life, from the First Presbyterian Church of Skaneateles, NY to the reunited family in southern Sudan, it will likely be an enduring theme.

He will undoubtedly tell his story many times over. The American missionaries along side him will build the new medical clinic they came to raise. And they will do what they can to encourage the church in that remote village. But as I watched Panther from my place crouched down at the rear cargo door, I believed that his greatest testimony would come from simply being there again. What men and wars and the harsh and heartless land of Sudan meant for evil, God meant for good.