Situated just over a mile from Uganda’s border with war-ravaged South Sudan, the ABWE Reaching Africa’s Unreached (RAU) ministry team found unexpected access to people groups normally difficult to engage.
While visiting the nearby Bidi Bidi settlement in 2017, one of the world’s largest refugee camps, missionary Jacob Lee met a Sudanese believer named Joshua Abraham Rawi.
Joshua was born in the Darfur region of the Republic of Sudan and raised in a Muslim community without knowledge of Christianity. Though his father sent him to Islamic school to become an imam, Joshua was plagued with doubts. Convinced that Islam was not true, he escaped from the school. When his family discovered that he had turned away from Islam, they rejected him, and he left to attend a Catholic school in 1997.
One night, Joshua dreamed of Jesus. Although his teachers spoke of Jesus, their theology did not include the full gospel—yet his dreams continued.
In 2000, civil war broke out in Darfur. Joshua was accused of rebel activity due to of his Christian school affiliation and fled for his life. He settled into a refugee camp in Ethiopia, where he again had dreams of Jesus, who nightly revealed himself to Joshua and directed him to meet with specific missionaries. Joshua sought them out, listened to the gospel, and placed his faith in Christ. He joined a local church and began preaching. In 2009, he moved to South Sudan to attend Bible school, burdened to raise up local church leaders.
“My vision is to . . . [strengthen] the body of Christ in North and East Africa to reach out to the unreached people and communities,” he said. When violence erupted in 2016, Joshua was again forced to flee civil war. It was during this time that he met Jacob Lee, who invited him to attend the pastoral and leadership training modules offered at the RAU campus.
Since completing the courses, Joshua has taken the initiative to gather two groups of 20-25 South Sudanese leaders from Bidi Bidi each year to study theological books supplied by RAU.
Jacob and ABWE teammates, in partnership with several Christian publishers, have distributed tens of thousands of African Study Bibles and theological resources to local church leaders.
“We want to provide resources that reflect the wisdom and cultures of African communities to pastors in our region, many of whom don’t have access to biblically based materials,” explained Jacob.
Through resourcing, training, and partnering with Christ-centered, impassioned leaders, RAU is pressing the gospel farther into Uganda and surrounding nations. Joshua himself hopes to start a Bible school to raise up other Sudanese leaders to reach the region’s many unreached people groups.
