eNews and prayer update August 2019

14 August 2019 |

Langham trains 14-yr-old ‘future church leader’ in Lesotho

Langham’s main aim is to equip the next generation of Bible teachers.

In Lesotho – a landlocked country in southern Africa – a teenager has been identified as “one to watch”, with huge potential for church leadership. 14-year-old Lipallo was one of a few young people who attended a Level One Langham Preaching training event in Maseru, Lesotho, for the first time in May. He is pictured above with the training group and is the young man in the green jumper standing with his arm folded across his chest.

‘Madly in love with the Bible’

Lipallo Thamahane was born in Maseru in 2004. He has an older sister, but his parents consider him a “miracle child” and a gift to the family because the three children born before him died in infancy.

Lipallo had some speech problems as a young child, but as he grew up his health conditions improved. Born to Christian parents, he fell “madly in love with the Bible” at a very young age. He gave his life to Christ at the age of six and took his conversion seriously. A while later, Lipallo became a Sunday School teacher at his local Assemblies of God church.

Lipallo attended the seminar in May with his mum and a few others from his church. Joseph Morenammele, Langham Preaching’s coordinator for Lesotho, commented that Lipallo “surprised all the participants”. He “amazed” everyone in the way he commented on biblical concepts and with his engagement during discussions. He “breathed scriptures into ordinary conversation”.

Joseph reported: “When he answers a question in a session he always accompanies it with a relevant verse from elsewhere. When he prays, he prays scripture very accurately. He is inquisitive like all boys. He reasons like an adult.”

‘Let’s keep an eye on him’

At school, Lipallo is not counted as one of the brightest pupils but he excels in the subject of Bible knowledge. Joseph says: “He is deep in understanding and applying scripture. He is far more mature than his age. Let us keep our eye on him and pray for him’.

Please join with us in praying for Lipallo, and the other teenagers who attended this Langham Preaching seminar in Lesotho. Let’s pray that God would use these young people for great things in the future!

 

Join us in prayer

UPCOMING LANGHAM PREACHING EVENTS

Where countries are considered sensitive re security, the region is mentioned rather than the country.

  • 11-17 August: SE Asia (2 countries), DR Congo, Bosnia & Herzegovina, South Africa, Ecuador, Argentina
  • 18-24 August: Benin, Papua New Guinea, South Africa
  • 25-31 August: Togo, South Africa, Liberia, Sierra Leone
  • 1-7 September: SE Asia (2), Liberia (Preaching club visits and L2 seminar), Benin(2), Romania, Peru
  • 8-14 September: Colombia, Benin, Croatia, Burkina Faso, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Liberia

Thank you for your prayers!

SCHOLARS

  • Pray for Egyptian Scholar George Bishai and his family as he completes his PhD back home in Alexandria.
  • Pray for Fanos Tsegaye (Ethiopian) as she studies in Scotland and Karuna Sharma (Nepali) as she studies in England.
  • Pray for new Scholars getting ready to begin the academic year in the northern hemisphere.

LITERATURE 

  • Please pray for indigenous evangelical publishers like CLC Myanmar, CTS Publishing (Sri Lanka), HRIŠĆANSKA (Serbia), Logos (Romania) and Harmat (Hungary). Pray for discernment in understanding local needs, wisdom in appropriate title selection, and professionalism in production.
  • Both the demand and the opportunities for partnering with good evangelical publishers and writers in the Majority World are huge. Pray that by working with and advising them, we have the opportunity to significantly increase the number and volume of heart language titles for the church in many different contexts.

PREACHING  

  • Pray for those who are involved in the administration of the Langham Preaching work around the world. Effective administration is a key to this ministry. Pray for those who serve behind the scenes in this capacity and yet who provide such crucial support.

GROWTH PROGRAM

  • To help meet the needs of the growing Church in the Majority World, Langham is seeking to grow more rapidly. To double our ministry over the next five years and carry forward the enhanced impact for an additional ten years, we need strategic growth funding in addition to our regular support. Please pray for us as we seek to raise additional funds over the next three years.

 

Langham Australia CEO Gillean Smiley writes…

Our responsibility, through Langham Preaching, is to train all those who are preaching and teaching others to communicate the Word of God with accuracy, clarity and relevance. We train those who are brought forward and recommended by the local Church leaders. This is how we come to be training 14 year olds… and how exciting it is that God is working through such a young man! We do not control how our participants will be using their training, but we trust that God will multiply the investment, to have an impact on many more than the approx. 10,000 who are trained each year. We do know that 91% of the people we train go on to train on average 64 people each in the use of sound Bible Study skills that they learned from Langham, and that after having been trained, 50% of our participants have had the response to one of their sermons “That’s the first time I have understood that passage”.

I’m particularly excited to see the PNG Preaching training this month – in a difficult to access part of the highlands. This has been made possible because of your generous response to our June appeal for the South Pacific. We praise God for the ongoing work among His faithful servants in remote and poorly resourced places, so that His people may be well fed on His Word.

To communicate with us, send an email to australia@langham.org or call to 02 4751 9036.