Seven-year-old Karuuparerue looked with curious eyes at the visitor who had traveled many hours by plane and then car to reach her homestead of four huts in the desert of northern Namibia.
She shyly told me about her love for macaroni, a rare treat that occasionally breaks her usual meal routine of maize porridge. She described the joy of playing dodgeball with a ball of old rags.
Then I posed the big question. It was why I’d traveled so far.
“Do you know Jesus?” I asked.
Karuuparerue was silent. She looked away. Then her black eyes met mine.
“I don’t know Jesus,” she said, softly.
Her reply made me sad, but it wasn’t unexpected. If anyone in the world didn’t know Jesus, it would be this little girl in the Himba tribe, a seminomadic people in Namibia.
Karuuparerue represents what many people see as the mission field. But the twenty-first-century mission field isn’t only a remote people group. It’s no longer simply a place inhabited largely by people from a non-Christian religion. The mission field is also in such developed countries as Switzerland. Exactly 150 years ago J. N. Andrews sailed to Switzerland as the Adventist Church’s first official missionary.
But today’s Switzerland is post-Christian and increasingly secular. In September the Office of Adventist Mission organized a Mission Week at the General Conference world church headquarters to raise US$20,000 for Switzerland. The Adventist Church has been offered a unique opportunity to teach the principles of healthy living to affluent Geneva residents through health expos. The goal is to give fewer people there the ability to say, “I don’t know Jesus.”
But how can we do that as we seek to fulfill Jesus’ Great Commission to “go therefore and make disciples of all the nations” (Matt. 28:19)?
In Namibia I asked Pastor Sabyn K. Ndjamba, president of the Namibia South Conference, how Karuuparerue could know Jesus. I learned that he had begun to study the Bible with her grandmother several years earlier. But the grandmother lives on a different homestead, so she hasn’t been able to share Jesus with her granddaughter.
The pastor said he passed the Bible studies over to a Bible worker after he was elected conference president. The Bible worker, he said, would add Karuuparerue’s homestead to his rounds for Bible studies.
I accompanied the Bible worker on several trips to Himba homesteads. I saw that he took not only his Bible but also gifts of bread and macaroni, Karuuparerue’s favorite.
Then I understood. This is the way to reach Namibia. This is the way to reach Switzerland. This is the way to reach the world. Ellen G. White said, “Christ’s method alone will give true success in reaching the people. The Savior mingled with [people] as one who desired their good. He showed His sympathy for them, ministered to their needs, and won their confidence. Then He bade them, ‘Follow Me.’ ”*
Jesus’ way to Karuuparerue’s heart is to mingle with her, desiring her good, showing sympathy, ministering to her needs, winning her confidence, and inviting her to follow Him. Then she will know Jesus.
* Ellen G. White, The Ministry of Healing (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1905), p. 143.
