Monday, August 10. Tolagnaro (Fort Dauphin). Continued from yesterday's post.
The only difference between what Donné tells the unchurched and what he tells the churched is his encouragement to the unchurched to start coming to church!
And in both cases, I asked him, what does he do after the initial contacts?
Donné has established a program for training Christians, and so he sets up follow-up calls and invites people to come to the trainings and also to attend the church's meetings.
I asked Donné why so many Anglicans hadn't already joined other denominations by the time he and his team had finally come to Tolagnaro. First, he said, because they love the fact that Anglicanism is in-between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism; and second, because they believed that the Anglican church would come one day.
And had Donné always been an Anglican?
No, he became a Christian in 1992 or 1993 when he came to one of Bishop Todd's evangelism services. Donné had grown up in the rain forest, about 50 miles south of Andasibe-Mantadia National Park. He made alcohol with his parents, and didn't pray. Then Bishop Todd had come with a team and started calling on people and preaching about Jesus Christ. It was the first time he had heard about Jesus, and then when he also heard about the church he decided to accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior.
Soon afterward he became active with SAFIFI (the Evangelism Department of the Diocese of Antananarivo). In 1997 the Synod of the diocese decided to start training evangelists as part of the Decade of Evangelism, and Donné was one of the first. The training course lasted three years, and he received virtually the same training as he would have gotten in a seminary. On August 13, 2000, Donné was commissioned as one of four full time evangelists in the diocese, and he was sent to Toliara.
In 2004 Donné and his family moved to Sakaraha, and he was ordained as a deacon on February 22, 2009. Including the church in Fort Dauphin,