Mark Gillmore: Welcome to the Go Mission podcast.

I’m Mark Gilmore and today is really a unique moment in the podcast history of Go Mission here.

And because I have with me a very special friend, Brother Glenn, who’s going to share with us his story and what God’s amazing opportunity God’s given to him.

But here for this podcast, we are at the Thee Generation Youth Summit.

And lo and behold, instead of sending this podcast out to the audience, the audience has actually come to us.

And there’s about 100 young men and women here with me this morning.

And I’m going to give them a chance for their moment of podcast celebrity here. to be part of the Go Mission podcast, to introduce themselves here with a, hey, everyone, my name is this.

And they’re going to, if you listen carefully, you might hear your friends.

So on three, ready?

One, two, three.

Hey, everyone, my name is Joe.

I knew there was an outlier in there somewhere.

And all right, good.

Well, I hope you can hear yourself.

And this is a great group at the V Generation Youth Summit, a real privilege to be together with future missionaries.

That’s right.

That’s right.

That’s right.

Future missionaries seated right here.

And that’s our vision.

And we do believe that this is the greatest day to offer your life for world missions for sure.

Absolutely.

And I’ve got with me here Brother Glenn, and I have gotten to know him and his home church and the incredible vision that God’s giving that ministry.

And I’ve asked Brother Glenn to join me here today.

God gave him a chance literally to be in Africa just a couple weeks ago.

That’s right.

And I want him to tell us about that trip.

But God, just give us a little background here.

How has God brought you to this moment, this involvement in world missions?

Guest: Sure.

Well, it’s really I’ll try to make a long story short.

Military background, church security background, and background in private security.

Both my wife and I were heavily involved in private security.

The Lord was moving us towards the ministry that we have now.

It’s called Operation Mordecai. and it started really as myself, a good friend of mine named Jim Wood, who started the ministry with us and started out with training church security teams and the Lord quickly showed us the work that we were going to be doing in missions work.

Have you heard of the Joshua Project?

The Joshua Project claims that there are 7,000, over 7,000 unreached people groups in the world and what that equates to is about 40% of the world’s population isn’t unevangelized.

It’s not unsaved.

It’s actually entirely unreached.

And that’s because those people are in places that you’re not allowed to go, that I’m not allowed to, or they’re difficult to go to, or they’re dangerous, or they’re remote.

And so the Lord’s been leading us into that sort of mission work.

And this trip to Sierra Leone really was just an example of not necessarily such a high threat area, although it ended up being that way, more of a remote access, a place where you just can’t get to by vehicle.

You can’t drive there.

You can’t ride a motorcycle there.

You can basically walk or fly if you can parachute out of an airplane.

Which military men can do that.

Yes, we have training in that.

I’ve rappelled out of helicopters for the military, done air assault missions, and that’s an option.

But not for this trip.

This trip we walked.

Right.

Mark Gillmore: All right, so let’s talk about that trip.

I believe it was your first time in Africa.

It was my first time in Africa.

And about a 10-day trip.

That’s all together, yes.

And that was to which country?

Sierra Leone.

Guest: Okay, so tell us about it.

So we were headed to the bush country of Sierra Leone.

That 10-day trip with about two and a half days of travel on either end ended up being about five days on the ground. and our target was getting into the bush.

It was getting into the villages that are remote, that are difficult to get to.

And we ended up doing a little bit of that and a little bit of reaching some of the villages that were not quite as remote but in that same area, surrounding a village called Moramba Junction, which is sort of a main town with a few thousand people in it.

And from there we branched off into a lot of these villages that are remote.

The whole country is in such a state of poverty.

It ranks really high on the global scale of impoverished and war-torn countries.

And so these villages that are in the bush, people are living like they’ve lived for thousands of years in mud huts and thatched roofs.

And not much has changed for them.

Very little electricity.

Very little medical support.

There’s a few schools.

But these villages are remote.

Many of them were shocked to see a white person.

And many of them, for the first time, were seeing somebody that was white.

And lots of little kids would run away screaming because it was scary to them.

Mark Gillmore: So you were partnered with a national preacher.

Guest: That’s correct.

So there was two national preachers.

Pastor Solomon pastors a church in Freetown, Sierra Leone, which is a large major city.

And then Pastor Van Boy pastors a small church in Moranwood Junction.

And Pastor Van Boy, to his credit, he did a lot of legwork ahead of time.

And, you know, the Lord did some really remarkable things with the legwork that he did leading up to this trip.

And some people were led to the Lord, including there was a small village that had a Methodist church in it.

The pastor of that church got saved due to Van Boy’s legwork that he was doing leading up.

There was a principal of a school in a town called Mocarewa, which was the village that Van Boy grew up in.

And it’s accessible by road.

It just takes a long time to get down a bumpy dirt road to get there.

And the principal of that school got saved as well due to his legwork of setting this.

So we worked with a couple of phenomenal local pastors there.

Mark Gillmore: So what was the day like in your five days of ministry?

What did the day look like?

Guest: Yeah, about five days that we were on the ground.

Really what we did is we got going as quickly as we could.

We spent the first day in that village, Mokorewa.

One of our key ministry tools we had was a projector and a screen and the Jesus film in their local language.

So we would spend the day doing evangelism, preaching, traveling to villages that we could go.

Really what we tried to do is jump off the main road onto the trails, spend the day hiking throughout the countryside, getting to maybe three or four villages that would be, you know, maybe three to five miles apart from each other.

So in a day, maybe we’d travel 20 miles, but we hit several villages in that time.

And each time we’d come to a village, we could immediately gather anyone who’s in the village together to preach to them.

Sometimes, several times we stopped at schools along the way, and we were able to go in and preach to the children during the schools, during class in their, in their, what would be their public schools and that was widely received and then you know what we would do is invite everybody that evening to a central location that they could try and get to and we’d play the Jesus film and for these guys with very little power running anywhere at night if you if you’re traveling at night you see a light bulb somewhere that’s where all the people are around a light bulb because they don’t have any power so for them to see a movie projected onto a large sheet that we had hung up projecting a movie in their language it was a big deal and it drew large crowds in the evening so a day would look like us hiking from village to village preaching um we’d we’d find a spot to sling hammocks between trees in the bush near uh near or or just outside one of the villages where we would show the jesus film and we would show that film at least once sometimes they wanted to watch it a second time but after the jesus film after the first time we would do then a gospel message and invitation.

And lots of people got saved just from that as well.

You’re there in

Mark Gillmore: Sierra Leone.

You’re obviously English speaker.

Did you, did English work for you?

English worked

Guest: about half the time.

So English is the official language of Sierra Leone and in Freetown or in the populated areas, pretty much everyone spoke English.

But as soon as you step off into the bush, it’s, it’s a hit and miss type thing.

The older generation, many of them don’t speak any English.

Mende is a very common language there.

A lot of the younger generation read and speak English because schools have been able to be, schools have been planted in that country.

Most of the villages we went to, there was a school within walking distance, you know, maybe less than 10 miles, maybe less than five miles from the villages.

So a lot of the children are educated in English language.

So we were able to communicate honestly in the village, in the bush, we’re almost able to communicate better with the young generation than we were with the older ones.

But we had a translator everywhere we went as well.

Mark Gillmore: Wow.

What do you think my young audience is sitting with me here?

Are you all in on that?

Like get a little pack on your back and track miles down a trail.

Man, I want to do that.

Guest: That sounds awesome.

I’d love to turn around and head right back into the bush and go even deeper.

It’s so, you know, five days.

I think we all together hit 12 to maybe 15 villages.

And we don’t even scratch the surface.

Mark Gillmore: Yeah, you don’t even, you’re like, what’s down that trail?

What’s down that trail?

Guest: So many opportunities.

There’s another village.

Yeah, so many opportunities.

And the door is so wide open for the gospel there.

Mark Gillmore: As we continue in our podcast, we’re going to find out that it’s not all, you know, just fun and games.

We’ll learn that.

God’s given us a story along that line, but it really is, it’s fun.

It’s a blessing.

It’s good.

Incredible.

It’s good.

So as you’re preaching the gospel,

Guest: how did the people respond?

That was maybe one of the coolest parts of the trip, and it didn’t matter if we were in Freetown on the way in or on the way back, or if we were in the bush, every single person that we came up to was willing to talk to us, was willing to hear us give the gospel, was willing to talk about God.

The religion there is a bit mixed.

The Methodists and Charismatic have been in there heavily.

There’s a lot of Muslim presence.

And the common denominator there is nobody has the gospel.

They don’t have the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Even some villages that have a Methodist church and a school in them, and the children will sing songs about Jesus in the morning at their school, but they’ve never heard the gospel.

They’ve never heard how to be saved.

They believe in God.

They believe in Jesus, but they have no idea how to get saved.

They haven’t been taught that.

They don’t really have Bibles.

Many of the Methodist preachers, they’ll talk about God, and they’ll talk about being good and loving people and lots of things that aren’t bad, but the thing they’re lacking is the gospel of Jesus Christ, And they’re so open to that.

We were able to get the gospel to over 1,700 people in these villages in the bush.

And there was more than 500, I think 510, 512 people that we know of that accepted Jesus Christ in that time.

A couple of really unique experiences.

There was one village we went to.

There was a young Muslim.

And this village had a Methodist church.

In this Methodist church, Pastor Van Boy was actually able to lead their pastor to the Lord two weeks before we got there. and he’d begun evangelizing the village.

So as we used this village as a hub to reach out to other villages in the bush beyond it, one of the people that came to that village was a young Muslim man, 18 years old.

And after they brought us into the church there and the pastor introduced us and we talked a little bit and the Muslim man raised his hand and he was like, well, what about Muslims?

And the pastor knew this guy and had been working with him for a while.

He says, no, you’re a Muslim.

He’s like, yeah, I’m a Muslim.

I read the, I read, I study the Quran.

And so I just grabbed my Bible, right?

Just on the spot, I grabbed my Bible and went and sat down by him, gave it to him.

I was like, well, now you read the Bible.

And so I sat with that young man for probably 20 minutes and led him to the Lord Jesus Christ.

He got saved right there on the spot.

Yes, praise him.

And then he took us out to his family, had a farm out in the bush.

His mother and father were under a lean-to with a fire underneath it with a baby crawling around, just desperately poor.

And before we left that village, we were able to witness to his father as well, give him the gospel.

I don’t know whether or not his father accepted.

There’s a good chance that he will because his son has and his brother did.

There’s a good chance that the gospel will then continue to spread in that village.

And I know Pastor Van Boy, who’s a local there, is going to continue working in that area.

Wow.

Mark Gillmore: Wow.

Guest: go back?

Absolutely.

First chance I get.

Our next trip that we have coming up is probably going to end up being to Zambia.

The Lord’s opening some huge doors in that.

The military has invited us to come and preach the gospel to all of the military bases and bring Bibles to all the soldiers.

So we have a huge open door to the military of Zambia right now.

But I definitely am going to be going back to Sierra Leone and continuing the work there.

There’s so much more opportunity.

There’s so many more places to get to.

One of the cool things they’re doing right now is a radio station.

The Lord opened the doors for them to get a radio tower in Morambu Junction, way out in the bush.

They were able to bypass everything in Freetown and go straight out to the bush.

So they’ll be able to set up a radio station that’ll reach many of these villages.

So the next time we go out there and we go deep into the bush, what we’re going to do is bring single channel solar powered radios with us.

And so when we leave the bush, when we leave the it will leave them with a radio that will transmit from the tower in Moramba Junction as far as it possibly can reach.

Mark Gillmore: How do you feel like this experience touched your life, changed you?

Guest: Incredibly so.

You know, it’s said that the eye affects the heart.

And it’s just, in a way, heartbreaking to see so many people living in such desperate poverty and without the gospel message there. you know there’s there was a man that came to one of the jesus films that we showed and he talked to us afterwards and he said he just escaped two months ago this is two months ago he escaped a village where he’d been sold to for a human sacrifice a friend had sold him to a village to make him a human sacrifice and the lord allowed him to escape the village and he said the lord preserved him as he ran through the bush he showed us the scars all over his body where he’d been cut up from running through the bush to try to escape these people.

And the Lord, he wasn’t a bushman.

He didn’t know the bush, but he was able to escape and survive and get out and get back to civilization.

But that’s what’s over there.

There’s still villages sacrificing people that desperately need the gospel.

There’s villages of, you know, 100% Muslim people, not because they rejected Christ, because they’ve never heard about him.

Mark Gillmore: Well, as I just hear stories like this, meet people like yourself, encounter just my own experience in the field, Africa is a wide open field.

It’s so wide open.

When you think of a country like Sierra Leone, Zambia, Malawi, and other places, there should be just a compelling desire to go and to be part of that. and young people I just get on your knees and beg God to send you to Africa beg him to put his hand on your life and let you be part of this as we said you you have the opportunity of your lifetime absolutely all you’ve got is one lifetime and it’s your opportunity and to invest it in a way like this

Guest: you know we talk about we talk about how the fields are white to harvest.

We talk about this often, and often when we refer to that, we refer to that meaning that the fields are ripe and ready to be picked.

There’s another analogy there with the fields being white unto harvest, and a white harvest is referring to a harvest that’s late in the season, and the weather’s grown cold, and the frost has already come on the harvest.

It’s frozen.

And at that point, the harvest is literally dying on the vine, and that’s what you have in Africa right now.

It’s so ripe.

It’s so late, and the harvest, the fruit is literally dying, dying on the vine waiting for someone to come and share the gospel.

Man, while you’re praying that the Lord would send you to Africa, just go to Africa.

Just take a trip.

Take a trip and go to Africa.

Go there, even if it’s 10 days.

Maybe it’s two weeks, whatever it is.

Tell you what, I cannot get to these villages in the bush.

I cannot.

Hey, I’m good at rock marching, being in the military.

I’m good at walking a long ways under a heavy load, but I cannot get to all these villages.

There’s a bunch of young people in here that could do a lot of work, a lot of work, if we just get up there and go.

Mark Gillmore: Well, this isn’t a time to be trembling in fear.

This is a time to be filled with the Spirit of God and to be engaging the harvest that’s around us.

Remember, the only way to stay at peace in a world of turmoil and uncertainty is to stay on mission with Jesus in his Go Mission.