Despite dangers, missionary work in Africa continues

Carrying out the work of the Africa Inland Mission can be rewarding but dangerous. The potential for peril did not prevent Peter Cameron Scott, a missionary who graduated from the Nyack Missionary Institute — now known as Nyack College — from establishing an interdenominational Christian organization in 1895 to minister to the inner regions of Africa.

Though Scott and several other members of the initial mission died of diseases they contracted in Africa, AIM flourished.

But the challenges it now faces go beyond disease.

"There's increasing danger," said Ted Barnett, director of AIM's U.S. operation, which is run out of small complex on Crooked Hill Road in Pearl River. "Two of our missionaries in northern Uganda last year were unexpectedly murdered, so they paid the ultimate price."

Warren and Donna Pett, originally dairy farmers from Wisconsin, had worked with AIM since 1997. The Petts and Isaac Jurugo, a Ugandan student, were fatally shot in March 2004 by robbers who raided the Christian agricultural training center where the Petts worked.

Others have been injured over the years, and several died in Congo in 1964.

The risk of harm — especially in countries with unstable political regimes — must be faced, Barnett said, and sensitizing missionaries to that risk is one of the key aspects of the training conducted by AIM's U.S. offices.

"We ask people, before they go, to consider the cost, and we go through a whole series of scenarios that do happen, have happened, that involve risk, and ask them not to go until they are at peace with what the ultimate cost could be," said Barnett, whose parents and grandparents were AIM missionaries in Kenya.

The organization has been conducting its work from Pearl River since it moved from Brooklyn to the hamlet in 1969.

About 45 staffers at the Pearl River site work to support AIM's outreach efforts. There also are facilities to host missionaries who are in transit. Three times a year, missionaries-to-be receive screening and orientation there.

More than adventure

Although the organization does not conduct formal recruitment, outreach through churches and speaking engagements provides exposure, and many potential candidates become interested in AIM when they visit the group's Web site, Barnett said.

Not everyone is an ideal candidate. From early on in the screening process, candidates are evaluated to learn their primary motivation for wanting to become missionaries.

If they want to visit Africa for an adventure or a vacation, "Well, we encourage them to take that, just not with AIM," Barnett said.

Others who appear to have a more serious commitment but are not certain that they want a long-term posting in Africa are encouraged to visit for about eight weeks to better assess their feelings, he said.

AIM's missionaries concern themselves with health, education and development issues.

The group's full-time permanent missionaries, who number about 900, serve in a variety of roles: they "plant" churches, work as doctors, teach theology and community development skills, and perform AIDS outreach.

Other missionaries work as pilots, engineers, accountants, administrators and computer programmers to provide critical support.

They come from offices in Canada, Europe, South America, Africa, Asia and Australia, and work in 15 African nations and the islands of the Indian Ocean.

Despite the diversity of talents and duties, they all share AIM's main goal: to spread the word of God. The mandate is derived from the Bible's Matthew 28: 19-20, which urges the teaching of the Gospel to all nations.

"This is an unchanging command from the Lord, our expectation to make disciples," Barnett said.

Life in Congo

David Langford, a retired AIM missionary from Clifton, N.J., felt that call.

"I was born in the Congo, and my parents were missionaries with the Africa Mission, so I sort of grew up in it and became an official missionary in 1972," said Langford, who taught at an AIM theological school in Congo — then known as Zaire — for about 22 years.

AIM has helped form about 2,500 congregations in Congo since it started working there in 1912, said Langford, who was raised and ordained in the conservative Baptist tradition and lived in Congo and Sudan until he was 14 years old.

Langford, who now runs his own business, came to America, went to school and college, and then returned to Congo with his wife, a doctor, when he was 30.

Life in Congo was interesting, rich and vital, he said. "I guess the most memorable experience was living in a village," he said. "One of the people that we had gotten to know in the village, he'd built us a mud and wattle house with a dirt floor and a grass roof."

There was no electricity, no running water, and the bathroom was an outhouse. They lived there for more than a year.

Langford, who has been back and forth to Congo in recent years since the eruption of a conflict that has left millions dead and displaced, said the current situation was markedly different from when he served full time.

"There really wasn't much danger" during his tenure, he said.

But times have changed, he said, recalling his visit to the country early last month.

"Even this last time when I went back, I wasn't sure I should go to Bunia," he said, speaking of a major city in northeastern Congo.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, a former Belgian colony that was known as Zaire from 1971 to 1997, has experienced intense political instability since the overthrow of President Mobutu Sese Seko's regime in 1997.

Fighting and disease are believed to have claimed more than 3 million lives since 1998. Since then, more than 2 million have been displaced. Although the main conflict has officially ended, bloody clashes, killings and mass rapes of women and children continue in parts of the Central African nation.

Despite the risk — which is particularly high for Americans in this geopolitical climate — evangelism and discipleship will continue to underpin all of AIM's work, Barnett said.

AIM's efforts are welcomed by national leaders because evangelism is conducted along with development assistance, he said.

"So governments see that we're there to help people live a better life and to meet practical needs. The Gospel entails more than just meeting the needs of a person's soul. ... My goals are to assist people who are in poverty or affected by war or HIV/AIDS, so there's many dimensions to our ministry."