The Hazani people in North Africa are devoutly Muslim. They are also an unreached people group, meaning they don’t have any local Christians. Jared and a team with Frontiers USA minister full-time among the Hazani and have a good relationship, but it took a while to get there.
Decades earlier, Jared’s American Midwest church began praying for the Hazani people to know Jesus. Frontiers helped the church connect with the Hazani in North Africa and they learned the tribe was trying to find ways to broaden their children’s understanding of the world.
This prompted an idea. Jared’s church invited the Hazani to send their kids to visit America and stay with Christian host families.
Perry LaHaie with Frontiers says, “They reached out to the Hazani tribal leaders and they said, ‘Well, other Muslims really aren’t helping us. So let’s give these American Christians a chance.’
“That first summer, nine families from Jared’s church hosted the kids and then after a couple of years, Hazani leaders invited Jared’s church to send short-term teams to come and just love on the kids more. The tribal leaders just said, ‘You love our kids. We can see that you genuinely care.’”
Once Jared finished college in the early 2000s, he started going on short-term trips to visit the Hazani. Eventually, his church partnered with Frontiers to send a full-time team to work among the Hazani in North Africa. Jared quit his job, joined the full-time team, and even became the team leader.
“They’ve been working among the Hazani for several years now sowing seeds of the Gospel, sharing and showing the love of Jesus,” LaHaie says. “There are still no churches and no believers. After decades, Jared started to wonder and his teammates started to wonder if they had been just laboring in vain, working in vain, just throwing seed into the dry ground.”
“But God brought this promise to them from Isaiah 43. God says, ‘I’m doing a new thing. I’m making a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.’ They have held on to that promise.”
SOURCE: Mission Network News, Lyndsey Koh
All Content & Images are provided by the acknowledged source