A couple of months ago, two Western cross-cultural workers joined a national believer on a visit to a town in eastern Turkey. The national said that there were three new believers in this town to whom he wanted to introduce them. It turned out that two of the new believers had been sharing in their community and about forty more people had become interested in Jesus. One evening, the workers visited a place where nearly ten of these young men were gathered. They were all interested in hearing the truth, and most of them wanted to have a Bible.
More recently, the most mature believer of the group called one of the workers and started lamenting over how people seemed to come to faith and even seemed to bear fruit but would later go out the back door to never be heard from again. The worker explained that these new believers needed to be taught to feed themselves from the Word and had to be integrated into the local body of believers. It was encouraging to see this man have a burden for his people and to be really thinking about how to build them up in Christ.
