Africa

Africa: A Continent of Great Diversity

Africa is the world’s second-largest and second-most-populous continent. It covers about 20 percent of Earth’s total land area. With 1.1 billion people in 2013, it accounts for about 15% of the world’s human population. The continent includes Madagascar and various archipelagos. It contains 54 fully recognized sovereign countries. Africa’s median age is about 20 while the worldwide median age is about 30. It straddles the equator and encompasses numerous climate areas. Africa hosts a large diversity of ethnicities, cultures, and languages.

Population: 953,000,000

Spiritually lost: 755,000,000 (79%)

Unreached people groups: 1344

Serving in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1996
Mission focus: training pastoral leaders
Jordon team: Dean and Autumn (husband/wife)

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Africa: Dean & Autumn Jordon

Our journey to Zaire, Africa, now called the Democratic Republic of Congo, began in 1994, when God began to speak to us regarding foreign missions. In 1996 we moved with our six children to France for language training and then in November 1996, moved to the interior village of Lodja. We later moved to Kinshasa, the capital city, to serve as the administrator of FODESA, our team’s Congolese Development Non-Profit Organization. In 2001, Dean assumed the responsibility as the IOM Field Director in Congo and in 2009, our vision to establish a Biblical Training Center in Congo was realized

More About the Jordons

In addition to our work in Congo, Dean is also working and teaching alongside other ministries in African countries. All six children have now returned to the States for college, four are married, and we have 14 grandchildren.

Dean and Autumn Jordon have successfully raised their six children in Kinshasa, one of the largest and most difficult cities in Africa. Now, deep in the interior, Dean partners with Congolese agricultural engineer and registered nurse, Pierre Nguelielie, and Pierre’s nurse/wife Beatrice.

To develop a unique pastoral training school in that war-torn and virtually roadless country, they are using smaller satellite schools, specially designed to meet the needs there. Each satellite school becomes a small local community of pastors and families, who closely live, learn and work together for two years. In addition to the inductive Bible curriculum adapted from KMTI, students, and their families also learn to plant crops and raise small animals, often forgotten skills in a country where more than five million people—generations of parents and grandparents—were killed in a long-running civil war.

At the end of the two-year training program, each pastor, and his family goes back to their village to begin a satellite school there, including other local pastors who have the same needs. Each of these families takes with them tools, seed, and the needed starter animals for a new beginning with a new satellite school and a new student body.

Learning the biblical skills of godly living in the context of community has special advantages. A group of families living and working together in close quarters has abundant opportunity to learn to forbear and to forgive, to serve as Jesus taught his disciples, and to grow in the graces of kindness and generosity. Learning these truths from the Bible, as the occasion arises, means that each lesson is clothed in real life, the life they and their congregations will lead for years to come.

The teaching families, the Jordans and the Nguelielies, have themselves become a seed which is falling into the ground to yield fruit for others to eat.

For more information about the Jordans visit their website: http://www.jordonministries.com