ReachGlobal is the world mission arm of the Evangelical Free Church of America. Jim Snyder is ReachGlobal’s international leader for Africa. Jim, his wife Ruth and their family have long been a part of our church family at First Free Rockford, even as they spent years living as missionaries in Africa.

Jim also works closely with local and national ministry in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where First Free has supported Tabitha Centers, GlobalFingerprints and other ministry throughout that nation.

With First Free being one of four American churches involved in something called the Congo Consortium, we spoke with Jim about the continuing opportunities for our church to engage there. This is the first of two parts.

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Most Americans don’t know much about Congo. Maybe the first thing is to point out that our church supports work in DRC. There’s another Congo, too, right?

Yeah. One was a French colony and one was a Belgian colony. We work in the Belgian colony, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (The adjacent, former French colony is Congo Brazzaville, or Republic of the Congo.)

And the capital city of Kinshasa is where our recent involvement has been centered?

Our church has been involved with Tabitha Centers and GlobalFingerprints (child sponsorship). There was probably no greater movement forward in those ministries than was created by First Free Rockford. And each of those ministries continues to grow. We’re at over 300 Tabitha Centers now.

For the benefit of those who might be new, what is a Tabitha Center?

Each one of these centers provides an opportunity for women to learn a job skill. Kinshasa is a city of 17 million people, and it is one of the most underemployed cities in the world. People might have a job, but it’s entirely incapable of providing for all of their families’ needs. In order to respond to that, women are looking for additional income streams. A Tabitha Center provides that. They’re learning hairdressing, sewing, cooking, hotel and restaurant hospitality industry.

It also provides women the opportunity to be discipled during their time there. They normally meet three days a week, about three to five hours a day. And it’s a great opportunity for women who are leaders in the church to come along and do life with those women. Usually the ones who come in are younger. That’s the demographic we’re normally approaching. But there are sometimes older women, sometimes women with families who are looking for additional income to provide for the needs of their family.

What has First Free’s involvement looked like?

A number of years ago, when we launched into supporting Tabitha Centers, we had sent over several of our people—Pastor Luke, Erin Blume and Aaron Biby— to just kind of scout out the lay of the land to see what was going on. Luke’s passion was to raise maybe $20,000 for a few Tabitha Centers. And we ended up pushing close to $100,000.

That allowed us to launch 60 to 70 Tabitha Centers. And it really moved us in a good direction, into a different level of operation. It caused them to have to rethink how that would look, as far as leadership is concerned.

Today it includes something similar for men, right?

Since the development of Tabitha, we were receiving all sorts of requests from pastors about doing the same thing for men. And so we developed Follow Me. It’s a ministry for men that engages particularly younger guys. They’re looking for income streams. A lot of these guys were really problematic for the church, in communities where they were connected to gangs. That’s probably one-third of those doing the Follow Me ministry. It is providing men with real-life job skill options. We just introduced welding, but there’s also carpentry, paint making and painting, shoe repair, things like that. Guys are learning and then also being discipled, just like in the Tabitha Center ministry. And they’re coming out of it with job skills that are making them money.

When you talk about church involvement, are you talking about the Evangelical Free Church or does it go wider than that?

This goes way beyond the Free Church. When we we walked into our ministry in Kinshasa, we realized that sticking with a single denomination would limit us severely. So we ended up connecting to churches through what is called the  EEC. It’s the umbrella of all the Protestant denominations in Congo. It’s an organization that is very friendly to us. … Basically, we look to them as a door opener. We do not work directly with them. They provide us opportunities. It’s through that, then, that we gain connections with the Baptists, the Pentecostal churches and all sorts of denominations that are considered Protestant. Even some of the mainline denominations that we are now connected to through things like the Tabitha Centers, through Follow Me and through children’s ministries that we’re doing with KidStory.

Do you operate with favor from the government?

Always. And there are times where we include local government officials in celebrations to help them see what’s going on. To thank them for allowing us to be able to do certain things. And we’re intentional about that — engaging them in a way that celebrates the freedom we have to be able to do that.

Is this within Kinshasa only, or does it stretch outside the city, too?

Tabitha’s ministry has gone well beyond the city now. We’re actually even in different countries. We have some in Central African Republic, some in Malawi. Some even with the Free Church up in the northwest (of DRC). And some of those outlying ones look a little bit different, but largely they’re Tabitha Centers. They’re teaching job skills and discipling people.

And it provides us additional opportunities, too, for inroads to areas that address an African worldview. We have training on the sanctity of human life, which is huge. We also have trauma care training. All of those address specific aspects of African worldview that help them realize that the Bible has better answers than what the African traditional options are.

And yet that’s coming from Africans, not from Westerners, right? Which is huge.

The material has largely been created for Africa by Westerners, but it’s being passed on by Africans.

It feels like a page has turned in world missions, especially Africa, with local ministry by churches there. God certainly used Westerners for a season, though.

Oh, totally. Everything that is happening right now in Kinshasa is happening because of the history of ministry in the northwest. And we would be nowhere right now had it not been for that.

But it’s so good to see God advancing those movements locally now, to where Westerners can step aside.

And some of it is forced. You have COVID. You have political tension. You have Ebola. You have wars.

So maybe sometimes the Westerners weren’t so willing, but God pushed things along anyway.

Yeah. And that was probably one of the biggest realizations that we had back in ’91 when we had to evacuate. We came back and realized that a lot of those things that we thought were so important just were not being done by the national church. We had to reevaluate some of that.

Being pushed out of it is not a bad thing. And in fact, one of the biggest measures I’ve used to see if our ministry is really effective is to pull people out. So, take Claudine and Selenga, who have been instrumental in all that we’ve done in Kinshasa. I’ve encouraged them multiple times to step away, come to the States, or spend time with their family, visit churches, do stuff like that. Give them a couple of weeks, a month, maybe even a couple of months, to be able to step away from ministry and then go back into it and see how things have fared.

So if it’s good, there are probably no hiccups when they get back. If there are hiccups, then figure that out. What is it that we need to hand off? What is it that we need to be doing to equip others to be able to do what we’ve done in the past?

That’s a pretty big step of faith for someone who has been completely immersed in a work for so long, to be able to step away and say, ‘I’m trusting God with this.‘

Yeah. Or trusting the people around them. That’s huge and it’s very non-African. Because normally the leader there … everything will exist around his presence, his power. So in that situation, it is proving very positive. But the other side of that is, OK, we have these Africans doing ministry. Why do they need us?

There are two responses to that. One is that I’m beginning to pull Africans into the (ReachGlobal) Africa team. One of those is a young lady who has been very involved with Tabitha GlobalFingerprints Tabitha, as the manager of the program. High capacity. A very, very talented young woman. She has now been accepted as a ReachGlobal staff person. She will be like Selenga and Claudine, living in Congo, and yet adding a dimension to what we’re doing through GlobalFingerprints that no white person could ever do. Helping with training and equipping other national staff around Africa. Responding to situations that are very complex because of culture, situations that she will have a head start on because she’s African. And able to speak into it in ways that no American can.

The other thing is that ministry is being done. It doesn’t matter who’s doing it, it can always be done better. There are always new things, new ways. And also, the reality of doing ministry in the context of partnership, always strengthens ministry.

And so as we engage with our partners in Africa, in Congo particularly, there will always be elements where we can bring in people, skills, training, encouragement in ways that could never be accomplished outside of that. So that’s really the role of the consortium right now, to come alongside to encourage, train, teach, equip, provide additional resources where it’s necessary. Not necessarily resources that maintain ministry. It’s resources that allow us to move forward in ministry.

Tell me a little more about the Congo Consortium.

We have four churches involved with it: Two Rivers in Knoxville, Tennessee; Constance Free Church in Andover, Minnesota; Hope Community Church in West Salem, Wisconsin, and First Free Rockford. We have a couple of other churches on the fringes that are kind of watching to see what’s going on, and wanting to develop the capacity to become part of it.

And then your role is to be the connective tissue to tie things together?

Right, at this point. In theory, no (ReachGlobal) international leader has ever done anything quite like this before because they are a couple thousand feet above this level. I’m still a country leader, I’m involved with Kinshasa ministry, I’m still the advisor to the president of the Free Church of Congo. I do all of that because I love it.

So you have both the aerial view and the ground-level view. Both must be pretty valuable.

No matter what area of leadership they’re in, I’ve encouraged all of my leaders to get their hands dirty at some point. Without that, one, it’s hard to raise support. And two, you lose sight of what’s really important. You become too disengaged from the realities of ministry as just a leader. So, I want every one of my staff on the ground experiencing what our people are experiencing. What our partners are experiencing,

How many African countries is ReachGlobal engaged in?

We have staff in five: Tanzania, Kenya, Malawi, Congo and Cameroon. And then we also have significant partnerships in Zambia, as well as significant GlobalFingerprints work in Liberia.

We also have partners in Uganda, South Sudan and Rwanda.

Those are hard places.

They’re really hard right now. And it wouldn’t be happening without the national partners.

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NEXT TIME: What can First Free Rockford learn from the church in Congo?

DRC photo and video: Reach Global.