Concert report

The Agsila concert celebrating the completion of the Wolof Bible went very well on Friday night – it was a much larger production than I expected, and well attended, we had an engaged crowd of about 500.

Agsila sang wonderfully, and had a few other artists appear before her and then sing with her – singing praise and scriptural songs in Wolof! We also had a video honoring the work of Mamadou Diop, the mother tongue translator who passed away after completing his Bible translation work – his son Samy is continuing to work with Marilyn Escher, our WorldVenture colleague who had been working in Senegal since 1972.

I was not at 100% but was able to go, praise God! I got a few pictures and video that didn’t do justice to it, but you can check a brief video out below.

I got the story on the venue change – the former director was taking deposits and not writing them down in the books, not just for this event but for many others – and was fired in the last few months. The new management is still working out all of the chaos brought by that – they returned the deposit that the former director stole, and offered a range of nights for free – I think next year there will be a follow-up concert there. Praise the Lord for that good resolution to that and that it didn’t hinder the concert happening as scheduled.

The striking thing about the concert for me was that there were so many helping, volunteering as ushers that I didn’t know – so many people attending that I didn’t know – and so many Christian artists singing in Wolof that I had not heard of before! I was amazed to see all that God is doing that I was ignorant of – it seemed like in years past there was so little happening in Wolof ministry that you knew more than you wanted to know about everything – to see people coming seemingly out of nowhere was amazing. It got me to thinking about the body of Christ and giftings and the broader work(s) that are happening in Senegal – and some lifting of the sense that we have to “do it all” – God is out there and others are too – as a friend said afterwards – referring to 1 Kings 19.18, all those who are still faithful. That’s a good thing to remember.

Wolof Bible update

Just got news from Marilyn that the Wolof Bibles are printed and in the dock in Busan, Korea! They are shortly to be en route and will be here mid-to-late March. We’ll have more events and concerts around that time and then I think the biggest event will be in June 2026.
Also pray for…

Church fundraising

Our beloved church here in Dakar has been raising funds for a new home for about a year – we are over 40% of the way there, $130,000 in of about $300,000! That is great progress, and we are praying soon for the remainder to come in. We and others have put out the word via our networks and I think we need to extend beyond our current communication radius. Please pray with us that we would be able to pursue some new leads for funds in the next few months!

In other news:

I can’t resist telling you all that our daughter Molly’s Coast Guard women’s rugby team won the DII national championship last night! They won 51-12 in the final.

Christmas Concert tonight

The WorldVenture team are hosting a series of events to promote the Wolof Bible release, and the first is tonight! Agsila is the daughter of our late translator Mamadou Diop – she sings in the Wolof language in a Wolof style, and many of her songs are from the translation of the Bible that her father worked on. You can check her music out on Spotify and YouTube below.

The attendees will all receive a couple of resources I had a hand in – the first is the Wolof scripture calendar I typeset each year from the content put together by my amazing WEC colleague Dirka.

The second is a Christmas booklet that contains the first two chapters each of Luke and Matthew – the Christmas story – with an endsheet with prophecies about Jesus and where the full Wolof Bible will be available from first part of next year. Click on the cover below to download the pdf if you want to take a look. The Bible text layout is identical to the full Bible – I just pulled the pages out of the original file. The cover design is an alteration of the Wolof Bible cover designed by our colleague Ruth W – I recolored it and changed the title for this booklet.

Moving from a rural part of Senegal to the biggest city has brought a ton of changes to our lives and work – things are so different for us now, it’s almost like we are in another country. Many of the things we used to do very regularly we never do anymore – and so it was like slipping back into our old lives a bit when Katie started teaching Sunday School in Wolof at the church we attend here in Dakar. 

How it started…

…How it’s going

The picture at the top was taken in 2004 in a village near Kaffrine of Katie teaching one of her first (of many!) children’s Bible storying groups. The picture at the bottom was taken during Sunday School at our church just a couple weeks ago.

Up until now, Sunday School at our church here in Dakar has been mostly taught in French but recently a group of boys who don’t go to school and who have never been to church before have begun attending so we realized we needed to offer teaching in Wolof. So Katie pulled out her well-used chronological Bible storying booklets and the lesson plans she developed to go with them. So far she has taught the first four stories and she is still learning all the kids’ names but she is really enjoying this opportunity. Pray for all of the kids to understand, remember, and believe what they hear!

Sometimes our second time around provides a chance to improve something that was good and make it better – I recently had a chance to get some things right with a Bible study program I wrote a couple of years ago.

I put this together to solve some specific problems I had encountered when helping Senegalese church leaders with Bible study programs. The app was fine but showed my deficiencies as a coder – the text in each translation scrolled together to a degree but could only find the right paragraph, not scroll to the right verse. The data had to all be downloaded before the user could do anything – so it took more than a minute to load the web version. Not good.

On the other hand, once it loaded, it showed two Wolof versions, a French and an English version along with biblical Greek for the NT, and was simple and uncluttered. And above all, it was easy to get to and available for web, Windows, macOS, and iPad. And in 2023, getting that far was absolutely maxing out my abilities.

So fast forward to 2025 – and AI coding is now a thing. I have done some experimenting and even written whole apps with AI – and so I went back to try to solve some of the deficiencies in this app, and I got all the to-fix items done – plus some more! – in a week or so of work. The verses now scroll together smoothly, the content gets loaded from small chunked files, and the search uses many small index files – all to achieve a faster and less memory-intensive app. I would not have been able to do all that without AI coding assistant’s help! God uses many different tools to help send out His Word!

You can test drive the new version of the app:

web: http://app.kaddugyalla.com

(the above link will send you to the mobile app download page if you are using mobile or the desktop version if you’re on a computer or iPad)

Windows: http://sng.al/win

macOS & iPad: http://sng.al/mac

What does coding with AI look like? It’s a bit different than AI in the browser; it’s a command line tool that sits in your development environment and, with the user’s permission, can write code, make new files, save files, and even run the program and do diagnostic work. It’s amazing how much I can do and how quickly I can do it when using the AI assistant!

We are thankful for a wonderful four days with about 300 pastors from across Senegal from Tuesday to Friday this week. Thanks for praying with us!

Our guest speaker, Dr Keith Ferdinando, spoke on Christ’s victory over evil spirits. The treatment was a panoramic Bible exposition of the subject from across Scripture from someone deeply learned in the field. For the conference audio and information (in French) check out http://bpp.sng.al

Our teammate Andrew at left and Dr Keith at right

In between the plenary sessions, we had workshops led by folks who work in Senegal. We had sessions on:

• How the Reformers battled superstition

• Understanding our civic rights and responsibilities as a religious minority in Senegal

• Christians, the church, and politics

• Sending and supporting missionaries from Senegal

In addition to the books distributed at the conference in both physical and digital format, we also had asked a group of experienced Senegalese pastors to produce chapters for a new book on ministry in Senegal that we also distributed at the conference with chapters on:

• The Gospel that Removes Shame

• What is the Kingdom of God?

• How to Motivate a Congregation to Witness

• Urban Ministry: Challenges and Opportunities

• How to Do Ministry Among Teenagers

• How the Church Can Better Help Singles

• How to Organize a Sunday School for Children

• Ministry Among Women

• How the Church Can Better Help Widows and Those in Mourning

• The Challenge of Contextualization: Remaining Both Biblical and Contextual

I am particularly excited to begin reading this book completely written by pastor-scholars from right here in Senegal!

We also had of course wonderful times of seeing warm reunions of pastors who live far apart and don’t get to see each other often – and participating in those retrouvailles ourselves!

Our team leader Andrew did a phenomenal job of setting up and hosting the conference. Many had a hand in the preparation but he has really guided the planning through the past year-plus. We had a very smooth four days without any emergencies or hiccups.

I led two sessions on how to use the Livros app that I made – and I learned a few things during the conference about things I need to change to make the login process easier for other SIM teams in other countries who will use the app in the future. But by and large it was a successful launch! Many of the pastors really appreciated the ‘offline-first’ functionality of the app that takes into account users who have intermittent internet access.

A couple of quotes from participants:

    Thank you very much to all the organizers. We are so blessed by all the teachings and various resources received during the 2025 Pastor’s Book Set for our edification and improvement in our ministry.

    I thank you with all my heart for the library. May God prosper your work and continue to inspire you.

Continue to pray for these pastors and their difficult and often (from a human perspective) unseen work in far-flung parts of Senegal.