The Itepela Adventure

God called a team of six Ywamers to pioneer a church planting work amongst the Yao people in Itepela, Northern Mozambique, starting January 2006.

The current team members are Fred and Paula Berrington, Geraldo and Luisa Damião, Pedro Domingos and Salomão Eugenio. The Yao people are still considered an unreached people group and there are only a handful of mature Yao believers in Mozambique. Itepela is a Yao Muslim village about 120km south of Lichinga, the capital of the Niassa province of Mozambique. Itepela is the administrative post for the immediate area of villages around it with a population of more than 11,000. There is 1 known Christian and no other evangelical witness in this Muslim area.

Itepela used to be called Catur which is the name that is carried over from one chief to the next. The current chief Catur has indicated that he would like to follow Christ. He is one of the 5 sultwans (kings) amongst the Yao and his chiefdom includes the whole district and extends even into Malawi.

The Yao team will go out as a church planting team from the Ywam Lichinga base. This base has a vision to evangelize, disciple, train and equip Mozambicans untill Niassa is known as a province with a Christian character.

All the team members are currently part of the first School of Frontier Missions in Mozambique either as staff or students, and all did the Leadership training school in Namibia in 2004 as part of their preparation.

The first year or two will be spent learning the language and culture and doing intercession and spiritual warfare. Only then will we actively start to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. Home churches will be formed with the new converts and we would like to train and equip local believers as church leaders. Geraldo, a team member, is trained in malaria analyses and he plans to set up a small laborotory in Itepela to identify malaria, a service not currently available. Our evangelism efforts will also include chronological Bible storytelling and sports development.

The vision is that our team to Itepela will be the trailblazers for man multidimensional teams (church planters, sports evangelists, health workers, literacy trainers and community developers included) to go to every village without a church in Naissa, Mozambique and beyond.

We are trusting God for a people movement to begin through these efforts.