The crowd of people gathering on the cement forecourt in the hot, humid air of Lomé, Togo, surged through the doors of Togo’s largest convention center, rapidly filling the 3,000-seat auditorium.
Arriving from churches, cities, and villages spanning the length of the nation, Togolese believers assembled with ABWE missionaries and leadership in one unified purpose: to praise God in joyful celebration of ABWE’s 50 years of ministry in Togo.
“This celebration of 50 years is a great milestone for ABWE,” declared ABWE U.S. President Paul Davis in the March 23, 2024, ceremony attended by representatives of the Togolese government. “When we look back on the time since the first missionaries came to Togo, we can see so much fruit from their labors . . . . ABWE has seen Togo grow and flourish to become a beacon of light to West Africa.”
“All of this is by the grace of God,” added ABWE team leader Honoré Afolabi, emphasizing the partnerships between ABWE missionaries and Togolese believers that have enabled a nationwide ministry, including founding more than 200 churches, two hospitals, a school for the blind, a radio station, pastoral training centers, a resource center, and impacting innumerable lives changed by the gospel.
Pastor Gaglo is one of those lives transformed. As a young man, he was hired as a mason during the construction of ABWE’s first hospital in Togo, Hôpital Baptiste Biblique. After two years of listening to the missionaries and Togolese pastors preach the gospel to the crew each day before work, he understood he was a sinner and placed his faith in Christ. He immediately began following the Lord’s direction to share the gospel with others, first as a hospital translator and later as a physician’s assistant and a pastor in the town of Adéta.
“I could never have become what I became without the mission of ABWE,” he testified. “It changed my life, and it’s my joy to celebrate this day.”
Choruses of worship echoed throughout the day-long commemoration, beginning with a festival of choirs and extending throughout a formal ceremony and worship service. Despite ethnic differences among those gathered, their praise harmonized—as did their attire, with most wearing clothing sewn from the blue, orange, and yellow swirled fabric printed for the event according to Togolese custom.
“While this is a beautiful crowd, and there are many who have heard the good news of Jesus Christ, there are many in Togo who still need to hear the gospel,” Paul Davis reminded the assembly. “There are still [unreached] tribes and villages . . . so we are praying that God would open a door for the gospel.”
An Unexpected Entry
Fifty years earlier, Dallas (“Dal”) and Kay Washer waited in a holding pattern as their plane circled the Lomé coastline. Gazing down at the airport in Togo’s capital—their new home—they watched as the transport carrying Togolese President Gnassingbé Eyadéma touched down on the runway to great fanfare. Only a month prior, Eyadéma had survived a plane crash in northern Togo that had claimed the life of the pilot and crew. Hailed by his people as immortal, Eyadéma’s triumphal return to Lomé on February 2, 1974, was celebrated as a national holiday.
Dal and Kay navigated the jubilant crowds in the airport alone and unknown, arriving as the first pioneer missionaries to open the field for ABWE. Kay later wrote, “For us, it was a special date as well, for it was the date of our own ‘triumphal entry’ into Togo.”
Togo had not been the Washers’ originally intended destination. After 18 years as missionaries in Niger, they had turned their focus to Benin. When the doors for ministry remained firmly closed, however, they charted a new course for its western neighbor, Togo.
Once settled in Lomé, the Washers launched into ministry from their home, inviting young people to Bible studies that grew into church plants. Their ministry flourished as their Togolese neighbors eagerly expressed interest in the Bible. Soon joined by ABWE teammates Dave and Elwanda Fields, Tim and Esther Neufeld, and Jim and Carol Plunkitt, the church plants became sufficiently established that Dal and Kay moved farther north into the nation’s interior, the burden for Togo’s 46 people groups—many of them unreached—compelling them onward.
Mercy for Body and Soul
As they began church planting in the city of Kpalimé, Kay’s heart was drawn to several blind children she observed in the streets. Her compassion for the visually impaired in Niger had prompted her to learn Braille, experience she now employed in Togo to begin the nation’s first school for the blind—and initiate a chain of ABWE mercy ministries that continue to this day. As the students’ academic success attracted the attention of Togolese examiners, the government granted the school a tract of land in Kpalimé to construct a permanent facility, now called the Village of Light.
Today, approximately 40 residential students fill the Village of Light each year, learning not only academic subjects but Bible courses taught through Braille, verbal instruction, and tactile learning. Young adults receive workshop training in furniture building or soap making to enable them to start their own business upon graduation. Many of the students, having been rejected for their blindness or subjected to painful animist rituals by village witch doctors, experience for the first time at the Village of Light the radiance of Christ’s love breaking through the darkness.
The blind were not the only population sector for whom the growing missionary team was burdened. One day, as Dal and Kay surveyed the vast panorama of huts clustered among the steamy tropical mountainsides near Kpalimé, they prayed for the remote villages still beyond their reach.
“Oh God, these lost people need medical help,” they pleaded. “Please send us nurses to meet the great need that we see.”
Their prayer was answered above and beyond in 1985, when a new wave of ABWE missionaries completed the construction of Hôpital Baptiste Biblique (HBB), situated just north of Kpalimé in the town of Tsiko.
“The hospital immediately began bearing fruit as hordes of people would come suffering, and their suffering would be relieved,” said current HBB hospital administrator and surgeon Dr. Tom Kendall. “They would sense the compassion of the medical staff, and they would be open to the gospel.”
From the beginning, HBB’s mission has focused on providing quality medical care as an avenue for assisting the Togolese church with evangelism.
“HBB is a holistic ministry, taking care of the entire human being, both body and soul,” Tom continued. “If we only take care of the body, even if we do it well, we’re failing our mission because Jesus didn’t say ‘Go and build hospitals.’ He said ‘Go and make disciples.’ A hospital and medical ministry is just a means to do that.”
Some, like recent patient Midima, arrive with little hope remaining. Injured in a motorcycle accident several years ago, the fracture in his leg had never healed, and he was forced to limp painfully with an exposed and infected tibia. After exhausting all treatment options at other local clinics and hospitals, he arrived at HBB as a last resort.
“By God’s grace, the infected bone was removed, and after one month in our hospital, he walked out the door with the aid of a single crutch and no pain,” reported HBB surgeon Dr. Jack Kehl.
During his hospitalization, Midima listened to chaplains daily preach evangelistic sermons, as well as converse with him individually. As with every patient, the chaplains recorded his spiritual interest in his medical chart. When Midima returned to HBB for a follow-up visit, Jack noticed the annotations and asked him what he had learned about Jesus.
“He broke into a big smile and proceeded to tell me that he used to think he had to keep all of God’s laws perfectly to go to heaven,” Jack shared. At HBB, Midima heard the true gospel for the first time. He believed and left the hospital filled with hope.
Each year, 2,200-2,400 patients like Midima are treated in the 50-bed hospital, while 16,000-18,000 visit the HBB clinic and 1,100-1,500 receive surgery. Since its founding, HBB has expanded to include men’s and women’s wards, a maternity ward, ICU, infection ward, operating rooms, an outpatient clinic, labs, and a pharmacy. On average, 14 percent of patients trust Christ for salvation during their stay.
“As medical professionals, we get to enter into the point of suffering in so many people’s lives and help address that, and that just opens their heart in a way that other avenues can’t,” explained Tom. “When people are brought face to face with their own mortality, they begin to think about eternity. . . . And so we don’t exploit that emotional state, but rather leverage that opportunity as good soil, like their heart has been prepared for us to share the hope of the gospel.”
In addition to evangelism, opportunities for discipleship at HBB abound—primarily through day-to-day interactions with the 150 staff members. A nursing education program founded by missionary Annette Williams in 1995 has trained Togolese students to provide quality, compassionate care, with discipleship woven into every aspect of the program.
The spiritual impact of HBB has spread far beyond the hospital walls. To date, 55 churches have been established in the surrounding region, along with a Bible institute.
As interest in the gospel grew, the ABWE team sensed a need to develop Bible study resources in local languages. The Christian Resource Center (CRC), constructed on the HBB property, opened in 1996 to design and print gospel tracts and discipleship materials, selling them at affordable prices in the CRC bookstore alongside imported French-language books and Bibles.
“We’ve gone from two yellow tracts in 1996 to over 900 titles, mostly in French, with some in Ewe and Kabiye,” said CRC director Judy Bowen, highlighting the unique draw of gospel tracts in Togolese culture.
One security guard accepted a tract from Judy one day, and the next day, quietly told her, “God wants me to know that I am a sinner. I read that brochure you gave me, and I asked Jesus to be my Savior last night.”
In recent years, the team has incorporated audiovisual resources to engage Togolese without access to education. By distributing SD cards preloaded with the Jesus Film or audio Bibles, Togolese from multiple linguistic backgrounds can access Scripture from their phones. ABWE ministry Studios Vérité has been instrumental in recording audio versions of Scripture, with plans to develop additional Bible training resources in audio and tablet formats.
Harvest in Stony Fields
As the growing ministries in southern Togo found ripe fields for harvest, the ABWE team cast their gaze to the horizon, beyond which lay an even greater concentration of unreached people groups.
Journeying over 200 miles north, the verdant plateau of southern Togo gives way to dusty fields of dry grass and tree-lined hillsides dotted with rural villages and herds of cattle. Many people groups in central Togo are staunchly Muslim or animist (or a combination of both), the stony landscape reflecting their resistance to the gospel.
“The best estimates indicate that there are 899,000 unreached, unengaged people in this region,” reports ABWE missionary Jonathan Archer. “There’s an overwhelming reality when you’re staring at someone face to face that doesn’t have access to Jesus.”
Ministry among these people groups often follows a different schedule. As a visual representation, Jonathan points to a wooden carving of an hourglass, quoting an African proverb, “Americans have a watch, but we have the time.”
He explains: “Time is our greatest commodity for people here. It’s so encouraging to know that [the work] doesn’t depend on us, and we’re just a little piece in the process that God uses to fulfill the task, in the roles that he’s put before us to connect with the people he created. Ultimately, he’s the one that gives the increase, and he’s the one that brings it to full fruition.”
Since the late 1980s, when the first ABWE missionaries moved to central Togo, God has indeed been granting that increase. These missionaries, together with Togolese pastors, labored to plant two churches in the city of Kara, and later, three more, including in areas with deep Islamic roots. As the churches developed, the missionaries became aware that the Kabiye people group, traditionally fetish worshipers, lacked an accurate translation of Scripture in their language and partnered with Bibles International and a core of Kabiye believers to form a translation committee. After more than a decade of faithful work, the Kabiye New Testament was dedicated in January 2012.
Simultaneously, understanding that the long road to ministry success requires theological depth, ABWE missionaries formed a Bible institute on the campus of Bible Baptist Church of Grace in Kara, which trains local pastors to plant and lead congregations in remote villages and nomadic communities.
“I know of at least 16 churches that have been planted in the Central, Kara, and Savanna regions as a result of the initial churches that these former missionaries established,” says Jonathan.
Current ABWE teammates in Kara serve alongside Togolese church leaders, training them to intentionally reach outside their own ethnolinguistic groups to bring the gospel to the unreached tribes in their region. They model evangelistic interactions as they build relationships in their city, lead a community kids’ club, and engage with university students through the El Roï University Center that aims to create disciples with the goal of church planting in unreached areas..
To the Farthest Corners of Togo
The call to press on to the farthest frontiers of Togo came in the mid-2000s. A team of medical professionals became burdened to develop a similar facility in the arid savanna of northern Togo, a remote region with limited resources and scarce gospel witness. The door of opportunity swung wide when Togolese government officials, recognizing the reputation of local medical centers as places where people went to die and infants didn’t survive birth, invited ABWE to establish a second hospital in the city of Mango.
When Hospital of Hope (HOH) opened its doors in February 2015, the president of Togo himself attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony. The 65-bed inpatient wards, four operating rooms, and clinic facilities quickly reached capacity, treating patients arriving with acute and chronic illnesses and injuries, along with a high volume of trauma patients due to its location near Togo’s only paved north-south roadway connecting the nation with neighboring West African states.
Bidima was one of the early patients treated in 2015. Traveling from Burkina Faso to receive treatment at HOH, he arrived septic and close to death due to a typhoid perforation of the intestines. Then-medical director and surgeon Todd DeKryger performed emergency surgery to save his life, and, after a long recovery, Bidima joyfully returned to his home country.
“When he left, he decided he would become a living advertisement for the hospital,” shared Dr. Alain Niles. To date, Bidima has brought 602 patients from Burkina Faso to receive treatment at HOH—of which he reports only three have died.
Each time he visits, Alain shares the gospel with him. “I see him almost weekly, and he is a reminder of the impact our hospital is having on the lives of our Muslim friends,” he continued.
HOH treats over 2,500 inpatients and performs approximately 1,000 surgeries each year, along with caring for 100-150 patients per day at the outpatient clinic.
Even with a consistently high patient census, ABWE missionaries and HOH chaplains prioritize sharing the gospel message with as many patients as possible. Each of the chaplains come from different people groups in the region and speak different languages, enabling them to connect with diverse patients.
“The majority of the chaplains came to faith in Christ through the ministry of our team,” shared missionary Jennifer DeKryger.
One chaplain from an unreached Muslim people group known for being hostile to Christianity recently experienced God’s sovereignty among his own people group. A premature newborn girl, Bouba, was rushed to HOH in critical condition after being delivered in a village an hour away. During the baby’s long stay in the NICU, Bouba’s grandmother remained at the hospital to assist the mother and participated in Bible studies led by the chaplains, peppering them with questions. When her son arrived to visit his infant daughter and met the chaplain from their people group, they were astounded to discover that, before coming to Christ, he had attended Qur’anic school with Bouba’s uncle. Incredulous, they asked the chaplain what would compel him to leave Islam.
The chaplain explained that he had diligently studied the Qur’an, searching for an assurance of acceptance and eternal life with God, but never found it. Instead, he found confidence in the biblical account of the love and sacrifice of Christ. As the chaplain shared the gospel, the baby’s father recognized the truth and declared his desire to follow Jesus.
“I feel like a burden has been taken from my shoulders,” he told the chaplains, returning the next day to join them in Bible study. He asked for prayer to face the persecution that will follow as he relinquishes the duties he held as a Muslim leader in his community.
HOH confronts the darkness of the region not only by sharing the gospel with patients but through nursing education. As part of the three-year nursing training program led by Dr. Sharon Rahilly, students study God’s Word daily.
Likewise, both HOH and HBB entered a new stage in training and discipleship as they launched a five-year surgical residency program through the Pan-African Academy of Christian Surgeons (PAACS) in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
“We don’t want to just train surgeons,” explained Dr. Jack Kehl. “The vision is that these surgeons would go to different countries and share the gospel in places that we can’t go.”
The combined ministry of HOH has already resulted in multiple village church planting efforts, as patients encounter Christ during their treatment and carry the good news of the gospel back to their families and villages, with teaching assistance from HOH chaplains and missionaries. Additional contacts come through well-digging initiatives, a Christian school—and over the airwaves.
Since 2018, Hope Radio has broadcast biblical teaching, music, and Scripture in six local languages to a radius of 100 kilometers and one million people. In this region with unstable electricity, limited internet, and cost-prohibitive television, radio serves as the primary form of entertainment—and people are listening.
About three years ago, a man from an unreached Muslim people group walked into Mango and sought out the local chief of his tribe. He explained, “I’ve been listening to this radio station for nine months, and I’ve become a follower of Jesus. But,” he continued. “I’ve never met another Christian. Do you know if there are any in Mango?”
The chief pointed the man toward HOH, where a chaplain provided discipleship in his language.
Within the city, ABWE ministry partner Evan Drake reports that a group of imams often walk out of their mosque after prayer and flip on the radio, catching Hope Radio’s weekly theological programming. More often than not, they call him over to explain a biblical concept they didn’t understand.
“That’s the biggest difference with our radio station,” he said. “We dedicate ourselves to living among the people so we can build relationships.”
ABWE missionaries regularly conduct personal follow up in villages, distribute Bibles to those contacting Hope Radio for resources, and continue to develop discipleship-based broadcasts.
“We believe that truth when it’s spoken into people’s lives changes people’s lives and changes their eternity,” explained Evan. “And we’re doing whatever we can to speak truth to people.”
Anticipating the Next 50 Years
Coming full circle, ABWE teammates once again established a ministry base in Togo’s capital in 2015, when ABWE missionaries Honoré and Kim Afolabi landed in Lomé to train Togolese pastors.
“We strongly believe that in order for our churches in Togo, and in Africa in general, to have strong, quality disciples of Christ, we need to have strong, quality leaders in the churches,” stated Honoré.
To this end, he directs Bible institute courses and modular training for church leaders in remote villages. He, like the more than 100 other short- and long-term ABWE missionaries spread throughout Togo, remains focused on the core of Christ’s mission.
He explained: “We want to continue founding churches, facilitating church planting, and making sure that everything we do as a ministry—whether the Bible institutes, whether the blind school, whether hospitals, whether radio studios—everything we do leads back to the church, because Christ, when he comes back, is not going to take any of those institutions. He’s going to take the church. Let’s not forget this reality and the centrality of the gospel.”
As ABWE celebrates 50 years of ministry in Togo, we are thankful that the Togolese government allowed the establishment of ABWE in Togo. May we look forward in eager anticipation of how God will continue to display his glory in this nation, and may we strengthen our resolve to carry his name throughout the earth.
“Brothers and sisters, let us continue to unite together in the gospel of Jesus Christ because there is so much to do,” urged Paul Davis during the anniversary celebration. “Let us hand in hand take the gospel to Togo, to the rest of Africa, and to the world.”
