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Our Church's BOLD INITIATIVE...
Steve and Svea Merry, Rob McBane, Chris Moir, and John Steer visited Guinea where they witnessed first hand the needs, met with the Minister of Health of Guinea, the Deans of the School of Medicine, some local Guinean physicians, a hospital administrator, our missionaries in Kankan, and visited the building site in Mamou of the Compassion Evangelical Hospital of which you will hear more during Global Impact Week. Steve is uniquely qualified for not only informing us about the enormous needs in French West Africa and Guinea in particular, but has participated first hand in meeting those needs through medical care and evangelism in the missions hospitals at which he has served. Steve is on the board of Compassion Evangelical Hospital, a U.S.-based 501c3 organization started by his brother in-law, Dwight Slater, MD, a Family Physician who directed the work at the Baptist Mission Hospital in northern Ivory Coast for 17 years prior to beginning this new ministry to reach the millions of medically underserved and spiritually-unreached Muslim people groups of northern Guinea including our adopted people, the 3 million Maninka of NE Guinea.
It is our desire at Autumn Ridge to find more effective ways to reach the people groups in Guinea spiritually as well as provide whole person care meeting their medical needs. Many from our congregation have sensed God calling them to minister to the “least of these.” We have been given an open door to reach a whole nation for Christ, by assisting in the health care infrastructure development of the nation. Guinea is a land of dire medical need surrounded by the most impoverished nations in the world with health statistics that speak of unimaginable suffering.
Compassion Evangelical Hospital
The first $150,000 of the Sharing Hope initiative will finance the construction of surgical suite facilities at Compassion Evangelical Hospital (CEH) in Guinea, West Africa. Autumn Ridge Church continues to partner with other U.S. churches to invest in the lives of the people of Guinea. CEH is now operating at capacity but services are limited to non-surgical procedures. The Sharing Hope initiative will build and outfit a surgical wing. Surgical capabilities will provide for better and more advanced care. In addition to medical care, every patient at CEH is introduced to the gospel of the Great Physician.
Compassion Evangelical Hospital is being built at the commercial crossroads of northern Guinea. It is right between the two large Muslim people groups, our adopted people, the 3 million Maninka of NE Guinea, and the 4 million Pular or Fulani of NW Guinea. These two people groups are 99.999% Muslim with only a few dozen known Christian believers in each. Like Jonah, we may want to run from our responsibility, our calling in the Great Commission, to preach the gospel to all peoples. We may even have anger, fear, or resentment of Muslims. That is not the attitude of Jesus, who saw the crowds of his day like sheep without a shepherd, and out of compassion went about teaching, preaching, and healing, providing whole person care. Jesus is calling us to give this kind of compassionate whole person care to the needy crowds in Guinea.
The NEED
Guinea has profound Spiritual needs
- 1% of the population of Guinea are evangelical Christians
- There are 41 tribal groups in Guinea
- The Malinke and the Puehl:
2 Ethnic groups in the north
70% of the Guinean population
99.999% Muslim. Most towns and villages have no known Christians.
Guinea has profound medical needs
- 1 in 10 children die by age 1
- 1 in 6 die by age 5
- 1 in 60 pregnancies end in maternal death
- Most people in rural areas have NO access to health care