Dear Prayer Partners,

Pray For:

~Northern Ghana Baptist Theological Seminary, to make the requirements to be a full-fledged seminary and to receive the support it needs from the

Ghana Baptist Convention and churches

~For the students to be excellently formed in Christ with a passion to go out to the ends of the bush and suffer for Christ that the world might know.

~Pat and Peggy Ozment, with the heat, lack of privacy in their living condition, teaching, library work, and witness to surrounding villages

~The time when they leave (1.5 yrs) with no one to replace them

~Their 3 children and 9 grandchildren back in the States; especially Chris, a pastor who has a blood clot disease which has already caused damage to his

lungs. Ten years ago he was told that he would live only 5-6 years! God has had a different plan.

When we left Dene and Felix Greer we drove six more hours into Ghana, past future sites to see: a monkey park (a safari animal park with monkeys), a village which creates pottery (17 km down a very bumpy dirt road) and a water fall, all beyond the pavement and the reach of our time for this trip. I thought all Ghana had to boast was the gorgeous ocean of long sandy beaches, historical but heart wrenching slave forts, glittering gold and the swinging rope bridge rain forest walk among the verdant leaves. Next time I get to monkey around with pottery by a splashing waterfall!

Somewhere beyond the waterfall we caught up to Pat and Peggy Ozment, more of our colleagues, in the town of Tamale, living on a compound with two African families, children, chickens, roosters, dogs, and a bird bath. Privacy is not a word in West African languages!

Just when most moms and dads settle into retirement and the cushy age of existence, Pat and Peggy forged into missions, leaving their bewildered children and nine grandchildren behind! Only the call creates such a compelling force.

Pat surrendered to preach at age 40, which must have been some life change! So his children mustn’t have been too shocked when he became a missionary at age 63! He never plans to retire, although he and Pat do intend to return to the States after they’ve completed their 3 year term in Ghana.

Pat teaches three theology classes, down from the six of last semester (!) at Northern Ghana Baptist Theological Seminary which has recently been called a “seminary” on paper but hasn’t yet made the requirements. NGBTS and the surrounding region have been greatly impacted by thirty Baptist churches pulling out of the convention, which has stranded Pat and Peggy. The Ozments are seconded by the mission board to the convention, so Pat cannot preach, nor can they attend non-convention churches. There isn’t much left in the area! Ever try to climb an oiled palm trunk?

We are praying for this misunderstanding between the churches and conventions to be quickly resolved.

The meager support for the school offered by the Ghana Convention has recently disintegrated into nothing. Peggy, who not only is creating a library from the mismanaged, nonclassified, minuscule jumble of books she found covered with a mountain of dust in a closet, she keeps the school’s financial books. Even if all the students pay their tuition for the next semester, the seminary won’t have enough money to operate. A serious situation for Baptist theological education in northern Ghana.

Pat and Peggy’s extracurricular plans include training the students and leadership in several storying witnessing tools and going with them into the villages around Tamale to reach the unreached for Jesus. With the searing 104 degree heat baking every drop of moisture from your body you realize just how far God’s leading supersedes your body’s desires!

Pat, a graduate of Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary keeps up a practice he’d learned from one of his professors, to always carry a New Testament with him for witnessing. His prof had challenged the class, “If you catch me without my New Testament, I owe you lunch.” Pat stated the same to his Ghanaian classes, and oops, does owe one student lunch! But now, even on quick runs out the door, that New Testament stays in his top shirt pocket!

So you can get to know Pat and Peggy a bit more, I'm including several of Pat's recent writings as clip-ons. Read them. You'll love them. Trust me.

Before we entered into this temporary supervisory role of the convention work in all West Africa (which will end May 1st with the return of Mike and Wanda Walker who are on furlough), we felt the burdens we carried for Francophone WA were enough. I didn’t want to care about Ghana and Nigeria, too. But the needs of all our countries have gripped our hearts. Help share the weight of these burdens with us in prayer and in coming to join us in the work, for it is too much for us to carry alone.

Laboring where the laborers are few,

Barbara and Jeff