“Hey, did your wife complain about me when she came back from church last Sabbath?” evangelist and church elder Hyacinthe asked his colleague Daniel.

“Oh, she was fuming, and so were the other ladies. What on earth did you do?” replied Daniel.

Hyacinthe laughed, and we all wondered why he was so happy to have upset the ladies from Boukombé church.

He explained: “You see, for years we have been training our wives how to prepare sermons and lead out at prayer meetings. They know how to preach. Yet my wife is the only one who actually does so. The other ladies always look at us men and expect us to take the lead. But if the women do not participate in the work, we will never meet our goals! We want to plant new church groups, and to do that we need people who will lead out, men and women alike. So this last Sabbath, I sent all the men to the different groups in our area, and no one was left to preach in Boukombé. The women and children were the only ones remaining behind, forcing the women to take the lead.”

After Hyacinthe finished the program at one of the village groups that Sabbath, he went back to Boukombé. Arriving at church, he met some ladies who were still hanging out in the churchyard. They immediately attacked him: “How could you dare to do that! Why did you send everybody away?”

“Did you find someone to lead the church service? Hyacinthe asked. “I am sure you did just fine!”

“If you think you men can all go out to the villages and leave us here all by ourselves, you are wrong!” one of the ladies replied. “Next time we will go out to the other church groups, and you men stay behind!”

“Oh great, even better!” Hyacinthe applauded.

When Hyacinthe shared this with us a few days later, he was still grinning. He certainly did not want to upset anybody. But he had felt the need to throw the women into the water to make them swim. And it worked. Shortly after that, a women’s retreat took place in Boukombé, where the ladies received more training to equip them to be leaders.

What is true for the Boukombé church is true for any other church anywhere in the world. God wants all of us to participate. Woman or man, old or young, He has given each of us unique gifts to take part in the mission. And He needs all of us to engage in evangelism if we ever want to finish the work.

• Twitter