Adeola inspires me. This may seem like an odd thing for a missionary to say about a process engineer working for an international chemical firm, but it’s true, because fruitful laity are the cutting edge of gospel ministry.

Adeola and I met just once at the General Conference session. I was passing out flyers, and this African woman was walking quickly past my booth. I held out a pamphlet. “I am teaching professionals how to witness in their work place,” I said. She stopped, turned and listened to the rest of my pitch with sincere interest. She said was working in Paris and then began to ask questions about exactly what GoTential was offering. She gave me her email address.

I didn’t know then that I had found dynamite. From Central Africa, university educated, speaking several languages, Adeola and a group of other professionals had decided to use their professional skills to form an evangelism strategy to reach unreached people in their own country. If that weren’t a big enough goal, they are working to “change the continent of Africa by instilling a missionary volunteer spirit in every African Seventh-day Adventist young adult, to create missionary movements across Africa.”

Adeola works at the Paris corporate headquarters of an international chemical firm. After work, she returns to her apartment each evening to use her skills as a process strategist to organize and structure the team of lay professionals working as tentmakers back in Africa.

I set up coaching sessions with Adeola by Skype. Introverted but ambitious, she had begun witnessing in Paris, putting tracts under people’s doors. Parisians literally qualify as an unreached people group, and to Adeola who was used to outreach in Africa, they seemed nearly unreachable.

Adeola’s boss was the first to be touched by her outreach. He asked her to be the godmother of his daughter—a great honor and one that told much of shy Adeola’s spiritual influence. The baby girl was being baptized into the Catholic Church, and Adeola wondered how to capitalize on this spiritual opportunity. She had only been trained in giving traditional Bible studies. What should she say, and how should she say it?

Working with someone as gifted as Adeola, so involved and yet struggling with some basics, reminded me that we all have blind spots resulting from our personality, life context and discipleship mentoring. Over many sessions I have trained Adeola how to ask questions, how to listen and how to build spiritual conversations. I have coached her through issues related to working in the French context. I have counseled her through some of her personal struggles of living in such a spiritually dry place after coming from a spiritually rich context in Africa.

My coach/mentor relationship with Adeola has been rewarding for me as I have watched her succeed, and I have learned from her as well. She has thanked me over and over, and I pass those thanks on to you, the supporters and prayer warriors behind GoTential.

Adeola’s giftedness in strategic planning has made me realize how effective every local conference could be if it were to engage the professionals in its membership to apply the knowledge they use in their secular jobs to the advancement of God’s work. Finance, marketing, communication and business savvy—why not tap into these gifts to advance Christ’s kingdom?

I wish you could hear Adeola’s raw enthusiasm bubbling through her French accent! She talks of billboard campaigns and radio work; evangelistic meetings, follow-up teams and strategic prayer schedules; Bible worker coordination and inner-city mission planning committees. In her mind, a carefully engineered universe of gospel work is expanding and rapidly unfolding into a reality she is helping to orchestrate. Adeola: a secular engineer by day and a global gospel revolutionary by night. That’s a real tentmaker!

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