“Be honest. How many of you are still afraid of owls?”

Bernadette and her husband, Clement, were teaching a class on worldview. We were conducting our first pilot church-training program, a four-day intensive in the Natitingou church. For months, we had been meeting with a small group on Monday mornings, and now they were the trainers teaching others the lessons they had learned about various aspects of evangelism.

I had thought I had done a decent job preparing them, but now I was wondering—what did fear of owls have to do with worldview? And who would be afraid of owls anyway? To my surprise, a few people raised their hands in answer to Bernadette’s question, and from the nervous laughter and excited talking, it seemed there were many who were scared of owls and other objects in nature, as we soon found out. It seemed that basically everybody was afraid of chameleons. Shooting stars were also mentioned. One lady said she had gained the victory over her fear of shooting stars after hearing a pastor preach a sermon about victory in Jesus. Now, when she sees a shooting star, she shouts out, “In Jesus’ name!” and the fear (and the shooting star) is immediately gone. Fear of twins is also widespread, though not among our members. One man admitted to being afraid of twins—because having them is expensive, at which everybody had a good laugh.

I also know from a recent conversation with our trainers that Otammari people are generally scared of eclipses. People believe that sorceresses are eating the sun or moon during an eclipse, so they pound loudly on drums and pots to scare the evil beings away. Others believe that if you look at the moon during a lunar eclipse, you will become blind, so they stay inside their homes until the eclipse passes. When I asked them what people would say if somebody were to tell them that they knew far in advance when eclipses were going to happen. They told me that people would assume the person was clairvoyant and had special access to the spirits, or maybe that the person was helping cause the eclipse.

As the discussion of fear progressed, I began to understand why Bernadette and Clement were bringing up this subject in a lesson about worldview change. Fear is a significant part of the animist worldview, but several church members gave testimonies about how God had helped them overcome certain fears and was working with them on others.

In animism, people believe everything is controlled by capricious spiritual forces that humans cannot really understand. Our goal is to help them shift to a Biblical worldview based on a personal, loving creator God.

We had introduced the subject of worldview in our Monday training classes, and now the trainers were sharing their understanding of it. I certainly wouldn’t have used Bernadette’s and Clement’s approach, but I began to see that they understood the principles and were speaking to the heart needs of their fellow Otammari people. They had grasped essential elements of AFM’s evangelistic model and were now helping others to understand it as well.

This is exactly what we are here to do—to transmit truth to select people who can internalize it and process it for even more effective sharing with others. Our focus here on the Otammari Project has shifted from being directly involved in church planting to spending our time training church planters. The church training program was conceived as an opportunity for our trainers to practice sharing new material with a live audience, but it was also a chance for the other church members to learn the material themselves.

Local people did the bulk of the teaching in the church training program. Suzy, Uli and I presented only a few things we hadn’t yet taught our trainers. As each of our trainers presented, we were delighted to see that they had digested their subjects, gotten a clear picture, and then presented in them in ways that made sense within their culture. For four long days, church members listened, laughed, considered and discussed subjects they had never been exposed to before. God’s plan for His church became clearer to them. We pray that permanent results will come from this pilot program.

We plan to continue training our local churches, and eventually we hope to extend our training to pastors and evangelists from all over Benin. Our little Monday training sessions are already growing into something larger, and we pray that the church throughout Benin will one day benefit from what this becomes. By the grace of God, we have faith that the men and women who are starting to understand Christianity more deeply will help hasten the coming of our Lord by carrying the everlasting Gospel to the unreached tribes in Benin and beyond.

If, in the process, people gain freedom from their fears of owls, chameleons and shooting stars, that will be wonderful, too.

• Twitter