I am humbled to present to you this short autobiographical piece of mine. I don’t mean my life to be any important. However, the God who has been at work in it deserves most this precious tribute. So I will first write this as an expression of worship. But along the way you will learn one or two things about me, how God has worked in my life over the last forty years, how he has called me, the passion that drives me and the convictions that sustain me. Through all of this, I hope to contribute to your edification, so that through my story you can grasp something about God, the Church, theology and Christian ministry.

The glorious ruins of my family

I was born to Anglican parents of charismatic fervor. Since their conversion in 1983, the year I was born, and for about twenty years that followed, they were members of the Anglican Church in the parish of Cibitoke in Bujumbura. My father rarely held an ecclesiastical position in the Church. On the other hand, my mother was more active in ministry: a preacher during the inter-parish women's crusades within the Anglican Church, and a preacher in other different platforms beyond. Even when I was little, I remember that she could go on a preaching mission for days. During this time, Dad amazingly took care of us.

Their couple was a sort of Priscilla and Aquila. My father neve felt any resentment about my mother’s public gifts, but accompanied and supported her in her public ministry and he was happy to be in the background and see her flourish in her gifts. My father had a completely different way of preaching: writing. He wrote and printed evangelistic pamphlets himself and distributed tracts at his workplace and in the neighborhood. As I write, my father is 74 years old and is still a secretary in the COTEBU textile company, now Afri-Textile. I think that’s where my passion for writing comes from. While reading his tracts I said to myself “when I grow up, I will write books. »

My parents are not perfect. And I have known the ambivalence of recognizing their heritage and the pain of discovering their imperfections as I grew up. But as the cross is the symbol of a glory born from the ruins of the death of Jesus, so I perceive glorious ruins in my family past. In the midst of so many imperfections, God used my family environment to awaken me to the first operations of God's grace. Through them that I grasped for the first time the concept of a personal, relational, approachable God through Jesus Christ and a Jesus more powerful than all the forces of evil. They thus laid the first stones of my theology.

A baby on an altar

It's 1984 and I'm only a few months old. It’s a Sunday afternoon and we are at Kamenge Evangelical Church of Friends. My parents are very young in the faith. Their respective conversions are recent. My father, a former notorious alcoholic, has just seen his life instantly changed by God’s grace. My mother, once a victim of demonic oppression, has just been miraculously delivered. The young couple feels more alive than ever before and for the first time they feel united by one and the same passion: knowing God.

That evening, the preacher intended to inspire his audience to demonstrate their commitment to God and His work through giving. My father feels a sudden impulse to give, but not money as expected! Without warning his young wife, he goes straight to the altar, a baby in his arms and says that he wants to give his son to God. Everyone is stunned. This is not a time for baby dedication. The preacher asks him if he understands the meaning of his gesture. He explains to him that this child will be like little Samuel in the temple. “This gesture means that you will not come back to claim him later but that he will be the exclusive property of the Lord,” the preacher clarified. My father nodded. Little did he know what this prophetic act was going to cost his child!

When many years later I explained to my parents that God was calling me to ministry, they shared this story with me for the first time. Needless to say, it stirred a deep sense of calling.

An adolescent under a mentor

On 16th January 1997, after listening to a powerful sermon from the book of Luke, I felt a deep need to completely surrender to the Lord. A year later, God linked me with the man who would be my mentor for the next 7 years. In our small, neighborhood church, he seemed the best educated. He was wary of charismatic excesses and wanted to protect me from any doctrinal drift. He was an evangelical lost in a charismatic world that was not his.

He used to invite us to his home for systematic biblical studies, and he introduced me to the world of books. Thanks to him I discovered Tozer, who inspired in me an evangelical mysticism and John Stott who gave me a passion for biblical study. No wonder that at the dawn of my 20s I seemed more mature than all the young Christians around me.

After seven years, it became clear that I could no longer count on my mentor. He had lost moral authority over me, knowing little of the power of holiness in his own life and the anointing of the Holy Spirit in his ministry. I had a thirst to grow in holiness and he was no longer the moral standard I needed. I wanted to serve in the power of the Holy Spirit but his multiple criticisms of others' experiences only created an unhealthy culture of suspicion towards everything supernatural and the experimental in particular. I was still obsessed with the subject of revival, which I wanted to explore within the confines of the Bible and he was no longer the guide I needed...so I ended the relationship.

A baptism, a vision and a call.

We are now in September 14th, 2004. I have been fasting for three days. All I want is more surrender, more holiness and more consecration in my life. Suddenly my body starts to literally shake, words coming out of my mouth whose meaning I don’t understand and a fire burning so hot in my womb. What’s happening to me?

I want to you to know that as a good evangelical who had followed John Stott in his theology of identifying the baptism of the Holy Spirit with regeneration, I had almost memorized his book Baptism and Fullness, The work of the Holy Spirit Today. All this to say that I was not fasting to have a particular Pentecostal experience. How could it be that I was speaking in tongues. God is bigger than our theological boxes! I am really glad He is!

But as the experience was going on, it ushered me into a new dimension of prayer and divine communion never known before. It literally felt like heaven. I thought I was going to die. It was the only time I begged God to stay His hand if I were to continue living. Later I discovered that other saints like Dwight Moody prayed the same prayer during their encounter with the power of the Holy Spirit.

The next month, as I was laying in bed reading the book on Church History, a light sleep overtook me. I saw in a vision the face of Jesus, saddened by the state of the Church. As his face darkened, it was as if he was communicating his sadness to me. I could feel it deep inside me and I started crying, then sobbing until I couldn't breathe. When I woke up, the book was still in my hand and this flash had only lasted a few minutes. When a year later I was reading Duewel Wesley's Ablaze for God, I understood that God baptizes us with suffering, a baptism of tears and constant sadness so that our hearts beat with His heart regarding His people and the world. Paul had known this feeling and he numbered it among the sufferings linked to the ministry. Here is what he wrote:

I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches. (the emphasis is mine) 2 Corinthians 11:27-28

All this progression of events led me to July 2005. Peter Youngren, the founder of World Impact Ministries, was to lead an evangelistic crusade. A Canadian pastor and church planter, Youngren held a doctorate in Biblical studies from Florida Christian University, he was a good communicator of the Word and an anointed man of God. I could not miss his conference for Pastors and servants of God. His passion for revival overflowed. He was thirsty to see a great movement of the Spirit in the region.

That day he stared at the pastors and bishops present and shocked them by saying:

“I didn’t come for you. Something tells me I came for the younger generation here. So I'm going to lead a prayer session for the young people present here between 20 and 30 years old. Because I have full conviction that God will call some of them for greater things. »

I got up and went to the front for prayers. It was an extraordinary day. The presence of God was so tangible. we laid on the ground and prayed for hours.

I felt God asking me to give up everything and serve him. For me the call had an urgent character that meant obeying immediately. My mother was there that morning. While she was praying in the audience, she had a vision of my call which, according to the voice she heard, will be characterized by persecution and suffering. The voice had been explicit “your son will experience much of my power and also much of my suffering. »

My heart was resolved. I rushed into a 100-day fasting after which I began preaching everywhere in the streets, schools, churches. This is how my ministry began.

On a long path of theological shaping…

When God called me, my parents had already left the Anglican Church for another Church of God, from Cleveland, Tennessee in the United States. Historically Church of God is a classic first wave Pentecostal Church. I was ordained as a preacher in 2007 and the same year until 2009 I was sent for training in Uganda where they had a ministerial studies program.

During those studies, I made a great discovery during my stay: that of Pentecostal theologians like Gordon Fee, Craig Keener, Simon Chan, Steven Land and others. I was attracted to Pentecostal scholarship. What joy to realize that intellectual erudition and passion for the power of the Holy Spirit go hand in hand. This intellectual experience made me a Neo-Pentecostal to this day. I don’t agree with the exaggerated emphasis on speaking in tongues, and I have never subscribed to the idea that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is always evidenced by an experience of speaking in tongues. But I also reject the idea that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is labeled as a mere synonym for the new birth.

Back home, I enrolled in another theological institution, PTI school of theology and leadership. It was founded by a group of Burundians, trained in England. It had an evangelical fervor and I remained there from 2010-2014 until the adventures due to a leadership crisis within the institution forced me to stop before even finishing my final paper on the renewal of the Church. The remainder of my education will consist of a combination of diligent self-taught work and online theological training.

Let me bore you with a few paragraphs that summarize the changes in my theological perception that have occurred along this path.

I have already mentioned that my stay at a school which bore the marks of classic Pentecostalism had exposed me to known Pentecostal theologians like Gordon Fee or the Singaporean, Simon Chan, the Canadian Seven Land or Craig Keener. When I later joined the Reformed movement, I was disappointed to see how much it was pervaded with a cessationist atmosphere. I clung to John Piper and Martin Lloyd Jones( through their books of course) who became faithful companions who helped me maintain my passion for revival and a thirst for the word of God. It was thanks to them that I discovered a group of Puritans, called the Sealers: Thomas Goodwin, Richard Sibbes and Thomas Brooks whose vision of the Seal of the Spirit was similar to the baptism of the neo-Pentecostals. Other theologians like Sam Storms, D.A. Carson, Jack Deere, John Wimber and other charismatic Reformed people were very helpful in solidifying my continuationist approach to supernatural gifts.

Thanks to the readings of Luis Birkhoff my faith became Calvinist. It was the culmination of the curiosity about the Reformed faith and the doubts about Arminianism that William Kuyper's essays, accidentally found in my room, had aroused in me.

A little earlier, I had met a young Burundian, fresh from Fuller theological Seminary, who had recently converted to Calvinism before returning. He gave me two books. One arguing for Arminianism: Why I am not a Calvinist by Jerry L. Walls and Joseph R. Dongell and the other arguing for Calvinism: Why I am not an Arminian by Robert A. Peterson and Michael D. Williams. After a long comparative reading, I told him that the beautiful prose of the Arminian authors had seduced me but that the theology of the Calvinists had convinced me. Before that he gave me the R C Sproul videos which I listened to without getting tired of them.

I believe the question at the heart of the 16th century reformation was "how can I be saved?" ". The five points of Calvinism adequately summarize the biblical answer to this question. However, as Piper says in his introduction to the Five Points, the rivers that flow from the Calvinist Reformed system are deeper, wider, and multifaceted. And confessing one's beliefs around five points does not mean embracing all aspects of the Reformed tradition.

What theological theme allows us to unify the other themes of the Bible? Eldon Ladd had long accustomed me to regard the kingdom of God as the most dominant theme in the entire Bible. Even today, the motto of Little Flock Ministries of “Proclaim Portray Point” testifies to the colossal influence of this theologian in the way of understanding the three aspects of the Kingdom: Inauguration, Continuation and Consummation.

With Calvinism I understood that God administers His kingdom through covenants which govern the relationship of the King with His subjects in this kingdom. One of the great hallmarks of Calvinism is covenant theology. During the early years of my conversion to Calvinism, I was excited to see that the Bible was becoming a unified book that speaks of a single story of God with his people through a single covenant of grace, administered under different but related covenants and expressing the same purpose of salvation in Jesus Christ.

As the time goes by, I began to realize that the natural consequence of Presbyterian federalism leads to dubious conclusions. In his concern to maintain continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament, he falls into replacement theology which spiritualizes the promises made to Israel into spiritual blessings of the Church to the point of violating the most basic hermeneutical principles. The second gap is his vision of the membership of the Church which is intended to be as mixed as Israel in the Old Testament, composed of believers and unbelievers. This line of thinking views Israel and the Church as two communities composed of believers and unbelievers (i.e., a mixed people within the covenant community); and their respective covenant signs (i.e. circumcision and baptism) signifying the same spiritual reality, hence the justification for the application of baptism to children in the Church. This could only confuse me.

By revisiting History, I was able to realize that I was not the only one to be confused by this vision of things. Otherwise there would not have been the Baptist confession of faith in 1689. Prominent Puritans like Nehemiah Coxe (who probably wrote the covenant chapter in the Reformed Baptist Confession of Faith) rejected Presbyterian federalism and today studies show that John Owen himself did not fully adhere to it. At least we know that he opposed the Presbyterian idea of identifying the Sinai Covenant as an administration of the Covenant of Grace).

I began to compare the Baptist and Westminster confessions of faith as well as anything that could help me understand the difference regarding covenant theology, between the Reformed Baptists and Presbyterian. I gradually sided with the Baptist side. Reformed Presbyterians hold that there is one covenant of grace under two administrations (the law and the gospel). In contrast, Reformed Baptists view the covenant of grace as having been gradually revealed in the Old Testament (in the form of promises, covenants, types, shadows, prophecies). But it was ratified or established by the blood of Christ in the New Testament.

Please understand that Baptists do not deny that the Covenant of Grace existed in the Old Testament. They maintain, however, that it was not fully manifested before the establishment of the new covenant. It existed as a promise and gradually revealed before being officially established by the death of Jesus in the New Testament.

Reformed Baptists insist that the first and foremost problem with the idea that Sinai was a covenant of grace is that the New Testament identifies it as a covenant of works. It is enough to read the epistles to the Galatians and the Hebrews to realize the insurmountable gap between the covenant as concluded under Moses and the covenant of grace. The latter was gradually revealed in the Old Testament promises until it was fully revealed in the New. We see very clearly that the two alliances are opposed.

The second problem concerns a set of errors that this misconception about the Sinai covenant introduces into the churches. If you make the covenant of law a dispensation of the covenant of grace, you make the New Testament church an extension of the Old Testament church, viewing the two as almost identical. You then say that baptism is the equivalent of circumcision and you admit people as members into the church of Christ without them professing the faith. By doing this, you transform New Testament church government into a form of hierarchy similar to that of the Old Testament. Likewise, you miss the point of having regenerate members, because that was not a characteristic feature of the Old Testament church.

For someone whose concept of the kingdom was so dear, you can imagine the joy I had to see two experts Peter Gentry and Steve Wellum publish the book: Kingdom Through Covenant. Thomas Schreiner, a popular New Testament teacher, wrote a short 128-page book Covenant and God’s Purpose for the World. Abounding in the same sense in such a way that he calls his own book a “footnote” to this masterful book by Gentry and Wellum. In the same line, we can include an essay which was written as a tribute to Schreiner by a very known scholar D. A. Carson, “New Covenant Theology and Biblical Theology,”

The debate over covenant theology within the Reformed movement itself is experiencing a great resurgence and various scholars are opening paths either towards a new covenant theology close to Baptist federalism or to progressive covenantalism close to Presbyterian federalism though different in some vital aspects. Even the dispensationalist camp has variations such as recently progressive dispensationalism and modified dispensationalism.

Since I was little, I have always had a particular interest in eschatology. In fact, at the beginning of my ministry, eschatological prophecy prevailed over other themes in my preaching. As a teenager I dreamed of buying the Scofield Study Bible for myself, the commentary that popularized dispensationalism. I am one of those who have read the Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay several times, after its author predicted a year of the return of Jesus in 1988, therefore a generation (40 years) after the creation of the modern state of Israel (1948). I enjoyed reading Charles Ryrie, Walvoord and Dwight Pentecost. and believed in the rapture of the Church before the Great Tribulation.

In Uganda, Eldon Ladd changed the way I saw things. The book The meaning of Millenium: Four views won me over to historic premillennialism. However, I did not become a post-tribulationist right there. I had to wait until I read Rosenthal's Pre Wrath Rapture, a modified version of post-tribulationism, then Robert Gundry's The Church and the Tribulation to adhere to a post-tribulationist vision of the rapture of the Church.

I like to save my saliva when it comes to discussing the most appropriate form of Church government. I agree with Ladd who liked to say:

“it seems likely that there was no normative model of church government in apostolic times and that the organizational structure of the church is not an essential element of church theology.”

However, with all my flexibility, I remain Congregationalist although I believe that Congregationalism can take on several expressions depending on the context and needs.

During my youth my mentor was a man who was a strict complementarian. He used to encourage his wife to study not with a view to any professional career in the future, he said, but so that later she would know how to take care of her children. He kept telling me that a woman does not study the Bible to preach but to know how to better educate her children in the faith. I heard him call Jezebel, this woman who preached at our church! I think doubts began to arise in 2010 when I read Issues Facing Christians today by John Stott. Then I met authors like Gordon Fee and Craig Keener, Alfred Kuen, and later Roger Nicole who changed my mind on the subject.

With John Stott I believe that the prohibition on teaching was historically and contextually conditioned while submission is a universal order. Although many theologians have reservations on the question of women's pastoral leadership, a growing number of theologians are speaking out in favor of women's right to teach. This is not due to the pressure of feminism as some think. These well-meaning thinkers find sufficient exegetical reasons to culturally and historically relativize the teaching prohibition of 1Tim 2:12. I would quote people like John Dickson, Michael Bird, John Stott, Alfred Kuen and others.

Regarding women’s leadership at home, church and society, I agree with professor Donald Bloesch.

The subordination encouraged in the New Testament is a privilege and indeed the badge of being a disciple rather than a burden that carries the notion of inferiority. The alternative to both feminist ideology, which allows no place for subordination, and patriarchalist ideology, which teaches subordination as a necessity of nature, is a covenantalism of grace, which unites man and woman in a ministry of service—most often with the former leading and the latter assisting, though not as a rule or law imposed from above but as a guideline that proves to have practical efficacy in the fulfilling of a particular task. Both man and woman are given preeminence in the kingdom of God, but this preeminence is conditional on the willingness of both to be least in the kingdom.

Man and woman, who are created for partnership with one another, are nevertheless free to work out the particulars of their own vocation as the Spirit leads them. In most cases the husband will be the breadwinner and provider, and the wife will play a supportive but nonetheless crucial role as mother and mistress of the house. But on some occasions the wife may work with her husband in direct ministry (as in the case of Priscilla and Aquila). On other occasions the woman may receive the call to fulltime church service (as in the case of Phoebe and Junia). On still others the woman may assume the position of spiritual leadership over men (as did Deborah and Huldah). This does not mean that in any of these instances the order of creation is annulled, for there will always be enduring physical as well as immutable psychic differences between man and woman. These differences, however, do not bar the woman from leadership positions in either the civil or religious society, although when called to a leadership position she should endeavor to fulfill her responsibilities as a woman, not as a man.

Just like Caleb…

Caleb is one of the most enigmatic characters in the Old Testament.

He is from the first generation of Israelites from Egypt. He participates in the first spy mission to the promised land and with Joshua, he remains firm in the faith, although surrounded by the 10 voices who only profess unbelief. (Numbers 14:26-38.) At that time he was 40 years old and God had spoken these wonderful words about him and Joshua. “But because my servant Caleb has a different spirit and follows me wholeheartedly, I will bring him into the land he went to, and his descendants will inherit it. ” Numbers 14:24

He saw his teammate succeed to Moses as leader without feeling the slightest resentment or jealousy for Joshua's victories and success. He waited patiently, faithfully, for his inheritance. When he finally receives it, he was told that he must fight against the sons of Anak who still occupied Hebron. Meawhile, he was 85 years old! And yet these were his words:

“I am still as strong as the day Moses entrusted me with this mission. I have as much strength as I had then, whether it's fighting or going on campaign and coming back. Therefore give me the mountainous region of which the Lord spoke at that time. You then learned that there are Anakim there and that there are large and fortified cities. If the LORD is with me, I will drive them out, as he has said. » Joshua blessed Caleb the son of Jephunneh, and gave him Hebron as his inheritance » Joshua 14.11-13

I really like this passage. This young man lived long after the deaths of Moses, Aaron and Joshua. He was never a leader of Israel. Even after Joshua's death, it was Otniel, his son-in-law, who became Israel's first judge. But his greatest privilege was seeing God fulfill his promises to Israel after Moses, Aaron, and Joshua himself died. He remained firm in faith, patience, faithfulness and never sought to make a name for himself. He never wavered in his devotion to the eternal.

My prayer is that like Caleb the Lord may keep my spiritual and moral strength constant and my energy for God's work always fresh.

Caleb reminds us that some of our hardest struggles may come in the later years of our lives but that the same God who was with us in the beginning will prove faithful. I don't know what I am yet to face, but something tells me that my last years will be harder than anything I've ever known before. The same God who has kept me all these years will help me face everything.

Just like Simeon...

He awaited the consolation of Israel with patience and in the presence of God. When he took the baby Jesus in his arms, He, the fulfillment of the promises of redemption, he said

“Now you can let Your servant go in peace, according to your word. For my eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared before all peoples, a light to enlighten the nations, and the glory of your people Israel.

“We pray and work for the renewal of the Church. Our desire and hope for a powerful revival has never faded with time. I will wait and in His presence.

After forty years, God willing, I wish I could look back and thank God for using our family and our ministry to prepare the Bride of Christ to face the final hour before meeting our precious Lord. The culmination of all our spiritual sighs is found in the return of Jesus who will glorify his Bride and make her appear before Him resplendent with glory. In the meantime, I will live my life to hear Him say “Well then, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Master” when He returns.

Thanksgiving…

I am so grateful for the invaluable help that Arielle has been to my ministry and to my spiritual life. I met her in 2010 and married her in 2013. In her I have discovered the beauty of a simplicity and purity of heart, that of complicity and intensity in the ministry and that of faithfulness and authenticity in marriage. I have an eternal debt to you, Mrs Arielle Trésor! Only you can understand how this short paragraph could so easily turn into a 300-page book!

From the start of my call, I had the privilege of meeting beautiful souls who love and value our vocation. They have the joy of participating in what God is accomplishing in our ministry. They pray and intercede. They give their money, they are present, they encourage and give advice. I can only say thank you. I will never take your friendship, support and presence for granted. Beyond ministry, you have shown a personal interest in me and my family and you have been there for our encouragement. Please find in these few lines our greatest gratitude.