A youth worker from Seinäjoki Free Church in Finland spent part of May in South Africa, where he used floorball, rap and games to share the gospel with children in schools and in a poor village. Oiva Lappalainen made the journey with his grandfather, Arto Hämäläinen, a veteran of Finnish mission work who has served as executive director of the mission organisation Fida and as chair of the Pentecostal European Fellowship. Their destination was a joint mission conference of Pentecostal churches from across Africa, which set aside one day for local outreach.
Lappalainen works with young people in Seinäjoki and is training to become a sports instructor, and he plays floorball for the town's SPV club. He had given the sport up about six years earlier, wondering whether God was calling him to serve only inside the congregation, until a video of Ivory Coast's World Cup qualifying campaign convinced him that a shared game could open doors for the gospel as well. For the conference's outreach day he enlisted a friend, Toni Kivistö, a school pastor for Pentecostal congregations in South and Central Ostrobothnia who shares his interest in floorball, rap and work among children.
The pair toured South African schools, playing floorball, performing rap and talking about Jesus with the children and teenagers they met. In a poorer village they played, rapped and handed out biscuits along with the gospel, and several children said they wanted to receive Jesus. "Now I am where God has called me," Lappalainen said afterwards, describing the moment his love of the sport and his hope for the kingdom of God came together in front of him. Suomen Viikkolehti, the Free Church newspaper, presents the trip as one door towards a longer-term missionary calling: congregations represented at the conference have already asked the two men to run similar programmes in Kenya, Madagascar and other African countries, and Lappalainen expects further trips in the coming years.
(Originally published in Finnish. Summary translated by CC / Connexion.)
Source: Suomen Vapaakirkko / Suomen Viikkolehti — svl.fi
