During a busy mission trip in Cordoba, Vera Cruz, Mexico, I stole away to a quiet, shady spot to sit and strum my guitar. I also brought my Bible and let the message of Isaiah 58 soak into my heart: “Cry out loudly, don’t hold back! Raise your voice.” As I meditated on that chapter, I began singing a song. I was thirteen years old and on my second mission trip to Mexico. I felt led to write a song while on mission to bring back home to share with my youth group. That day, God was setting a trajectory for my life. Little did I know that one day I would sit somewhere back home in Texas to write songs to share while on mission trips.
By the time I began studying at Southwestern Seminary, I had been on nine international mission trips. I was also growing as a songwriter and arranger, having taken some private composition lessons in college. I was excited to attend Southwestern for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because Southwestern was both fully committed to evangelism and missions and a place where I could study songwriting and composition. I desired to grow in my zeal for evangelism, and I wanted to hone my musical composition chops. I didn’t necessarily connect missions and songwriting yet, but God was going to make that connection for me. This is the story of God blessing me with unexpected connections that grew directly from my studies in music and multicultural worship.
Becoming a Songwriter on Mission
In the fall of 2012, I was progressing in my songwriting and musical leadership, taking classes such as “Leading Instrumental Groups,” and enjoying private composition lessons. During this time, I shared an original song called “You Sought Me” with my professors, who encouraged me to write a third verse about our current and future hope. That academic year, I was twice given the opportunity to share my music with my campus community: once at a Church Fair and later in a chapel service. I was so encouraged by the song’s reception that I also introduced it to my church.
During this same timeframe, I was contemplating my next mission trip. The previous summer I had travelled to Peru on an evangelistic mission trip. Our main partner in Peru had invited me to come back and, if possible, bring a worship band. At first, I could not picture clearly the purpose of bringing a worship band to Peru, yet a vision began to form in my mind around sharing original worship songs as a hook for inviting people to church. Three friends and I recorded a low-budget demo and nicknamed our band “Sacrificios Vivos” (Living Sacrifices). With assistance, I translated five of my original worship songs, including “You Sought Me,” and we shared these songs in multiple cities in Peru. I also preached on biblical worship and our band led worship for several evangelistic rallies with our national partner, Samuel, an evangelist.
Sharing the Gospel through Song
While writing, translating, and editing new songs, I took a seminar entitled “Global and Multicultural Influences in Worship.” One particularly memorable subject in this course was the discipline of ethnodoxology, “the interdisciplinary study of how Christians in every culture engage with God and the world through their own artistic expressions.” I also attended a global worship concert and ethnodoxology lecture in Dallas, and was moved by the passion of missionaries who encouraged local believers to develop their own musical expressions of praise. I thought that this would be an awesome endeavor to undertake one day (and I was right).
After graduation in 2015, God called me to serve as Worship Pastor at First Baptist Church in Farmersville, Texas, and I began travelling with our church to evangelize and do church planting amongst the Jola Bayot of Senegal. On a Sunday night during my first journey to Senegal, I heard a group of believers singing a song in their native tongue of Bayot called “Oye Sembe.” I transcribed the Bayot words to the best of my ability and learned the melody of the song. Later, I learned that one of the local believers, Victor Nyafouna, had attended an International Mission Board (IMB) “Storying Together” conference, during which he memorized the story of Jesus calming the storm in his own language and wrote a song about it.
“Oye Sembe,” by Victor Nyafouna
When I returned in 2018, I heard Victor sing more of his original songs in the Bayot language. At that time, Victor was one of less than a dozen baptized believers living in the Bayot villages. He was writing the first-ever worship songs in his tongue. I thought to myself, “This is ethnodoxology!” I offered to record him singing these songs so we could disseminate them. Our missions team was able to put these songs, along with the Jesus film and around 30 spoken Bible stories in Bayot, on SD cards. We offered these SD cards to villagers as we shared the gospel with them. The villagers who came to church also learned Victor’s songs through listening to them on their phones, and they used these songs increasingly in gathered worship. Though Victor passed away in 2022, the Bayot church still sings his songs to this day.
(1st image: Victor Nyafouna; 2nd, left-to-right: James Cheesman, Pastor Sambou)
The Lord has forged additional unexpected musical connections between me and the Bayot. In 2020, a few church members gave me the seed money for recording a professional album of my original worship music. I have since then released two studio albums containing fourteen original worship songs. Although I didn’t share these songs with our Bayot brothers and sisters, some of my fellow members from FBC Farmersville did. I did not anticipate some of my Bayot friends enjoying my English worship music as much as they do. My brother George Manga, who speaks French, Wolof, and Bayot fluently, but only speaks minimal English, has sent me pictures of my music on his mp3 player and playing in the vehicle as he rides. What a delight to witness God use the songs I wrote for our church in Texas impact our sister church in Senegal!
Ever since I played guitar in Mexico as a thirteen-year old, I dreamed of various ways God could use me and my music throughout the nations. I suppose I could have learned about ethnodoxology and songwriting from books and individual events. Yet I would not have received the excellent mentorship, coaching, and comprehensive theological education I did apart from Southwestern. Music and global worship, songwriting and missions, collided in my life in an explosion of growth that has propelled me forward in ministry.
