By Stacey Ayars, One Mission Society Missionary in Haiti

“Hey, Madame Matt!”* Jean-Marc called across the yard to me from the driveway, leaning on a hoe. “Do you see how they’re trying to kill us with this awful work?” he asked, grinning widely and making the guys working around him laugh.

The work-study program at Emmaus Biblical Seminary in northern Haiti makes it possible for EBS students to live and eat at Emmaus for free—if they work an hour or two each day to keep the new campus beautiful and the classrooms cleaned.

I stopped playing with Lily for a moment to assess the situation before I responded. He and several other guys were weeding the fading gravel driveway, putting clean lines back in place. The “they” that was “trying to kill” them was Maxi, Emmaus’ groundskeeper, who was just a few yards away, doing equally grueling work, digging up plants and relocating them.

“Ah, Jean-Marc!” I laughed, “You and I both know by now that Emmaus has plans to prosper you, not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future,” I quoted from Jeremiah 29:11. “All unto the Lord!”

Jean-Marc joined the Emmaus community when his seminary in Port-au-Prince was destroyed by the earthquake. He grinned and turned back to his hoeing, picking up the harmony to the hymn the guys sang as they worked. He knows.

A few moments later, I returned to the yard and was humbled and blessed by what I saw. Maxi, their boss as a staff member at Emmaus, had left his work and joined them for their “awful work,” singing loudly alongside them as he hoed.

What Maxi was doing wasn’t grounds keeping. And what that young group of pastors saw that day wasn’t how to best separate rock from grass. They saw a person of authority, who could sit in the shade and watch them if he wanted, but instead, he humbled himself and joined them, voluntarily serving them. What Maxi was doing was training.

What Emmaus Biblical Seminary is doing is training.

Just as Emmaus fits directly with One Mission Society’s focus to “train national leaders,” EBS has a strong two-fold focus for that training: academic training, made up of a strong academic program with a heart for spiritual vitality and spiritual-life training, developed through a deliberate atmosphere of biblical community.

There is almost nothing better than walking through the hallway of Emmaus any day between 7:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. If you poke your head into the first-year classroom, you’ll find 20 young men and women transfixed by Professor Matthew Ayars and their textbooks, worn Creole Bibles, gleaning an introduction to accurate biblical thinking.

One door down, second-year students are asking Pastor Elizay Alphonse intense and personal-experience questions about good and practical church administration. They’ve been in the Haitian church for a long time. They’ve seen churches led a hundred different ways by a hundred different people. They want to know how to do it well, in a way that glorifies the Lord.

A few more steps and you can hear Professor Guenson Charlot, diving into hermeneutics or biblical interpretation with third-year students. He has studied in Haiti, in Jamaica, in Canada and in the States. Now, he’s back in Haiti with his master’s degree and fully committed to helping his brothers and sisters accurately interpret Scripture and grow in theological competence within their ministry contexts.  Guenson is excited about what good biblical interpretation could do in Haiti.  And now, 15 third-year students are, too.

Before the four fourth-year students head to chapel, you can try to keep up with intense debates regarding end times and apocalyptic literature with Pastor Paul Vilmer. How can they help their congregations with Revelation? How can they interpret this culturally-charged symbolic literature?

Monday through Friday, classes like these, chapel and coursework make up their academic training.

While the academic training is the easiest to observe and is slowly changing the church, it’s the spiritual training taking place at Emmaus that is changing lives in Haiti.

A beautiful dorm doesn’t create Christian community. Biblical community cannot be preached into existence. Instead, spiritual training through the godly community at Emmaus is taking place just by living life together as redeemed people. Staff members attend the students’ churches and vice versa. Staff and students evangelize in the afternoons together, eat together, play soccer together, work together, pray together, study together and go on mission trips together.

On Sundays, I have the joy of sitting in their congregations; my English students serve as the senior pastors. From tiny mountain congregations of 30 to packed-out churches in town, we listen to them preach personalized versions of exactly what they were taught at Emmaus.

On Tuesdays, Emmaus staff members are elated to see the students “get it.” On Sunday, we are elated to see their congregations get it, too.

Staff, like Maxi, work overtime to model relationships that follow in the image of the Trinity: self-giving, self-sacrificing, loving, edifying, trustworthy. As brothers and sisters in Christ, the Emmaus community recognizes that they have much to learn from each other, many ways to help one another and a calling to sharpen each other in His Word and in His kingdom.

On October 17, 2010, a group of five staff members determined to make the long voyage to Port-au-Prince, alongside any willing students. The objective was to encourage the tent churches of Diquini, made up of new Christians brought to the Lord by Emmaus immediately following the January 12, 2010 earthquake.  Second-year student Junior Cineas stayed after the initial evangelism effort to plant churches in the area.

Ten students spent their fall break in Port-au-Prince with them. While the staff was fully prepared to lead the trip and the ministry, they encouraged the students to take over, promising only to step in if needed.

“It was awesome,” vice-director Matthew Ayars said during the trip. “Watching the students develop a vision for the ministry, take the initiative and the time to be culturally and contextually relevant. Watching them lay out themselves for people they had never met, participating in the services, evangelism and children’s programs that the students had planned … all of their hours in the classroom, all of their training just took off.”

“Not only did they not need me,” Matt said afterwards, “but they did absolutely better than I could have done if I had planned the whole thing. They weren’t just able to do it in my place. They did it better. I was so proud.”

While almost all of the students at Emmaus were in full-time ministry before they came to EBS, each of them had a strong desire, need or vision for doing better. We can’t help but think that God is also proud of the way His children in Haiti are studying His Word, standing upon it as truth, holding it up against the lies and slavery of Voodoo and sin and dying to their countrymen in order to see it thrive.

* The custom in Haiti is to refer to a married woman by calling her Madame, along with the first name of her husband.