Our church history

Our church, called Oasis Gospel Ministries, started as a small fellowship of 4 English-speaking people. We felt the need to come together and worship the Lord in our national language (English) in this French speaking land of Mali; this was in 1993. Two years later, the Lord spoke to us about officially registering as a church and this we did in March 1995, thereby becoming a non-denominational church of about 45 members at its nascence.

Today, we have spread to 20 localities in 3 different regions of Mali, with churches officially planted in 10 of these, and cell groups in the other  10 areas; meanwhile our membership has blossomed to about 2000 people in the last 20 years, 10% being English speakers. However, we minister to about 6000 people every week.

The headquarter church in Bamako is unique because it has people from about 14 different nations including American and French missionaries, so our meetings are in French, English and Bambara (the Malian national language); the youth group is diverse as well. All the other churches are in the interior, and the meetings are in the local language and French, depending on whether it is a village or town.

We are involved in holistic ministry (ministering to the whole man), so we have helped sink a well in a village whose inhabitants completely lacked water; we also installed a grinding machine in another village to help the people grind their grains. We have a project called “Operation Joseph” in which we buy and store grains during the cheap harvest season and distribute them to the very poor and needy during the rainy/planting season when the people suffer hunger, especially in the villages. We are running an orphanage home in an interior town (Koulikoro) where we take in orphans to prevent them from dying, being abandoned or destroyed. We are developing a small agricultural project which will eventually expand into a large scale operation and will become a source of income to expand our work. 

We've officially registered a Christian non-governmental organization (NGO) with the government in order to effectively pursue these developmental and humanitarian activities; we are also presently putting in place a rehabilitation centre for street kids in Bamako, the capital city, where urban life is creating a lot of destitute kids who might end up as criminals if they are not well channeled.

Our slogan is “Reaching the hurting world with the healing gospel of our Lord Jesus”, a vision we will continue to fulfill until the coming of our Lord Jesus.