2025 Field Guide: Dori
Gospel Work Continues Despite Change Among the Dori
Along Africa's Atlantic coast, missionary teams are adapting to new realities as economic development brings both challenges and opportunities to Dori communities. Even as traditional partnerships shift, meaningful connections deepen, including a moving encounter with a local imam searching for truth. As the team prepares for home assignment, their language learning and upcoming literacy program are laying crucial groundwork for sharing Scripture with the Dori people in their heart language.
Dori
Update from the field
In a corner of West Africa’s Atlantic coast, where sun-baked roads wind through mangrove groves and river deltas, the Dori people live at a crossroads. For generations, life here has moved at the rhythm of fishing tides, market days, and the steady pulse of community. But now, the tides are changing.
The past year has brought disruption. Large-scale mining companies have arrived, seeking access to the vast bauxite reserves beneath the Dori homeland. These new visitors are paving roads and building ports, luring young men from the villages with promises of cash wages and bright futures. Those same young men were language helpers, cultural guides, and friends to the local missionary team. Now, they wear hard hats and carry ID badges instead of translation notebooks and pencils.
Their absence is deeply felt.
Still, this story is not one of discouragement. This is a story of perseverance and of God’s quiet movement in hidden places.
One recent morning, a member of the missionary team walked past the mosque and saw something that stopped them in their tracks. The imam, a respected elder and devout teacher, stood at the front of the congregation, weeping. His voice broke as he spoke about the weight of life and the impossibility of reaching God. His words stirred the room into silence. No one moved. No one breathed.
Later, the team sat with him, not to challenge nor to preach, simply to listen. He shared the heaviness he carried and the fear of death that looms without warning. Because of language limitations, the workers couldn’t yet tell him everything they longed to say, but they offered their presence and prayers for peace, and for the chance to share the full story of the gospel with him one day soon.
The work they came here to do continues, as it has each day since they arrived, humbly and faithfully. They press on toward the goal of telling this whole community about the Savior who came near, who bore the weight of sin, and who opened the way back to God.
There are daily frustrations and hardships, small and large. But the Spirit is uniting this team - two families and a single woman - in a way that compels the Dori people. Their freely given acts of service to the community demonstrate the love of Jesus, preparing hearts for the time when there are words to fully share who he is.
This summer, the entire team will head back to their home countries for a much-needed home assignment. They will leave with the knowledge that many things may look different when we return, but also with the assurance that nothing surprises the Lord. He sees this shifting landscape. He loves these people. And is making a way for the truth of the gospel to reach their hearts someday soon.
Prayer requests
- Pray for stamina and focus as the team finishes this first term, especially in language learning and literacy preparation.
- Pray for unity and strength in relationships both within the team and with their Dori neighbors.
- Pray for spiritual refreshment for the team while they are on home assignment.
- Pray that God would draw hearts to Himself—even amid disruption—and prepare the way for gospel proclamation when the team returns.
- Pray for local leadership, that those stepping into village roles would be fair and open to the team’s presence.
- Pray for the literacy program launch, that it would be well-received and help pave the way for the future teaching of God’s Word in the Dori language.
