Simon Guillebaud

Dear GLO Team,  Greetings from Burundi! I hope this finds you well. After last week’s launch in London, my new daily devotional ‘Choose Life’ is now fully live and unleashed officially, and here is the big plug and sell if you haven’t had it already! Thanks to all those who have already bought 100, 30, 20, 10, 5  copies or however many to sell on or give away to friends and family. We’re already on a second print run. It’s packed with juicy quotes, anecdotes, humour, challenge, encouragement – and already emails are coming in of how it’s touched people’s […]

In Blue Like Jazz, a non-Christian talk show host urges Donald Miller to defend Christianity. Miller refused to do so, which made the host curious:   “He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him yes. “Then why don’t you want to defend Christianity?” he asked, confused. I told him I no longer knew what the term meant. Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian school, abused by a minister, or […]

I’ve been reading a friend’s (maybe that’s too strong – we’ve met and emailed once or twice, but I LOVE what he does and how he approaches things) book called ‘Speaking of Jesus – the art of not-evangelism’). The guy’s name is Carl Medearis. Definitely worth a read. Check out this beautiful inspired encounter and dialogue: One day I saw my Muslim-Arab friend sweating as he talked with my other friend, a fine, conservative-minded evangelical Christian. It looked like the two had locked horns in a battle to the death. It happened in Colorado this past summer. We were hosting […]

I’ve just returned to Burundi from Kenya where I had the chance to attend a gathering of influential businessmen/politicians/social entrepreneurs to discuss and encourage one another as we seek to be agents of transformation in our respective nations. It was a deeply impacting time. I just want to share some of the mind-blowing story of one man at the gathering, former Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Tamirat Layne: Tamirat was one of five leaders who banded together under Mengistu’s military dictatorship to form a clandestine movement with the aim of regime change. He was a committed communist, and yet now says […]

Dear Team, I’d asked you to pray for our incredible annual summer outreach for the first two weeks of August and the results are in. They’re awesome, as ever! Here goes from Onesphore, the movement leader: We sent out 1010 evangelists in 42 teams around the country (554 from our group, Harvest for Christ, and 456 local church folk who could learn on the job alongside our guys). 11,366 people made professions of faith, including 62 witchdoctors and 55 Muslims. There were119 miraculous signs, including two blind people recovering their sight, two deaf people hearing, 13 paralysed people being healed. […]

Dear Team, It’s the most exciting outreach activity of the year again. Picture it right now, today, as around 800 evangelists travel up into different parts of Burundi to do the Acts of the Apostles. Over the next two weeks, they will cast out demons, heal the sick, preach the gospel, get beaten up, and more. Please pray daily for them: for receptive hearts of the listeners, for anointed words, for lasting fruit, for many miracles, for witchdoctors and Muslims to come to faith, for good health and team unity, etc. Last year when we did this, we saw a […]

Below is a letter that is so heavy and convicting to me – so worth reading, unlike the inane things I sometimes allow myself to get sucked in by. It is written by my dear friend ‘Claude’ in the Central African Republic. I lived with him and his family in 1995. What faith! How humbled I feel as I imagine being in his position. There are some similarities in his situation with what I’ve been confronted with, but I’ve not suffered in the same way, and as I get his weekly updates, once in a while I want to share […]

The day before leaving Burundi for our annual summer preaching around the UK, I met up with 26-year-old ‘Paul’ to hear his story. With his permission, this is what he shared with me: His original name was Hassan, and he was born into a Muslim family. His father died shortly after Hassan’s birth, so Hassan was raised by his uncle. His uncle’s side of the family were rich whilst his Mum’s side were dirt poor. So his uncle, who was also a sheikh, took him to Rwanda and raised him there.  Hassan remembers listening to a teacher telling the class […]

So we Guillebauds are back in the UK for the summer, and I’d love to connect with any of you. As you’ll see from the speaking schedule below, it’s pretty flat out, but if you can make it along at all, it’d be great to see you. Contact me for any further details. Have a great summer!  Here goes: Sunday June 29th – 9.15am and 11.15am services at Holy Trinity Cheltenham Evening preach at Woodlands Church, Bristol Monday 30th June – GLO gala dinner at Latimer Park (contact me if you want to come, all invited!)Tuesday 1st July – Wonnersh […]

What an incredibly memorable ten days we’ve just had! 20 folks from the USA, Greece, Sweden, Rwanda, Brazil and Kenya flew in to form the Surge team for a superb and sometimes surreal outreach in Burundi. The idea was to use football as the World Cup kicked off as a tool for reconciliation, and as a platform for sharing hope in Christ. There were pastor seminars, football coaches training sessions, and inner healing mini-retreats, and it was a hugely challenging thing to organise. It went about as smoothly as I could have hoped, and the team consisted of a wonderful […]

Christ for all Nations were in town last week doing a massive outreach. There were some enormous crowds, bigger than any I’ve seen here in my 15 years here (their website says 150,000 and even if that’s a little evangelAstic (!), I’d say maybe 100,000). The speaker, Daniel Kolenda, did a great job. I’m not a huge fan of these campaigns, mainly because there are so many showmen ‘on the circuit’ with questionable practices, and often it’s a big bang of an event with no lasting impact – well, let’s hope this week does indeed leave a lasting impact across […]

(Tour du Burundi 2014, outside King’s Conference Centre, about to kick off) I’ve entitled this post ‘Gloriously Alive’ for two reasons:  Firstly, because that’s how we all felt as cyclists last week as we sweated our guts out up brutal hills, and then sped down steep inclines with the ubiquitous stunning views. The feelings of exhaustion and elation, of camaraderie, of digging deep, of encouraging each other through the tougher times – they all made for an incredibly bonding experience that will stay with each one of us for the rest of our lives. That might sound overstated, but I […]

What a day! I wasn’t going to blog on this Tour du Burundi, just wanting to enjoy a week of fun away from technology with a bunch of great guys – but below you’ll see why I’ve chosen to after all. It started off at a beautiful lakeside hotel after a reasonable night’s sleep post Day 1’s 122km from Bujumbura to Nyanza Lac. We ate a hearty breakfast and were on our way by 830am, knowing that a brutal ascent awaited us almost immediately. The sun was fierce, the scenery was literally awe-inspiring, and we all huffed and puffed up […]

Last week saw Bill and Susalee Sasser and Nigel Mallon bring out another superb dental team to work with our rockstar Harvest-for-Christ-ers up in Muyinga in the far North. They plundered people’s mouths, yanking teeth by the dozen, and pausing occasionally to take photos of some of the more unusual orifices, as seen below with Exhibit A: Lizzie got the chance to be a part of it for four days, which she loved, not that she looks very impressed or engaged in the photo below – but none of the others do either! It’s always beautiful seeing real partnerships between […]

Below is one entry from my upcoming devotional book ‘Choose Life!’, which will be available this coming June: Romans 9:17 “I raised you up for this purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” Evariste Galois might have been as well-known as Albert Einstein, so why is it that this is probably the first time you’ve ever heard of him? On May 29th, 1832, Galois sat down and wrote a sixty-page mathematical masterpiece from start to finish without taking a single break. That one night’s work contributed more […]

These totally incomplete notes below are forming into a sermon entitled ‘JOURNEYING WITH GOD – CERTAINLY UNCERTAIN AND CAREFULLY CARELESS’ out of Hebrews 11 – famous named heroes of the faith and then the anonymous ones who were sawed in two, stoned, afflicted, etc. Anyways, as ever there are some juicy quotes, and as I refine and tweak the message, I’d be interested in any feedback, please do comment/challenge/question: Choosing to see life as a journey reminds us to stop trying to set up camp and call it home. It allows us to see life as a process, with completion […]

Meet this precious little boy called Sylvestre: About 1 year ago, he fell face first into a fire and became stuck for several minutes. As you can imagine, he was tragically and critically burned. He has had to travel to Uganda for a few surgeries, and is currently stable.  Last week a friend in the USA of my buddy Ladd spoke with the Doctor at Shriner’s (famous medical place there), and they have agreed to take on his case. They are very excited to get him there as soon as possible to re-build his face and give him the best […]

‘SHAMMAH’ means ‘The Lord is there’. And so after several years, at last on Saturday Shammah Health Center was formally opened. YFC’s Future Hope orphanage and school now also boasts a high quality clinic. The Governor of Gitega came to open it, and several hundred of us also were there to enjoy a special day.  It wouldn’t have happened without dear friends Josh and Nadine Guenther from Canada, who have been working towards this big day for 18 months. Well done you beauties! And here is the rest of the dream team: Here below we are being shown around. It […]

Dear fantastic GLO supporter, I just want to say a HUGE THANK YOU for all your support to us out here in Burundi over the years – for your prayers, your encouragements, and your financial backing. As a sign of my gratitude, I’d love to send you a FREE COPY of my latest book, ‘Sacrifice’.  It’s short and sweet (written for people who don’t like long books!) and packs a punch, and has had some embarrassingly good reviews (see below). If you get to the end of the pages and are more fired up to aim higher, go deeper and […]