Prowling rebels, foreign nations didn’t scare him. Getting married did.

Desmond Bell was not afraid to launch out as a pastor and “pioneer” a church at Wilberforce, Sierra Leone. He had already conquered his worst fear.

He had gotten married.

“I thought marriage wasn’t worth it because I was afraid I would be like my dad,” Desmond recalled. He grew up with a single mother because his dad had been unfaithful.

“But (my pastor) showed me that I could make a difference. He showed me how to love my family. It was actually Pastor who influenced us to get married because I was scared. He showed me I could be loyal to my wife.”

Three pastoral assignments later, Bell, now 41, took over a church in Marseille, France from Charlie Forman who now is an evangelist. It has been an astounding odyssey for a man born into one of the poorest nations of the world.

When Desmond was only two months old, his mom, a telephone operator, separated from his dad. Bell grew up in a middle class home in Sierra Leone’s capital city, Freetown, and integrated in 1992 into the Door Church which was exploding in the middle of a guerrilla war.

At 19 years old, Bell got caught up in the whirlwind of exciting preaching, enthusiastic outreach, commitment and loving pastoral attention that marked that early church. Pastor Alvin Smith became a father figure for Bell.

He met his wife, Matilda, another young person drawn by Holy Spirit fire, and they married only after Pastor Rob Scribner from Santa Monica pushed them forward. “It was obvious that they liked each other,” recalled Rob, whose church had help bankroll revival in Sierra Leone.

Bell, who is four years older than Matilda, pioneered a church in Wilberforce in 1998. He was among the first… Read the rest: He was afraid of getting married.