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 Missionary Johnny Todd
A special memorial service will be held on Friday at 2:00 p.m. at the church in honor of Todd, a veteran missionary who served in Ghana and Ivory Coast in West Africa for 31 years, who died in an automobile accident in Ghana last month.
Todd, who was 56, and two co-laborer national pastors were traveling home from a meeting one night when their vehicle ran into the back of a heavy truck that had been left out in the road in the dark of the night with no lights on. The collision took the lives of all three men.
Todd’s family chose for his funeral to take place and for his body to be buried in Ghana. It was buried on a parcel of land given to the family for a gravesite by the chief of a village where Todd had ministered for several years.
Young Johnny Todd and his wife Joyce were married in Eastern North Carolina in 1969 and came to Greenville to attend the Tabernacle Baptist Bible College, where he graduated in 1972. Feeling called of the Lord to serve as missionaries in West Africa, the Todds spent the next three years raising support and attending a French language school in Paris, before arriving in West Africa in August of 1976.
Their 31 years of service in Africa started out with the first nine years in Ghana, where Todd pastored the Truth Baptist Church, and also started a Bible school to train national workers, who in turn started several other churches in that area.
In 1985 the Todds moved across the border to serve in neighboring Ivory Coast for the next 15 years with the Grand Bassam tribe. There Todd started the Grand Bassam Baptist Church, which is still a strong, though small, church today with 75-80 faithful members. Todd and national leaders whom he discipled and trained branched out to start eight other churches throughout that tribal area.
“We never tried to keep track of numbers of people who became definitely born again believers,” Joyce Todd commented. “So many of the people want to be Christians, but they don’t want to let go of their traditional animistic religious beliefs.”
She continued: “However, many certainly did genuinely come to know the Lord. And that, of course, is the greatest blessing that missionaries can have. You can’t put a value on souls.”
She added, “It was so wonderful to see how the Lord could take a young man and save him, then develop him, and use him in His service.” Her husband spent much of his time doing one-on-one discipleship and teaching, she explained, and it really paid off in multiplied and lasting results.
The Todds raised seven children in Africa - three sons and four daughters. All are now adults, and two of the daughters are back in Africa along with their husbands serving as missionaries today. Interestingly, most of the children also attended the Tabernacle Bible College here in Greenville and several met their life partners here.
“Our children all loved Africa, and the African people loved them,” Mrs. Todd related. “And that’s why several of them have wanted to go back there as adults to live and serve the Lord among the African people.”
Sadly, a three-year-old granddaughter named Esther, the little daughter of Todd’s daughter Rebecca and her husband Ron Walker, passed away in Ghana a year or so ago from a complicated medical condition. She was buried on the same land where her grandfather is now buried, also.
The Walkers are pastoring a successful church and Christian school ministry in the Accra area, which is the capital city of Ghana. Daughter Deborah and her husband, Dwayne Harrison, recently completed a year of service in Burkina Faso, and have now moved to the country of Mali to begin missionary ministry there.
Joyce Todd is now here in the States, and she will be present at the special memorial service for her husband. But she plans to return to Ghana in a few months and continue to serve there, working alongside her son-in-law and daughter.
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