The Brown Door: Adult Mission Story for June 13, 2026

By Gina Wahlen

This week’s mission story is about how the first people joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church on Zanzibar island, which is part of Tanzania and located just off Africa’s eastern coast. This story happened in 1987.

It was a Sabbath morning, a normal day on the African island of Zanzibar.

Josiah, the first doctor of the only Seventh-day Adventist clinic on the island, was getting ready for church when he heard a knock on the clinic’s door.

He was surprised.

No one had ever knocked on the door since he had moved into the clinic many months earlier.

During his time on the island, he had learned that it was highly unusual for people to knock.

If islanders wanted the attention of someone inside a house, they cried out, “Hello! Hello!”

People only knocked on doors on Tanzania’s mainland, where he had been born.

Josiah walked over to the door and swung it open. The door was large and brown, the only one of its kind in the neighborhood. Outside he saw seven strangers — three men, a woman, a teen, and two children.

“What would you like?” he asked.

A man replied, saying, “Doctor, we know that this is a clinic, and we are here to talk to you.”

“What would you like to talk about?” Josiah asked.

“Just listen to us,” the man said. “We want to talk to you.”

The doctor invited the people to come inside.

The man introduced himself as Moses and the others as his wife, children, and a friend named Ezekiel.

Then he told an unusual story.

He said that he had had a dream in which he was told to go to such-and-such a neighborhood.

“There, you will see a big, brown door,” a voice said. “Knock on the door. The people who open it are Christians from the mainland who have brought Jesus to this island. They will tell you what to do.”

Moses found the dream surprising but, when he woke up, he decided to ignore it.

Then he had the same dream again. He ignored it again.

When he had the dream for a third night, he called his family together in the morning and brought them to the clinic. It was early on Saturday morning.

“There is only one big, brown door in this neighborhood,” he told Josiah. “I recognized it from the dream. But when we arrived this morning, the door was closed. I was told in the dream to knock, so I knocked.”

Josiah smiled.

Moses continued. “Maybe it is you who I’m looking for from my dreams,” he said. “Are you a Christian?”

Josiah nodded.

“Today, is a worship day, and I’m going to my place of worship now,” Josiah said. “Would you like to go together?”

Moses agreed.

The group walked to the road and boarded a bus to a house church. Afterward, they ate lunch there and caught a bus back to the clinic.

After that day, Moses and his family began going to the house church every Sabbath. Josiah came to their home and studied the Bible with them. It turned out that Moses was a Christian who had moved to Zanzibar from the mainland seven years earlier. He had recently met a Seventh-day Adventist literature evangelist on the island, and he and his friend, Ezekiel, had been discussing the Bible with him.

It was then that he had the dream about the big, brown door.

The day came that Josiah contacted a pastor on the mainland and informed him that he knew two people — Moses and Ezekiel — who were ready for baptism.

The pastor was surprised.

No one had been baptized on Zanzibar for many years.

A short time later, the pastor baptized Moses and Ezekiel in the waters of the Indian Ocean.

Josiah rejoiced as he saw the two men commit their lives to Jesus.

He had done nothing except open the big, brown door.

God had done the rest.

The big, brown door that Josiah opened at the Zanzibar Seventh-day Adventist Dispensary has been replaced with another door in the years since this story took place. But today, more than a door needs to be replaced at the two buildings that make up the clinic. You can be part of this story by giving to this quarter’s Thirteenth Sabbath Offering, which is also known as the Quarterly Mission Project Offering. Offering funds will allow Zanzibar Seventh-day Adventist Dispensary’s two buildings to be demolished and replaced with two modern buildings. Thank you for giving generously to this important project.