Southwestern couple bringing theological education to native land

Mandimby Ranaivoarisoa and his wife, Tiana, both grew up in Antananarivo, the capital city of Madagascar, but had very different upbringings. Now, after earning degrees at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, they are preparing to return to their native land and the seminary they started there.

Mandimby grew up in a Christian family, with his father serving as an elder in a Baptist church and his mother teaching Sunday School. He first felt the call to faith during a Christmas church service when he was around 6 years old. The church traditionally had a message to the children as part of the main service, and the children’s preacher led an altar call after tying the message of the birth of Jesus to His death and resurrection.

“And somehow, this day, the message of salvation just became mine, and I felt like I understood it,” Mandimby said.

As a teen, he began conducting Bible studies with his peers at the Catholic school he attended. Three of his best friends came to faith by the end of high school, he said.

“That’s where I felt, so to speak, the call to ministry,” he said. “I didn’t know where or when or how back then; it was just a strong conviction, strong desire to continue that activity.”

Mandimby entered the ministry at the age of 22 when he was asked to serve as youth pastor for the local church. He learned about Southwestern Seminary while serving that church.

“There are many IMB [International Mission Board] missionaries in Madagascar, and families who are doing mission work,” he said. “I used to go on mission trips with them, translating for them and participating in whatever event we had.”

Mandimby was close friends with some of the missionaries, many of whom were Southwestern graduates. When they learned he was looking for a theological education, they recommended the seminary. Mandimby later studied at Southwestern and earned his Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from the seminary in 2017.

Tiana, on the other hand, said she grew up in a “nominal” Christian family.

“I thought I was saved because I heard the message, ‘If you believe in Jesus, you will be saved.’ I said, ‘Well, I believe in Jesus, so I’m saved.’”

She left Madagascar for France for her college studies, as did one of her classmates. They called each other every year to reconnect, and during those conversations, her friend would invite her to his church.

“And every year I said, ‘No, thank you,’” she said with a laugh. “I was really not interested.”

One day, something changed.

“He called me again and almost begged me to come, because this time he was preaching at his church,” she said. “And so I was thinking, ‘Okay, if I say yes once, he will not bother me anymore.’” She accepted her friend’s invitation and said it was the first time she had attended an evangelical church.

“I didn’t like it,” she recalled with a laugh.

She kept returning to the church, however, with no prompting from her friend. Though she didn’t understand why at the time, she now sees it was the Lord calling her to go.

Her friend invited Tiana to a weekly Bible study at the church, and this time she didn’t hesitate to go. The Bible study leaders told her she was not saved, even though she kept saying she was.

“So for nine months I attended that Bible study,” she said. “I heard the Gospel. I understood who God was. I understood the Gospel. But I was not ready to give up my sinful life.”

One day when she was depressed and didn’t understand why, she opened the Bible and read Psalm 94:16-21.

“I just remember that these words just hit me,” she said. “I told to God, ‘Okay, I’m giving up. I just surrender my life to You.’ And this is where I became a Christian.”

Mandimby and Tiana met through a mutual friend. Mandimby was studying at Southwestern at the time, so their conversations at first took place through texts and online messaging.

“And then a month after we started talking, he proposed,” Tiana said.

“She stopped responding to my text messages for about a week,” Mandimby said, adding that he finally got a message from their mutual friend saying Tiana wasn’t sure if Mandimby was serious. Both eventually agreed that they were ready to be married, and Tiana accepted his proposal.

Three months later, Tiana arrived in Fort Worth and saw Mandimby for the first time.

“Yeah, we had not seen each other [before then],” she said with a laugh. She stayed at the home of Dean Sieberhagen, interim dean of the Roy J. Fish School of Evangelism and Missions at Southwestern, and his wife, Sandra.

“The main thing, I think, was just giving her a warm home,” Dean Sieberhagen said. “She’d never been to America, she’d never seen this guy she’s engaged to. So we just wanted to give her a home that was stable, where she could just come home and relax and have meals prepared for her and just good fellowship. That was our priority: to give her that because we knew she was processing a lot of things.”

Mandimby and Tiana married July 28, 2016, and Tiana moved to Fort Worth. After having earned a master’s degree in France and attending a Bible school in Switzerland, she was not interested in going back to school at that time. The couple spoke with the Sieberhagens, who encouraged Tiana to take advantage of the fact that she was staying at the seminary, adding that she should be equipped for her future ministry in Madagascar.

Tiana agreed, but said she wanted to enroll in a short program, “like, two years max.” As she looked at Southwestern’s programs, however, the MDiv program with a focus on women’s studies caught her attention.

“I [had] wanted to do that for a long time,” she said. Though it was a four-year program, Tiana decided to enroll. “And it was the best decision,” she said. She earned her degree in 2021.

Mandimby is in the dissertation stage of his Doctor of Philosophy degree in church history, and he and Tiana – along with their sons Harena, 6; Arianala, 4; and Kaleba, 2 – will return to Madagascar to operate the seminary they started there in 2022 after his dissertation is submitted.

The seminary, the Baptist Theological Seminary of Madagascar, “has been a longtime vision for the Malagasy Baptist churches in Madagascar,” said Mandimby, who serves as director of the seminary.  He said they felt led to not wait until he finished his PhD program to return to Madagascar, “but  actually start the whole thing to show the people that … we care; we want to do it.”

They had a waiting list of 50 students who were interested in attending the school and a website that was ready to go. They also had formed a small team of teachers and a board of directors.

“We didn’t have the finances to go back to Madagascar to start the seminary back then, but our church said, ‘You guys go; we will pay for it,’” Mandimby said. The family attends Rock Creek Baptist Church in Crowley, Texas.

They flew to Madagascar and campaigned for a couple of months with the local churches there, “and the seminary saw the light, almost miraculously, I would say, really. Not of our will,” Mandimby said.

The seminary is housed in the headquarters of the Baptist churches in Madagascar, operating in a small room with a few computers.

“We mainly operate online,” Mandimby said. “So we run the seminary online from here until we go back.” They’ve seen 70 students through the first five semesters the seminary has been in operation, he said.

Tiana does the administrative work for the seminary and teaches academic French. The seminary also offers academic English.

“The teaching is happening in Malagasy,” Mandimby explained, “but we use a lot of English books and French books for material because we don’t have anything really written in our language for theology.” He explained that the Malagasy language “has not had the time yet to develop into a fully academic language with the terminologies we offer, theological language and literature and all of that. So it makes for us a little bit difficult to produce material in that language, but we definitely are on the way to do that.”

Tiana sees another need in Madagascar.

She and Mandimby will join his former church, where his family members attend. Tiana sees “a great need in, especially, discipleship [for women] … especially one-on-one. And this is my thing. I love [to] disciple one-on-one, and this is something they are not very familiar with. … So that’s what I really want to develop,” she said. “So this, and then biblical counseling. It starts to come in Madagascar. Yeah, it’s coming.”

Mandimby and Tiana are wrapping up their time in Fort Worth and will return to Madagascar as missionaries of Reaching & Teaching International Ministries. “We’ll be raising our support from here before we go,” Mandimby said. “We actually don’t know how to do that, but hopefully that will happen,” he added with a laugh.

They want to take books with them when they go to use in their seminary. Mandimby noted the current trend is moving toward digital books, which leaves some professors and students asking what they can do with their physical books.

“We’ll take them,” he said, adding that they want to fill a 40-foot container to send to Madagascar with their things and, hopefully, a library for the seminary.

The couple will take fond memories of Southwestern with them when they return to Madagascar.

“I was very happy to be here when I had my children, because it’s here that I really learned about womanhood and motherhood,” Tiana said, adding that she also learned discipleship and counseling while at the seminary.

Mandimby said, “This has been the place that I call home for 12 years. Home for me is seminary, is Southwestern, right now. This really is a haven of peace. I love studying. I would love to stay here forever …, but of course, God is calling us to go back to Madagascar and give back what we’ve received here.”