63 Outreaches, 3 Teams, 21 Evangelists and 8 Days.

Sprinkle in 5 different vehicles, 2 generators and African timeliness, and you also have a recipe for disaster…

This is how it happened:

Operation Christmas Child invited me to train all the Children’s Pastors who were participating in this years outreaches - 65 churches.  The training was awesome!  130 showed up (2 from each church) and it ended with us laying hands and praying for over 30 of them who felt a call to full/part-time children’s ministry.

Then I had the crazy idea - why not train some of them in drama, skits, puppets and create teams so they can go to each distribution and really make the distribution of shoeboxes an extra-special event?  This would also ensure that the focus of each distribution will be more on the Gospel, less on the gifts.

We got 21 volunteers, so Heidi and I paired up with some of our “Give a Kid a Christmas” veterans to train them in 3 days.  Heidi took the Jesus Skit, Issaka and Gregoire took the “Sin Chair skit” and I took the puppets.  We also spent the 1st hour of each day to explain basic discipleship.

All of that was great…  But then we had to find a car, sound equipment, costumes, food, water, gas, etc… for each team.  Sound easy?  It’s not!  But God is good, and thanks in large part to our home church: Newspring, we are able to work it out (they sent 2 speakers, a generator, mics, and of course, a Ford F150).

Then we split all 65 outreaches among the 3 teams (Lightening, Gideon and my team, Ebenezer) based on proximity to each other.  Each team chose a rendez-vous point, then we had to confirm each outreach with each pastor.  Anyways, it’s been a circus!  But we have successfully completed 8 outreaches already.  Here’s our 1st great testimony:

At one church a lady stood up, in front of the entire crowd, after the Gospel presentation and said:

“Before we had great hate in our hearts for you, the pastor, but now, we understand, and we are letting our hatred go.”

Wow!  The community genuinely felt the love of God and for the 1st time understood the Gospel message (told in stories) and are now opening their hearts to the church.  That is EXACTLY what Operation Christmas Child is all about, and that is what Vision 2020 is all about.

More to come!

Here are a few pictures from the training that Heidi and I conducted for the Evangelism Team.  There’s also a few pictures from Joel’s team’s very 1st outreach.

More explanations in the next blog.

We have 4 more days till the outreaches start!!  Would you pray with us for this year’s outreaches?  We have been ready to go for several weeks now, but because we want to join our outreaches with a medical clinic, we have been delayed a bit.  The doctor we work with began the authorization process in July, but the government has been dragging it’s feet.

We decided that no matter what, the show must go on…  So we are starting on Monday.  But we need to cover this in prayer!  Would you please urgently pray that:

1. Doctor Peter can get the authorization by the end of this week.
2. We can assemble the drama troupe and retrain them in time.
3. We can find enough volunteers for the packing and wrapping.
4. We find favor with all the school directors - there will be 5 or 6 schools next week.
5. For protection against sickness and equipment failure.

We love our interns, and now they’re gone…

Our 2009 Interns

Wow!!  That was some of the MOST intense 10 weeks of our lives!  The interns were fantastic and we wish they could stay here in Africa (one is coming back - yay!), but there was so much other stuff happening at the same time:

1. The truck came in - this involved a week-long trip to Ghana.  Boy, did that transform our internship for the better!  The 4 interns took our old van and we made all our long trips with style…
2. The Flood.  Wow, that was amazing.  Ouagadougou is still picking up the pieces.  We were able to help in a couple of different ways - by running a kids’ program with games, puppets and film - which really gave a lot of joy, and we gave out blankets and food and mats.  We will be doing more.
3. Prep for Give a Kid a Christmas.  Enough said…
4. Sickness…  ALL of us got sick.  One of our interns (actually the one coming back, if you can believe it) got Typhoid, Malaria, Amoebas and an infection.  All at the same time…
5. I’m sure there’s more, but I’m blocking it out right now

This is a very quick note (it’s late) to say that on Sept 1st, over 10 inches of rain fell in very little time here in Ouagadougou.  It created flash flooding and the water ran together to make huge, raging rivers which poured down the streets.  Bridges and dams were wiped out, and roads were made impractical.  But worst of all, thousands of mud homes were devastated and 150,000 people were displaced.

Our friends and neighbors are suffering.  We are working with Joseph Dayamba to help the worst hit.  

Tomorrow we will be going to the school across from his house to give out food, water, lamps, mats, etc…  We are also working with the local gov’t to see how we can help rebuild homes for the most needy (the widows, the handicapped, the blind, the elderly).

To see pictures, videos, press coverage, etc.., go to Joel’s Facebook profile.

Thank you for your prayers!

We are so excited!  We have 4 new missionaries with us for 10 weeks for an internship.  They flew in just a few hours ago and we just showed them around their new house.  We are going to have an amazing 10 weeks.  Here are the week’s themes:

1. Discipleship - what it means to be and to make disciples
2. New Testament Team - what is a church, how to form a team that conforms to the New Testament
3. Church planting and strategic prayer
4. Islam and Cultural adaptation - they will go to a mosque and meet an Imam
5. Project management - here they will actually write a project proposal for Kids of Hope
6. Survey and Assessment - how to determine the physical and spiritual needs of a community.  We will go to an unreached village this week.
7. Children’s Ministry - they will plan and execute 2-3 children’s outreaches.
8. Village Outreach - the interns will plan every aspect of an outreach to the village we went to in week 6.  This should be amazing!
9. Day in the life of a missionary - we will visit different ministries and missionaries here on the field (medical, street kids, Bible translation, ethnomusicology, etc…) and then have a “hands-on” time.
10. A lifetime of missions - getting them ready to go home and prepare to go do missions full-time