News from China

CHINA. Two simple questions helped jump-start an evangelistic outreach to a minority group in a major China city. An overseas Christian worker first asked a house church leader if she knew any Mongol Christians. When she replied that she didn't, he said, "Why not?" It was as if he could see the light go on in her eyes. They talked a while longer about the need to reach the minority group. The next day, the lady told the Christian worker that she was ashamed that she had never thought about the spiritual needs of the minority group and ashamed that it had taken a "foreigner" to remind her of the needs of a group in her own city. She turned that shame into victory, though, by making contacts that will facilitate a wide outreach among the Mongol people living in her city.

CHINA. He woke up feeling sick. His head ached and he had a stuffy nose. "It's going to be a long day," he thought. On the way to catch his 6:30 a.m. flight, he realized that he had not brought his medicine. "It's going to be a very long day," he sighed. Resisting the urge to ask the taxi driver to turn around, he reminded himself that he had promises to keep. But he inwardly harbored a sliver of hope that maybe his flight would be cancelled. It was not. Nor did his contact fail to meet him at his destination. He reluctantly climbed onto a bus to head out with his trainee to tell people about Jesus. The first person that they shared with rejected Jesus outright. But the next one gladly received the Gospel and accepted Jesus as Savior. At the next stop, another person accepted Christ. At noontime, they led the parents of two new believers to the Lord. All of the sudden, the evangelist realized that his headache was gone. He felt great, albeit humbled. Reflecting on the day, he said, "I learned that the Lord loves these people more than I do."

CHINA. When the Chinese realtor rented an apartment last fall to a Christian couple from overseas, she told them that she did not believe in any religion or deities. She believed only in herself. But over the course of several months, as she visited their apartment to assist with housing issues, she developed a relationship with the couple and some of their Christian friends. The self-sufficient realtor came to grips with what was lacking in her life and accepted Jesus as her Savior early this year. In the meantime, she had introduced five of her colleagues to the Christian couple. Together they began to hear the Good News and four of them accepted Christ during a Bible study held at the rented apartment on Easter night.

Vermont Mission Report--Terry Dorsett

Dear Vermont Prayer Partners,

The following is good news about the work in Vermont from my friend and colleague Terry Dorsett. At the end there are several projects that you may feel led to adopt. Remember to pray for the work there, and help financially as you are able.

This past week I spent a great deal of time meeting one on one with people
who were having various spiritual difficulties in their lives. I do not consider
myself a very good counselor, but the Holy Spirit is a great Counselor and He
brought great hope and peace to the lives of His children as we talked and
prayed together.

Yesterday I spoke at Faith Community Church in
Barre (which meets in the basement of a local motel). I speak there two Sundays
a month and then speak in other GMBA churches on the other two Sundays each
month. Yesterday we have a huge crowd (59), which included 10 teenagers. It
seems that our outreach to teens has just exploded in the last few months. Pray
for many of them to be saved.

I preached on How to Find Joy from 1
John 1 and one of the points was the need to confess our sins and forsake them.
If we continue to carry a sin load on our backs, we’ll never find joy. I gave
the group a sample prayer to pray and encouraged them to talk to someone before
they left. Right after the service a mother and her 9 year old son asked me to
pray with them, so we slipped into the storage room (it was the only private
place around) and prayed among the boxes of kitchen supplies that the motel
keeps stored there. While I was praying with them a young man who is completely
unchurched but has been coming the last few weeks was desperately trying to find
me so he could talk to me too. But since I was in the storage room, he couldn’t
find me, so he grabbed one of the ladies whom he had met and asked if she could
tell him how to be born again. So they turned the hallway in front of the two
bathrooms into an altar and she led him to the Lord right there. It was the
first person she had ever led to the Lord, so it was a cause for rejoicing. When
I finally emerged from the storage room after having prayed with the mother and
son, I saw a couple sitting over to one side of the room and their body language
said, “we need to talk to you” so I went over to ask if I could help and they
said, “we have got to get an appointment to come talk to you, we need to get
some things right and join this church” so they are coming by the office today.
Then another person came up and asked if I could make an appointment for them
too. Wow, it was quite the morning.

Be praying as the Lord works
through these many issues in many people’s lives. Pray especially for Gabe (the
young boy) who really needs a touch for the Lord and pray for Nick (the young
man) to be discipled in his new faith. Pray for Karen, who got to lead Nick to
the Lord, that that spirit of evangelism will permeate her
life!!

Yesterday just underscored the need for Faith to move into a
real building. But praise God that even when you don’t have a building yet, you
can turn storage rooms into counseling areas and hallways into altars. God’s
Spirit cannot be stopped! Pray for Faith as they have their hearing with the
zoning board on June 7. Pray for them to get approval to convert the warehouse
into a church. It is the last major hurdle. They are schedule to close on June
29, but the seller wants us to move it up to June 21 if we can get the permit.
So pray towards that end.

There are still a lot of needs; you can
see the list below. Pray to the Father that each will be met.

Faith
Community Church Current Financial Needs:
1. Renovation costs - $20,000
(actually it is twice that but the mission has raised half themselves) 2.
Refrigerator - $1000
3. Two microwaves - $3004. Video projector for power
point - $1000 (all their songs & sermon notes are projected on the wall but
they currently use a borrowed projector) 5. Computer for power point - $1000
(they currently use a borrowed computer) 6. Computer for office - $10007. Sound
system - $5000 (they currently borrow a system that another church needs back)
8. 1 case of new hardback Holman Christian Standard Bibles, preferably black -
$2759. Furniture for youth room - $3000 (couches, lamps, tables) 10. New drums -
$950 (they had a borrowed set that the owner wanted back) 11. Office furniture -
$350012. Furniture for the "Family Room" (vestibule/fellowship area) -
$5000

All gifts are tax deductible and should be made out
to:
Faith Community Church
P O Box 278
Barre VT 05641
Donors are
encouraged to pick an item from the list above and specify what their gift will
be used for. However, if any single item is over subscribed, the church reserves
the right to use that overage to meet a different need on this list until all
the needs have been met.

Here is a great project for your Vacation Bible School. We are collecting empty ink cartridges and used cell phones as a fund raiser to help pay for the renovations of a warehouse into a church and also the association office. Have your VBS collect those items. At the end of your VBS, email me (don’t mail the box to us) and I will send you a prepaid label and you can ship the box postage free directly to the company that is paying us to do the recycling.

Also, a second project, have your Vacation Bible School collect change to help us renovate three classrooms for children in this same building. What a great thought, that the children of your church and help the children of a mission church in Vermont have a nice Sunday School room. Checks for that project can be mailed to Faith Community Church, P O Box 278, Barre VT 05641.

Thanks for thinking of these two great VBS projects.

News from the the Middle East

The following is a report on a recent M trip by colleagues to the Holy Land. How exciting to see God at work even in short-term mission experiences. If you would like more information on this ministry, please contact me.

Assalaamu alaikum.

My friend D and I made it home yesterday. H stayed on a couple of days and should be on his way home now. Pray that all goes well for him.

The trip was all that we expected and then some. We painted. We walked and prayed. We visited some of the historical holy sites. We had some divine appointments and we were healthy. Thank you for going with us through your prayers.

Let me tell some stories to give you a feel for our time in the land.

The Mosque of Omar

We had met the two young Palestinian Muslim men the night before as we delivered food to a poor Muslim family in Bethlehem. “Khalid” is 21 and is studying to be an accountant. “Hakim” is 26 and is blind. When Hakim was 13 he found a live Israeli land mine in his back yard. He lost his right arm and his sight.

We had asked them to take us on a tour of Manger Square and the Church of the Nativity. The young men did a good job of telling us the story of the birth of Jesus. As we left, I asked them if they could then take us to visit the Mosque of Omar.

This mosque was built across Manger Square from the Church of the Nativity and is a symbol of peaceful coexistence between Palestinian Christians and Muslims. The land the mosque is built on was donated by the Greek Orthodox Church.

We removed our shoes and eased in. We were met by a man who worked at the mosque. He wasn’t the Imam, but he worked for him. He took us inside and showed us around. Then it happened.

As we stood before the mihrab we began to talk about what the Qur’an says about Jesus. Hakim translated our conversation. It was an incredible exchange. The man we were sharing with had the typical responses I hear from most Muslims, but he was very cordial and listened to our replies and comments. The conversation lasted for maybe half an hour or so. Good seeds were planted, both in the hearts of the man who works at the mosque and in the hearts of Khalid and Hakim. This was one of our divine appointments.

Overflowing with Joy

Daher is a strong man. He wore blue coveralls and spoke broken English. He greeted us with warmth that I will soon not forget.

Daher is a Palestinian Christian. He is fighting for his land, land that has been in his family since 1924. In 1991, the Israeli government declared his 100 acres, along with surrounding acreage as Israeli state property. The plan was to build settlements for Israeli immigrants to establish “facts on the ground” in the West Bank. Daher’s property is now surrounded by 5 Israeli settlements.

Daher has legal papers supporting rightful ownership; papers from Ottoman, British, Jordanian and Israeli governments. He and his family have been fighting the Israeli government for 16 years. This is a David and Goliath type story.

We went to spend the night on the land and to work the next day. Daher built a fire in his wood stove and we sat around it to get warm. He smiled at us and began to sing:

“Hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah
Praise ye the Lord…”

He was overflowing with joy. It was a beautiful time.

The next morning he woke us at 7:00 and led us to a cave where the goats had slept. It was time to milk the goats. So we did. He then fed us breakfast and led us to our work assignment. We were to pull weeds. There were weeds around the olive trees and weeds around the grapevines. So we pulled weeds. It was hard. The weeds had thorns and we had no gloves. We hated it. We loved it.

I truly felt like I was fighting for justice. Nothing more than a few hours of hard work and a few holes in my skin. Justice.

Naher has no bitterness. He fights for his land through love. He is one of the truest examples of Romans 12:21 that I have ever met.

“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

I am honored to have met him and to have fought with him for the land.

For more information about Naher and his family’s fight for their land see: www.tentofnations.org

But How do we trust Jesus?

Khalid and Hakim invited us to lunch. Khalid’s mother was there and she had prepared a feast of rice and baked chicken. The serving platter had to have been three feet in diameter and it was heaped at least a foot in the air. A true feast. We ate and then ate some more.

After the meal, over tea and coffee, the discussion turned to religion. We started in the Qur’an and shared the Truth about Jesus. We talked of how Jesus was born of a virgin and was the Word of God and the Spirit of God. We talked of His sinless life. We talked of His miracle working and that He had power over death as evidenced by His raising people from the dead. We talked about His crucifixion and resurrection.

We then talked about why Jesus had to die. We talked about God’s requirement for a blood sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. We talked about the Muslim belief that every person will stand before God and give an account of their life. Their sins will be put on one side of a scale and their good deeds on another. If the scale leans toward the good deeds, they might be allowed to enter Paradise. If not, well…

We shared how God’s word says that if we are guilty of one sin, then we are guilty of all sin. (James 2:10) They understood and realized that we all had a problem.

We then shared how God loved His creation so much that He made a way to be reconciled with Him. What we can’t do, God did. We said that we must stop trusting in our works and trust in the completed work of Jesus.

Hakim translated for Khalid’s mother, “But how do we trust Jesus?”

What a moment. We shared what it meant to trust Jesus and then gave them two copies of the New Testament in Arabic, one for Khalid and his mother and one for Hakim. They were so appreciative. Hakim said he would have someone read it to him since he is blind.

This was another of our divine appointments. It was an honor to sit in the home of Palestinian Muslims and share the love and truth of Jesus. Pray with us that Khalid, his mother and family and Hakim and his family will soon be walking in the Kingdom of God. They are already walking toward it.
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This was a great trip. Thanks for going with us through you prayers.

Please pray for the Palestinian people. I fear that we here in the American church are often guilty of forgetting about the Palestinians. Regardless of our eschatological stance on the nation of Israel, Jesus still died for the Palestinian people just as much as any other people and we must never lose sight of that. Pray for the Palestinian Muslims to know the Truth of Jesus. Pray for the Palestinian Christians, who make up roughly 4% of the Palestinian population in the occupied territories. They feel abandoned by their brothers and sisters in the West.

I’m home for about 3 weeks and will then head to East Asia as well as other spots in the Middle East. I will be visiting with some of our long-term workers and possibly meeting with a group to discuss writing a book on Muslims who are having dreams and visions of Jesus. By the way, we met a man last week who had a dream of Jesus. I’ll tell you his story soon.

Until ALL Have Heard,