New Stories From Mexico

Two of our most prolific blogging missionary families are based in Mexico. In the last couple of days, they’ve both added updates that are certainly worth reading!

You can get to Lane and Sheri’s by clicking here.

And you can read Greg and Shelli’s by clicking here.

We’re Back in Action! (Updated)

After a very refreshing and positive time spent in prayer and community with the EFCC and EFCCM leaders, we are back at it. For most of us, this involves catching up with the myriad of correspondence that accumulated in the absence of internet access. And speaking of internet access, there’s one fact that I should alert you to:

Our site this month saw 14,600 hits! Because I don’t toot numbers on here too much, let’s put this in perspective. It is more than twice as many as our previous record! Thank you for your part in helping this site grow toward being the community we’ve envisioned for it! As we continue to foster its ability to share stories, and develop relationships, we hope you’ll return often, and contribute your thoughts here.

Update: we ended up with 22,158 hits for the month. Those came from many sources, including nearly 1,000 returning visitors (is that an oxymoron?). That’s the number that I’m really excited about, as that means that we’re really starting to gain momentum. More than that, interaction is beginning, and we encourage it. So if you see anything that needs your comment, this is your invitation!

EFCC Prayer Summit

For the next couple of days, the EFCC Home Office will be joining the EFCC leaders for the annual prayer summit. We invite you to pray for us as we consecrate our leadership and our decisions for the year ahead. This is bound to be a good time of celebration, fellowship and camaraderie, as we focus on God, Scripture and worship.

This means however that the office will be closed until Friday morning. Any comments that you make may not get approved until next week. We appreciate your patience!

Casa Mariposa Progress

The following comes from Jake and Mary, who are close to completing the Women and Children’s Shelter (also known as Casa Mariposa).

The place is coming together beautifully. Four of the apartments already have tiles and are ready for paint, as are two bathrooms. The laundry room is completed.

I am sure many of you are wondering what is happening with the Mennonites. You have heard horror stories and wondering what the latest is.  Well, we haven’t written much about it for a while because we have heard so many conflicting stories that we are not sure anymore what is true and what is not. Sadly, we often hear that it is still going on.

Last Sunday we had strangers in church, so after church I introduced myself and found out they came specifically to talk to us. I  invited them for dinner. We had a good visit. Then she told me her father was one of the men in prison. And he is supposedly the ring leader and the one making the spray, but she said it was all a set up. Meanwhile we are hearing that the rapes are still going on. Her 17 year-old sister was a victim and they need help for her. Since she was drugged and raped she has not been herself. They knew the boys; they confessed that they had drugged her but did not say with what drug. Saturday they had found her at the cheese factory taking her clothes off and coming on to all the men. They said that this behaviour was not like her at all! Before all this happened to her, she had given her life to Jesus and was just a normal teenager with good morals and was helpful around the home.  She really needs professional help.

We recommended that they take her to a mental health facility in Paraguay that we have heard many good reports from. It is run by a Christian organization which does not resort to simply using more drugs as some do. When we phoned for more information, we found out that their doctor was visiting Santa Cruz. Now she is in their hands but they said they would like for her to come to Paraguay for three months. At a cost of $1,000 per month the family said that was out of the question. But we told them not to give up — we would seek help on their behalf. Since then some money has come in, and our church will do what it can. Now we are asking if there is anyone else who wants to contribute to this. You can do so by sending a donation with the details below:

Account #2-2881 Jake & Mary – Special Projects

(You can also contact Home Office to give by phone or cheque.)

Our youth pastor Willy Reimer is still doing visitations  at the jail in Catoca. Three of the men know and confess that they are saved and the others still seem to have many questions, but they enjoy his visits. The living quarters are awful but some have said that this is the best thing that has ever happened to them! Through this they have found the Lord. And of course they are all saying that they are innocent. Thank God he knows the truth.

We have new neighbours from the Manitoba colony that have moved in about two weeks ago — a young family with three little girls. They will face a process of transition as they make the adjustment to off-colony living. But already that are sleeping more peacefully than they have for a long time. A lot of colony members live with constant fear and anxiety, and for them just moving away is a big relief. For some unable or unwilling to move away as a family unit (the social costs are severe!), we hope that Casa Mariposa will offer them the healing and tools to be able to face their situations and improve their lives.

In other news, we just sold our first papayas. We sold them to a lady that takes them to Tarija, they help pick and then she pays 2 bs a piece. We are looking for a good contract to sell them. We are hoping to get at least 3 on the yard. We will wait and see. They trees look very good. We estimate we can harvest 50-60 papaya per tree, but we think that they will exceed that by far. But we’ll see. (Papayas will be used to help offset the costs of running Casa Mariposa, as well as give residents life skills in basic agriculture and economics.)

Special World of Hope Report: Lithuania

The following update just came in from Nathan and Dawn, serving with us in Lithuania. I’m excited to see how some of the needs of Lithuanians have been met by generous Canadians. May we see these gifts supernaturally multiplied!

With rising costs of living and increased unemployment leaving many families struggling to feed their children, and some even devastated by the loss of their homes, the unusually long winter in Klaipeda has been particularly harsh. As the line-ups at the city’s few soup kitchens and social organizations grow longer, the supplies on the shelves quickly run out.

At one church in our city, a weekly food bank helps to provide those who are in need with staple foods, as well as a sympathetic ear, prayer and spiritual encouragement. So, when desperate families, single mothers,  young couples, and pensioners line up with their empty grocery bags on Thursday afternoons, there is often a question of whether or not there will be enough food to help everyone.

Through the World of Hope project, “A Step Up,” our goal was to provide the church’s food bank with enough supplies to make at least 20 individual bags of dry groceries. For a few people, these foodstuffs could mean the difference between feeding their families and going hungry. Through the generosity and concern of people who responded to this need, we are thrilled to report that the World of Hope project has enabled us to purchase supplies for 70 bags of groceries! In addition to the purchased dry foods, the city has also begun a program of collecting dated items and spoiled produce from local grocery stores for distribution through selected charities. This new initiative is helping to expand the resources of the church’s food bank, and is providing extra food, more variety, and increased nutrition to both the poor and homeless.

Each bag of groceries includes:

• 1 bottle of cooking oil
• 1 bag of sugar
• 1 bag of buckwheat
• 1 bag of dry split peas
• 2 tins of meat or fish
• 1 can of vegetables
• 1 package of pasta
• 1 box of tea
• 1 package of cookies

Website Improvements Onstream

Finally! As we’ve been promising on this site since we first put it up, the ability to donate online is now live! We’ve worked with a very capable web developer to rebuild the functionality of the e-commerce, and it comes with several key improvements in how it works, and how secure it is. It will allow you to donate to either a national or a national ministry at one spot. That’s pretty cool!

We’ve also launched registration for EFCC Conference 2010 (the theme is Regenerate: Plant. Water. Grow.). Again, this is going to provide us with the ability to handle registration with a far greater efficiency, it will give us much greater capacity to make edits, and will enable us to plan with much more accurate focus. If you got caught up in the glitches last time, you’ll appreciate this! (We’re not promising perfection here, just improvement. It’s still a pretty complex process!)

To visit the donation page, look for donate.efccm.ca.

To register for Conference click on register.efccm.ca.

2 Steps to Go

1.) All of the domains we own are going to point to this site, including efccm.org and efcc.ca — that is in process. (Currently those domains are broken from their old locations, so the servers’ processes have started.)

2. ) We are implementing a robust e-mail subscription system. If you’d like to keep up with news from the EFCC and the EFCCM, submit your e-mail address on this page. It is a way of reminding you to keep coming back to participate in the good things that are happening on the site.

Well that’s it for now — we now return to our regularly (un)scheduled ministry updates.

Prayer for Travelling Mercies

‘Travelling mercies’ is one of those Christian clichés that often gets thrown into the end of a prayer. But when you know what missionaries are up against, travelling is a near and constant danger. Ukraine is no exception, especially in freezing conditions.

Garry and Teresa have expanded on some of their recent harrowing ‘adventures’. That they have stayed safe on Ukrainian roads to date is a testimony to God’s faithfulness and protection.

See more of their stories from the road by clicking here (edit — the blogging service is down temporarily). And don’t forget to keep praying for them and our other missionaries — many times just the process of living incurs uncomfortable levels of risk.

Wait, But I Thought…

“The Land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you are but aliens and tenants. Throughout the country that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.” (Leviticus 25:23-24)

This is one of those obscure passages that we skip over without much thought. However, as I was reading this the other day, it struck me once again how deeply the assumptions of our culture influence what I think “the Bible says”! Take the above passage for instance: it is a great reminder that God mandated a system of redemption into the very fabric of Jewish existence, including redemption of land (and slaves, but we won’t go into that!). The Year of Jubilee was a practical way for God to return the land to its original stewards every 50 years (if it had been sold to alleviate debt).

Now I say “steward” intentionally, because God makes it very clear that the Jews did not own the land – He did. Their families were “aliens”, “tenants” who just had permission to use it as stewards (to support their survival). And here is my confession: I always assumed that private property was the system mandated by God (in the Bible) and “pagan” peoples like First Nations folks in Canada were the only folks who believed that no human had the right to actually claim ownership over a piece of land indefinitely. Somewhere along the line, I took John Locke’s theory of “natural rights”, (famously trumpeted by our American cousins as the inalienable rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness) as biblically-mandated truths. In fact, Locke first declared that all peoples had a right to the “pursuit of property” (that is how closely notions of private property and happiness were linked), but “pursuit of happiness” became the motto of our cousins to the south, many of whom earnestly believe that their country was founded on so-called Christian principles, and that these are the key Christian principles. In fact, Locke and other philosophers whose ideas were used to build and justify the constitution of the United States of America were deists who would have great difficulty in signing our EFCC 10 Articles of Faith.

Now this is not to pick on the Americans (after all, beating them in hockey is quite sufficient!). We could pick apart similar claims that “Canada was originally a Christian nation, based on Christian principles”. Certainly some Christian principles were foundational in the founding of both North American nations – but many secular notions were as well. And this is my point: I have a tendency to assume that those secular notions are biblical – when in fact they may even run counter to God’s truth. Hence, my sense of ownership of my land, my stuff – and my accompanying attachment to it (and anger at losing it) create serious loyalty issues for me. God tells me in I Peter that I am an alien – not a citizen of this world and here in Leviticus He reminds me that He owns the land not us. Yet I still have some vague sense that I am justified to cling to this world (and my “private property” in particular) and that this is somehow a God-ordained right.

This all makes me wonder how many other axioms that I vehemently defend as biblically-mandated truths are really cultural values that I have absorbed by osmosis. This is why the Word is still powerful – it subversively challenges those wrong beliefs that plague my heart and mind. Perhaps the Word still has much more to undo and redo in my mind before I get to glory…

Seeing “in a glass darkly” with you,

Bill