A Word From Above

Johnson, Rudy PeruA TRUE CHRISTMAS STORY

For many years our home Church (IBB Miami) has had a 5:30 am prayer meeting for people who are going to work. They prayed for a neighborhood family whose 7 year old son has leukemia. The mother had to quit her job to take care of the son and the father’s hours had been cut back at work, making a big hardship on the family.

The pastor sent an email to the entire church asking for help for this need, even though they had never been to any services. They brought groceries, laundry and cleaning supplies, gift cards and cash on the 23rd, which is when they had the Children’s Christmas Program.

The little boy got out of the hospital on the 22nd for Christmas and someone suggested that they bring him to see the Children’s program. They came, not knowing anything about what the Church was doing.

After the program, when the pastor heard who they were, he went to them and told them (in private) what the Church had done. They loaded their car completely full of groceries and supplies, plus over $1000 in cash and gift cards. Here it is several days later and money is still coming in for the family. This is what Christmas should be all about, SHOWING LOVE TO OTHERS.

Please pray with us that through the out-pouring of love and generosity by our Church people that the family may be saved.

Rudy has an appointment with the Eye Dr. next week. We pray that he can have his eye surgery so that we can return to Peru. Also Lorraine is having special treatments for her back. Please be praying for this also.

May you all have a Happy New Year.

Rudy & Lorraine Johnson

Email Address: rudy@cuscoperu.org

Video Update from Ethiopia

Epp-isodes

PICT6333We recently had a Family Festival as an outreach to the community.  We saw 150 people participate in this event with the help of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Middletown, NY. We have been following up and have some of these people coming to the church as a result.

However, I’d like to share with you the story of a young man named Samuel.  He had been coming to church on and off since March.  He was searching for answers and looking for a needed change in his life.  He found just what he was searching for at Santuario Bautista Vida, and that is Jesus!  On July 31 Samuel prayed to have Christ be his Savior.

Since that life changing day, Samuel has been growing immensely in the Lord.  On August 28 we had our first baptism service where Samuel and another gentleman (Marcio) were baptized.  Samuel is being discipled and said he was going to commit to tithing to God and is excited about it.

Samuel has also discovered that doesn’t mean that life will always be easy. Just after the baptism he lost his job.  I have been greatly encouraged by his attitude and faith through this tough time.  Friends have asked him what he is going to do and he responds, I don’t know but I have faith that God will provide.

Please pray for Samuel, that God will give him that job and that his faith will continue to grow stronger each day.  I know he appreciates your prayers and so do we. Thanks for investing in our ministry.

Prayer Needs:

*Cost of forming non-profit Org. in Honduras – Gov’t fees + Lawyer fees approx. $5,000

*Growth of our new church

*Our personal walk with God

*Wisdom

*Our partners the Lopez family as they continue to adapt to a new culture.

For Jesus,

Keni and Vanessa Epp

Rain In Central America Brings Devastation

We have a couple of missionaries and feeding centers in Central America that could use your prayers. The rains have hit El Salvador and Guatemala especially hard.  In El Salvador, they have caused 32,000 people to be taken to shelters and over 32 have perished as it continues to fall.

According to Paula Rhoades, “We are in a state of emergency down here…schools are closed, rivers are out of their banks, walls are down, mudslides have blocked roads and houses washed away.  Please be in prayer for El Salvador and that the Lord will use this disaster to bring people to Him.”

Guatemala is also dealing with a crisis due to the rains right now. As of Monday, the death toll stood at 28, with over 110, 000 affected.  You can see a video to show some of the damage in Guatemala here:

watch?v=XxXB5VdMaZI&feature=share

More rain is forecast. Please pray for our children in Manna Feeding Centers and our missionaries in El Salvador (Jeff and Paula Rhoades) as well as Guatemala (Jerry and Mindy Kinman – who although God has them currently safe in the US till Nov 10th, their hearts are very much with their churches, feeding centers, and co-laborers back in Guatemala).
Thank you.

Needing the Healing Hand of God

RobertsPlease pray for me, I spent yesterday morning at the emergency room. Monday morning (1 a.m.) I was awakened by a pain in my legs and my back hurting. The pain was so bad, I could not go back to sleep. When I got up, I fell after my one leg collapsed under me.

I took some over the counter pain pills but they did not do me much good. Tuesday night I got about 4 hours sleep and fell two more times on Tuesday, Wednesday, I just got up and asked Sandy to take me to the emergency room. They said I had a severe case of Sciatica and gave me four injections through and IV.

The pain has lessened, but I am not able to do much. I can not walk more than 10 ft without stopping or setting down. I have so much to do this week, I need the healing hand of God.

Randall Roberts

What’s Going On in El Salvador

We finished the summer hosting our final two mission teams (we did five this summer). In July we had 50 college students from the States join up with around 100 Salvadorans, Nicaraguans and Guatemalans for our annual Juntos Together trip. During the day we went to public schools teaching values and a college campus teaching English giving the gospel to over 2,000 students. In the evenings we went to a couple neighborhoods doing an evangelism campaign and had four nights of challenging preaching and worship. God really moved in the hearts of our students. The best part was the Kingdom was expanded with 850 making professions of faith!!


In August we met up with our home church in Guatemala to work with our Metro church. We taught a lesson on Sexual Purity to around 1,140 high schoolers and then had around 171 adults make professions of faith from our evening campaigns. Please pray for Pastor Nelson as they continue with the follow-up on each person who made a profession.


Our work up in Nueva Concepción is going well. July 9th we had a picnic and baptisms for 3 of the churches in Project North. Jeff baptized 12 for the Nueva Concepción church. There are 8 adults being discipled and we are seeing many coming on a regular basis. Now we are praying for our next church plant up in the Northern part of El Salvador…continue to pray for Project North. We are buying land for our next church. We have a small group that meets in the town of Tejutla, in a rented house. We are praying for a church building to be built next year for them to have a permanent home.


We finished out the summer saying good-bye to Emily as she headed back to the States for school and we celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. What a blessing it is for us to serve together along with you!!


Prayer requests: $35,000 for a building in Tejutla, El Salvador, please let us know if you can help.

Rhoades


Blessings to you! Jeff and Paula Rhoades, your missionaries in EL Salvador

Looking Back At What God Has Done

Cruthers Alan Kathy-015

Kathy and I just celebrated our 46th wedding anniversary with our four kids and twelve grandkids, and it was certainly a joyous occasion! It is hard to believe that so many years have gone by that quickly in one sense, but looking back at all God has done in our lives and given us, it seems like a very long time.

That idea of “looking back at what God has done” kind of resonated with us, so we decided to make it the theme of this newsletter. He first called us to be missionaries in the fall of 1973 here in Southern California while we were serving at the First Baptist Church of La Palma under Bro. Howard Ervin, our father and mentor in the Lord who is now enjoying his ongoing eternal life in heaven. For the past 37 ½ years He has given us the privilege of getting to know you folks and serving Him in the country of Chile which we have come to love as our home and our people. After arriving there with two kids, Howie and Gloria, the Lord graciously gave us Dan and Joy during our first term on the field along with the blessing of seeing many saved and planting one strong church, the Bible Baptist Church of Villa Macul, before our first furlough. Through the next three terms on the field God used us to help plant five more independent congregatiions, and when I say “help plant”, I mean just that. Our philosophy of ministry has been to try to find a young Chilean couple or family with a vision for a certain city or town and work with and through them to establish the churches. It was also during this period that I became the director and president of the Chilean Bible Baptist College (now named Bible Baptist Seminary) in Santiago from 1983 to 1999 helping to prepare and train the majority who are now the pastors, associates, and youth leaders of our Chilean churches. Since 1996 the work of church planting has literally exploded as we have seen fourteen more churches and missions started as we also personally helped mentor and trained three Chilean church planters and sent them out from three different churches in Santiago.

In the last twelve years, the main Seminary has also been in national hands even though we have continued to teach there and help with the training process. Together with this, we have also spent even more time with the mentoring process and travelling all over the country helping with the church planting and the encouragement of these young leaders and their families. The crucial part of all of this is your involvement without which all that we have mentioned would not have been possible. So we pray that this has also been a blessing and encouragement to your hearts! Remembering these things has at the same time been uplifting to us during this time of dealing with our health issues which apparently are not going away according to all the doctors have told us. We thank you for your continued prayers on our behalf and for your investment of  during these past two months for God’s work “at the bottom of the world”!

Yours in Christ for Chile,

Alan and Kathy Cruthers


A Busy But Fruitful Summer

Dear Praying Friends,

It’s been a BUSY Summer!  Sorry the updates have been few!  I’m feeling my “geezer” age now, and it’s hard to keep up the pace.  But, God’s grace has been sufficient for Sherry and me, and we are thankful to Him, and for YOU and your faithful prayes and support!

July’s highlight was a fantastic team from El Paso.  What a great group of people!  They had the sweetest attitudes and never complained once about being worked to death!!  No kidding, I think we put too much on them this time — (most of the same folks came last year too).

They presented the Gospel in song, drama, preaching and personal evangelism in over a dozen schools, open air sites and during a sports evangelism tournament.  Well over 100 souls came to Christ, as far as we were able to discern.  The last School they visited was 90% Muslim, and there was no visible invitation given because of persecution of new believers.  But, judging from facial expressions, I know that many of these students were impacted by the very clear presentation of the Gospel!

Thanks, Cielo Vista Team!  And thanks to all who have prayed and given to make this trip, and other ministry fruit possible!

Here are a couple of photos of their visit.

School

SportsDay

We’ve posted a few more on our website, along with a video clip or two.  www.jerrydaniels.org

In God’s amazing grace!

Jerry and Sherry Daniels

MMKP Parties

MMKP Season is Upon Us!

Luke Kelly Scott Lyons July 2010

MMKP Translates to: Meet My Kaibigan (Friend) Party

Small Groups is at the core of our church planting ministry here in Metro Manila, Philippines. All of our church plants start with a core group of leaders who go to a new area and start new small groups in homes, building rapport with the community, winning people to Christ and begin discipling new believers. Through this we have been able to establish a member base to launch our new churches.

MMKP is entirely evangelistic in nature. We use the existing small group network of a church and plan a big PARTY! Filipino culture lends itself to make everything an “event”.  You would not go to someone’s house to hang out or to the mall, you bring friends and make it an event. So our MMKPs fit right in here. Each group schedules a date when and where the party will take place and each member will plan to bring 2 non-small group or

un-churched friends to their party.

Each party will have what we call, the 4Gs: Goodies, Games, Guests, and the Gospel. The leaders of all our small groups are right now training every member of his/her small group how to share the Gospel with their friends at this party. The end result is to spread the Gospel, grow and multiply each small group and consequently increase the attendance of the church itself.

These evangelistic MMKP events have been a great success in the past. Last year in 2010 we had a goal to reach 500 visitors with 500 salvations and God blessed. Last year we saw 778 visitors and 570 salvations. This year we are looking to God to work through us to do more.

In preparation for this, we held a leadership rally to get everyone pumped about the MMKP season. Last August 1st we invited all 14 of our churches to bring their leaders and new potential leaders. Believe it or not, we had a typhoon hit the city on the same day. It rained and stormed all day, even with this difficulty, we had 9 churches make it with 225 in attendance. An awesome victory, we planned and cast a vision to reach out and see God move over the next 60 Days. I can’t wait to tell you of the victory we are already expecting.

Our prayer is that God will allow us to win Manila, then the Philippines, then Asia, then the world over to Christ.

Please pray specifically for:

The success of all the MMKPs, that God will allow us to see hundreds of new salvation and church growth and lastly that the Typhoons (we are currently in Typhoon season) will not affect the success of these parties.

We would also like to share that we are expecting our second child due in early January 2012.  We would ask that you also pray for a healthy baby and healthy mom during this pregnancy time.

Thank you for your part in our ministry.  We can only be as strong as the people that are supporting us and we are grateful for each one of you!  We would love to see you visit us in Manila.

Thank you,

Kelly, Luke and Scott Lyons

Health Situation

PerezWe have been dealing with our national pastor’s health situation for the last three months.  He has developed a sickness called Charcot foot which has deteriorated his right foot deeply. Besides this, he has chronic Diabetes which makes it more difficult for doctors to treat his right foot. To make a long story short, he is now facing to have his foot amputated due to a severe infection.

Our church has been in much prayer looking for God’ direction in these matters. We all are very much distress with pastor Juan’s emotional and physical health. My wife and I have been in much counseling and prayer with them and helping them with the medical visits to the hospital for the many tests he has gone through. The doctor who is in charge of his case is waiting for a space to get access to a surgery room at the hospital to do the amputation of Juan’s right foot. He says that it might take up to a year or a year and a half for there to be room for him.  There are seven surgery rooms at this hospital but only two are functional;  and there is a list of eight thousand patients waiting to get their surgery taken care of. This is how the social health care system works for the people here in Costa Rica!

Pastor Juan, however, continues to preach in his wheelchair every Sunday morning and in the PM service.  I preach on Wednesdays a series of messages on Biblical doctrines.

Please, continue to pray for our national pastor and that he will be able to have his surgery sooner than what it is expected.

Thank you for your faithful prayers and financial support, without either our work would not be possible.

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Because of Him,

Ramon & Annette Perez


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