I’m sure you will agree that these are very difficult days in our world’s history. Billions of people are poor, millions go hungry or thirsty every day, children are dying from preventable diseases, and the list goes on. There are lots of problems right here in our own city of Omaha – thousands living in poverty, kids being raised without dads – people everywhere who need help.

So can you, one person living in Omaha, make a difference?

I am going to be teaching a class on Sunday mornings for 6-weeks starting on March 6th called Out Live Your Life. This is a Max Lucado video series that will tee up some great discussion on how you, just one person, can actually impact the world around you.

The more I study scripture the more I come to realize – our God is a huge advocate for the poor and defenseless people in our society.

So come join me in room FLC230! I’m really excited about how God is using people like you to impact the world – one life at a time.

Here is a link to a website that talks more about it and has a little video introduction to this class.

http://www.maxlucado.com/outliveyourlife/

Craig Walter

As I posted in my last blog entry, on February 19th CCC will send 5 people to Mali to perform a medical outreach. This team will partner with the hospital for women and children along with a Malian Pastor and provide medical services out in the rural areas (called the bush).

Below is an the text from an email that Dr. Dan Nesselroade sent to the team this week to let them know what exactly they will be doing. Be praying for this team!

CCC Team,

Here is what I can give you at the moment. We plan to do three clinics. The first is on the 22nd and it will be for women and children in the village of Bobola-Zangasso. This is a village of about 6,000 people without a single believer. There is a pastor in a neighboring village named Josuee Goita. He will be following up on any converts and will be our principal host. The village is pumped for us to come and has asked that we come for two days, so the 24th we will be returning to the same village to do Men and children care. Both nights will be evangelization with a movie and sermon.

The village has the only medical care available in the precinct. That is, they are it for a surrounding 11 villages that total 15,000 people. It is highly likely that we will receive people from these surrounding villages as well. We will probably get inundated, but as long as we can provide some sort of plan to control the chaos, it will go well. We are making the plans to do just this,so don’t worry about it.

Language barriers will make it just about impossible for you to treat patients alone, so your team will be doing different jobs and will be paired with missionaries or native speakers in a workable fashion. We will be able to do hematocrits and blood sugars and will have about 40 or so common meds with us, as well as vitamins and parasite treatments among other things. People will get triaged and be assigned numbers and will be seen in order after their vitals have been taken and written on index cards or some such. Different people from our staff will be going each day.

Each day we will eat one meal in the village and bring snacks for lunch. There will be so many people, that we wont stop for lunch, but rather just bang through them. Saturday we will be going to a different village and seeing men, women and children . The village is named Tempela. the pastor there is named Simeon. He lives there and has a fledgling church that has just started in the past year. This is going to be a lot of fun!

There is no greater joy or privilege than being able to announce Jesus to people who have no idea who he is or how much he loves them! Pray hard and come with lots of energy and joy, and God will carry the day.

Dan

I am very, very excited about a short-term mission team we have leaving for Mali on February 19th. This small team of just 5 people will be partnering with the hospital in Mali to perform medical outreaches in small villages. So here is how this will work.

Our team will partner with the doctors and nurses from the hospital on three different days in three different villages to provide medical care. They will do this in an area where there is a local Pastor who is trying to build and grow a church. So each day, after a long day of providing medical care literally from sun up to sun down, the team will then work with the Pastor to show the Jesus film and share the gospel.

We are the first church to partner with the hospital in this way, so we are trying to use this team as a prototype for future teams from CCC and other churches. I’m sure some things will go really well and others will not, but in the end we hope to learn a lot and we hope that many Malians come to Christ.

Pray for these 5 as they embark on a new and exciting ministry in Mali for CCC. Pray that they will have the stamina for some very long and hot days. Pray that God will use this ministry to draw Malians into a relationship with Jesus.

The following is from Ashley Baer, a young lady from CCC who on January 5th left to serve in Peru for 1 year. Ashley is working with children who live and work at a local garbage dump.

Beloved friends and family,

I am safe and sound in Trujillo, Peru. My flights were all wonderful. I was a bit nervous coming up to the day before my travel plans but on the morning of I felt great and had no stress or worries at the thought of flying.

Inside the church that is located at the garbage dump

I arrived in Lima at 10:30pm Wednesday but didn’t get to the hotel until 2:00am due to meeting others that were flying in at later times. The next day the group of us took the 10 hour bus ride from Lima to Trujillo. The bus was nice, not at all like the “Romancing the Stone” bus ride. I imagine it was a lot like Greyhound in the States – except I’ve never gone Greyhound before.

Cultural: The people are wonderfully welcoming and loving. The children love the attention us Americans give them. I’m still getting used to the food. They eat pretty heavy here: like potatoes, rice, and beans all in one meal. The climate is very dry here. I thought it would be more tropical like Florida or Costa Rica, instead the ground is mostly sandy and not much grows.

Spiritual: I’ve started memorizing Isa 43: 1-5. It’s a passage I re-discovered recently that really means a lot to me. I want to memorize new scripture every month I’m down here. Just being here has so many spiritual elements: trusting God that you told the taxi the correct place to go in an unfamiliar language, stepping out of our comfort zone to meet new people, and not caring about filth when hugging and playing with the children in the garbage dump.

the garbage dump where both adults and children work

the Church located in the garbage dump

Remember to lift up in prayer this week a short-term mission team CCC is sending to Mali to work with Dusty & Julia Reynolds in their Christian business called Sababu.

Part of the Reynolds dream for this business is to create a different kind of business – a business that will shine brightly as it represents Jesus Christ. Part of the way they are doing this is by providing amazing benefits to their employees. So the team of 9 that will leave for Mali this Friday, December 3rd, will be doing a couple of different things.

First, Jim Nichols, Brian Smith, Dave Price, and Dennis Wheeler will be providing business and management training for the key managers and supervisors. In addition to this, they will act as one-on-one mentors for these managers to help them become the best leaders they can be.

The second part of the team, Dr. Jim Simmons, Shyla Schmidt, Ali Holtrop, Tom Ezell, and Shelly Nichols, will work with the employees and their families to provide medical checkups and basic medical care. They will also document their medical history so in the future when they see Malian doctors they can take their medical history with them. We take this for granted in America but this is unheard of in Mali. In all, they anticipate seeing 125 to 150 people during their time in Mali.

The Reynolds have turned this business over to the Malian leadership, as planned, and will begin the next phase of their project here in Omaha starting in 2011, where they will become the sales and marketing arm of Sababu here in the US.

I want to encourage everyone reading this to please take a moment and lift up our partner orphanage in China in prayer. Since this is on the Internet I will be somewhat vague, but God knows the details anyway so your prayers will not be any less effective with fewer details.

In summary, the orphanage is being made to move by the government and they have been looking for land for a long time. They have found a suitable piece of land at a reasonable price and are in negotiations to get that land. However, here is the latest from our contact in China:

The land negotiations are progressing slowly. We are not getting full, straightforward, and complete answers to questions we have concerning the legal status of the land. Please continue to keep us in your thoughts as we continue our investigations.

I encourage you to stop, drop, and pray right now that God’s will would be done in this situation.

This last week I was able to spend nearly a week in China. I am going to keep the details of my trip private for security reasons, but I did want to share one very moving and important aspect of my trip.

Pastor Tim Perry and I had a chance to spend about 2 hours with 7 Chinese university students, 2 of which were Christians. The setting was a coffee shop on their campus and it was intended to be a discussion, in English, about our two different cultures. The discussion migrated quickly to Christianity and we got to share, in detail, the gospel with these students. We were able to share in detail how Jesus is different that other religions, how salvation is by faith and not by works, and how God is working in America, China, and other parts of the world.

These students are like a blank sheet of paper. They came with no preconceived notions about Christianity. One girl named Eve said in the discussion, “When I grew up nobody told me about God so I know nothing about him.” Another girls named Greta said, “I have considered Christianity, but I cannot understand why babies who are born are sinners.”

We were able to explain to them that of all the religions out there, Christians are the only one with a Savior who is alive and who claimed to be God himself. This was quite a surprise to them.

If you are reading this, please stop what you are doing for about 1 minute and just pray specifically for Eve, Greta, and the three other students who heard the gospel. Several of them seemed quite close to trusting in Jesus. Pray also for the two college students who are already Christians, that they would be able to follow-up with their friends and lead them to Christ.

Some of the First Fruits gifts given this last week as part of the Double-Your-Impact campaign are already headed to Mali.

Bethel Bible School- By now you are well aware of Bethel Bible College and their goal to grow this school to a point where it will have 100 students in Pastoral training by the year 2015. The 2010 – 2011 school year starts in November and they currently have about 25 students scheduled. CCC has immediately provided the school $5,000 in student grants to assist some of those incoming students who were wavering due to lack of finances, and some of this money will be used to encourage other students who want to come to Bethel but cannot afford the cost. The total cost to educate one student for one 6-month term is $400.

Higher Education- A key need for the Malian C&MA churches is the need to have some of their top leaders trained in the Bible at both a Masters level and even the PhD level. The church in Mali has 8 men who are ready to be trained at an Alliance college in the West African country of Cote d’Ivoire, but lack the necessary funds. It’s too late to help those 8 students for this year, but they have 1 man already in school but he is lacking significant funds to start his second year. CCC has sent $2,200 to assist him as he begins his second year of Masters level training.

Baramba Girl’s School- The C&MA has a girl’s school near Koutiala in a village called Baramba. This school is basically for high school level girls who are given a Christian education and trained up to be Pastor’s wives and Christian leaders in the church when they become adults. There are currently 63 girls in this school and today each girl sleeps on basically a floor mat on concrete floors. CCC has sent $3,500 to fund the purchase of mattresses for all of the girls as well as 10 manual sewing machines, which will be used to teach the girls vital sewing skills.

What a blessing it is to already begin to use your gracious gifts to impact the people of Mali.

Norman & Vickie Sutton are CCC missionaries in Guatemala working to enrich the lives of children in an orphanage. The last few months Vickie has had a number of health problems that she cannot seem to shake. Read the contents of their latest email below and please spend a few minutes in focused prayer for the Suttons after you are done reading.

Dear Friends,

This last Tuesday night we had a Double-Your-Impact (DYI) spotlight event on what CCC hopes to be doing in China over the next several years. Rick Mann, the President of Crown College and a former missionary to China, came and shared a little about the history of religious freedom in China and where China stands today.

The changes in China over the last 30 years have been nothing short of a miracle!

Let me share a couple of things that Rick said during his time that really stood out to me.

First, Rick said that today you can walk down the street in a large city like Beijing and find Christian book stores with Christian books and Bibles. In fact, one of the largest Christian publishers in the world is in China. Wow, I had no idea! I take this as a really positive sign that in deed China is becoming more and more open to Christianity.

Another thing Rick said that was amazing is that there are estimates of 80 to 100 million born-again followers of Jesus in China. Do you realize that this means China has more believers than America? This makes it even more urgent that CCC get involved in China to help train and develop Christian leaders.

In my next blog I will outline in some detail what we hope to do in China through the DYI vision. Stay tuned.