Archive for the 'Missions' Category
The Masters have arrived in North Africa
August/September 2010
The past few weeks have been an absolute whirlwind. Praise the Lord for graciously providing everything that we needed during this transition. All of our paperwork moved along a lot faster than we originally anticipated. We were even able to find a home within two weeks of our arrival. We are now living in our new apartment waiting on our crates to arrive. God is so good to us.
On July 20, we said goodbye to our life in the States and headed toward the field. Our first stop was in Madrid, Spain. We stayed the night with missionary Jeffrey Andrews and his family. All four of us were suffering a little from jetlag so most of what happened that day was a blur. The Andrews took good care of us and got us back to the airport the next day to catch our flight to Jerez.
We learned on this trip that you get what you pay for. I found tickets to fly from Madrid to Jerez for only 25 Euros a person. Unfortunately, the deal comes with a few setbacks. To make a long story short, we had to leave some of our luggage at the Andrews’ house and the flight itself took off two hours later than scheduled. In midflight the captain told us that, due to the delay, we could not land at our destination because the airport there closed half an hour before our scheduled landing. They diverted our flight to Málaga and sent us on a three-hour bus ride to Jerez. We finally got there around 5:00 in the morning. Needless to say that day was just as hazy as our first.
Our friend, John Beck, picked us up and took us to his house in Rota. Gretchen, Norah, and Judson went to their rooms to try and catch up on some sleep while I went out and gathered all of the necessary paperwork at the police station. In spite of the drowsiness we were able to get everything organized and ready to be submitted the next morning. John Beck was a tremendous help in running me around the city and helping me gather everything that I needed quickly. What we were told would take several weeks only took us three days. The Lord expedited everything.
With a little extra time on our hands we decided to take a trip down to Ceuta and look at some houses. We arrived in the city on Thursday morning and by noon the next day we found our apartment. We looked at dozens of houses online and could not find anything that we liked within our budget.
After visiting about ten real estate agencies and making dozens of phone calls I walked into one agency and told the woman working there what I was looking for. When I mentioned my wife and kids she lit up and said that she had something that we needed to see. She made a quick phone call and then explained that the landlords of one particular apartment were looking specifically for a family to rent their place. When I was able to get the whole family together again, we headed over for the grand tour. Within minutes of looking the apartment over we knew it was what we wanted. It has enough space, is almost completely furnished, and in a decent area of the city. We signed the contract and actually stayed that night in our own home.
Thank you so much for all of your prayers and support. God is preparing the way for us to work here in North Africa, and it is exciting to see His hand in everything that is going on. We will begin learning Arabic soon, so please continue to pray that the Lord will continue to work miracles in our life and ministry. There is very little light in this area of the world. Jesus Christ is the only hope that the people of North Africa have. Please pray for us as we preach the gospel to those who have never heard it before.
August 17 2010 | Missions | No Comments »
William Carey was born on August 17, 1761. At Vision I like to remember these great men of God that paved the way for much of what we do today. I call the Sunday closest to William Carey’s birth, William Carey Sunday! That will be tomorrow. I challenge you to consider some of Carey’s famous quotes:
Carey requested the following epitaph:
A wretched, poor and helpless worm, on Thy kind arms I fall.
This is what Carey asked of his friends who did not go to the mission field. At Vision, we are the senders and the yokefellows:
I will go down, if you will hold the ropes.
The following quote comes from his most famous sermon. This sermon was used to stir England to begin the Modern Missionary Movement.
Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.
Carey said that the secret to his success as a missionary could be summed up in this quote:
I can plod. I can persevere in any definite pursuit. To this I owe everything.
Would you like to ask Carey how to know God’s will for your life? Here is a quote that he might use:
To know the will of God, we need an open Bible and an open map.
This might be a message he would preach to us as a church in our effort to do world evangelism:
Is not the commission of our Lord still binding upon us? Can we not do more than now we are doing?
August 14 2010 | Missions | No Comments »
Chileans reaching Chileans
One of our fundamental beliefs, as church planting missionaries, is that the Chileans must reach their own people. Our goal is to plant local churches with trained national leadership that will continue for decades to reach and train their own people.
During the past few months we have seen this plan in action! Our new church plant is led completely by our Chilean Bible college students! In the picture above is one of the students who preached to 275 Chileans this past week in our two churches! It’s a thrill to see these young guys winning souls, discipling new converts, preaching sound doctrine, and growing in the ministry!
Keep praying that God will greatly use them to reach thousands more with the gospel message!
Youth Congress 2010
In July we hosted our annual Youth Congress with our pastor, Austin Gardner, as the invited speaker. The theme of the conference was “Filling our City”.
God used the week to help us focus once again on the goal of filling our city with local churches and the gospel.
Get updates throughout the week!
In this modern technological world, you can stay in touch with our ministry like never before! You can watch monthly videos, get short daily reports, and read weekly articles about our family and ministry. Several churches have even shown our monthly video updates in their services! Check it out on the following pages:
twitter: @jasonholt
facebook.com/missionaryjasonholt
biblicalmissions.com
Gospel via Internet
During the week of Youth Congress, we launched a new evangelistic website. Within two weeks, more than 4,000 Chileans had visited the site and hundreds had watched a video presentation of the gospel!
This media ministry is getting us into the homes of many who were previously closed to the gospel. Pray that God will continue to use this site to bring many more souls to Him.
Thank you for all you do each month for our family! It is our privilege to be your missionaries in Chile!
Jason, Lori, Katie, Joshua, and Andrew Holt
August 11 2010 | Missions | No Comments »
Dear Pastors and Praying Friends,
This month has definitely been an extremely busy one. We have had many events and groups. We have also had a huge change in our life. It has been good to see how God has provided in all of the spiritual and physical needs during this month. It is truly amazing to be able to share your own stories of God’s provision.
Chloe Elizabeth Jean Gardner
Praise God that He gave us such a beautiful daughter on July 20th at 2:20am. She weighed six pounds 4 ounces and was born completely healthy. I am so thankful for our beautiful and healthy daughter. Katie started having labor pains on the evening of the 17th and by midnight of the 20th there was little progress in her labor. The doctor finally decided that we should do a C-Section and go ahead and get it all over with.?
Be praying for Katie as she recovers from surgery and is getting used to being a mother. She will be returning to language school very soon in order to finish up her language studies. Thank you all for your prayers for Katie and the baby. As I stated in other prayer letters, her health situation wasn’t the best and the pregnancy was a high risk pregnancy. We are so thankful he has been so good to us.
12th Annual Youth Conference
This month we had the opportunity of hosting and organizing the 12th annual youth conference here in Arequipa. Many of the churches banded together and contributed their support for the conference. Some churches were in charge of decoration, others of food, lodging, reception, etc. It was a wonderful to see how great an event can be when people join together as a team. Our guest speaker was Pastor Jeff Bartell from First Baptist Church of New Philadelphia, OH. It was a truly great time with lots of biblical preaching. We had people come all the way from Chile, Argentina and Bolivia to attend this conference.
Please pray for the Pastors Conference that will be held in October. It will be a very similar event, but we will be seeing mostly pastors and church leaders coming from all around the country and continent to be helped and encouraged.
Thank you so much for your prayers for our family and ministry. It is our privilege to represent you and God’s kingdom here in Peru.
For His Glory,
David, Katie and Chloe Gardner
Missionaries in Peru
Macedonia World Baptist Missions
Check out bcwe.org
August 10 2010 | Missions | No Comments »
Dear Pastor and Church family, August 2010
We are very excited to be able to share with you the blessings that God poured out on our lives and ministry. Thank you so much for your prayers and faithfulness.
VISION BAPTIST CHURCH
Time has past so quickly the years have seemed like days, this month we celebrated our 4 year anniversary at Vision Baptist, it was a very special day, the church family put themselves in different groups: decoration, music, testimonies, and announcements. Each one of the groups did a great job. 2 people got saved by the wonderful grace of God! We had many visitors who heard for the first time the Word of God. After the service they prepared food from the country they were from, we have people from, Colombia, Peru and Mexico.
The last Day of July we had a picnic, this was the first time that the Church had an event like this. We had a great time playing; it was a great day together as a church.
TRINITY HILL
This month we had Vacation Bible School for the kids in our area. This was a new experience for us and it included many surprises. Our Church family organized and helped with this event, I believe it helped them grow by serving God. Another thing and the most important is that 10 kids received Christ as their personal Savior, 10 precious souls escaped eternal fire, it was such a special time.
In August we will have our anniversary of the church. We will celebrate 2 years as a church. We are planning many things for this date. We ask for your prayers, we want to see more souls saved on this special day.
FAMILY
We are starting the process for our residency. This will take at least 2 years if everything goes as it needs to. My children and my wife will be able to have a social security number. I ask that you help us pray for this process that the wait will not be too long and that it won’t cost too much.
My oldest daughter is starting school, this will be her last year of elementary school, and she is very excited. My beloved and faithful wife will be celebrating her birthday on the 15th of August. I thank God for a wife so faithful and loving. My ministry and my life would not be the same without her by my side.
Thank you again for your friendship and your missionary support. You have been very faithful to God and I am very appreciative and honored to be able to be your missionary. God bless you
Ronald Tubillas
August 09 2010 | Missions | No Comments »
Dear praying friends,
Well, we are 26 days away from full-time deputation! God has been so good to us this month, it’s definitely been a busy one. Here are some of the things we are thanking Him for:
Meetings: Even though we are only part-time until September, we have been in 5 meetings since our last prayer letter! 4 meetings have been in GA, and 1 in NC. What an honor to be able to represent the need for a Gospel preaching movement in Spain.
Calendar: Thanks to God’s provision at work, I have been able to devote at least 40 hours a week to scheduling meetings for the next two years. Yesterday was pretty exciting as we hit the 50 meetings mark! Even though we are just at the beginning stage of fund-raising, it’s been amazing to see how God has a plan for us every step of the way, as He opens doors.
Support Level: We had two churches take us on for support this month! That brings us up to around 7% of our needed monthly support to live and minister in Spain. 7% May not seem like a huge number, but considering we are not even officially on deputation for a few weeks, we praise God for a great head start.
Hudson Taylor once said “God’s work done in God’s way will never lack for God’s supply”, and we have seen that true in our own lives, and look forward to seeing Him provide! We don’t consider ourselves to be anything special, or even that we always do everything exactly right, but we know that God wants the people of the world to know His glory, and this is His plan for our lives, not our own.
Prayer Requests: Please continue to pray that God will open the right doors for us, that we will be a blessing to the churches we are in to encourage them to stay excited about what God is doing in world missions. Please be in prayer for the works in Spain, that God will grow them for His honor and glory. And finally, please continue to ask God to send forth laborers into His harvest, in Spain and the rest of the world.
Yours for His Harvest,
Scott and Melissa Newton, Vision Baptist Missions
August 2010
August 05 2010 | Missions and Prayer Requests | No Comments »
Dear Pastors and Praying Friends,
Well this month our prayer letter is going to change quite a bit. The ministry has done well and we have seen God do some amazing things. This month we were able to have a few groups down to visit the ministry from the states. One of the highlights of this month is always our Youth Conference, we had the privilege of having Jeff Bartell down to preach for us. He is the pastor of First Baptist Church of New Philadelphia, OH and also one of our supporting churches. We had a great time with him and saw many lives given to Christ and many people surrendering to full time ministry. God has been so good to us! We actually had people travel all the way from Buenos Aires, Argentina for the conference as well as people from Bolivia and Chile. People travelled up to 50 hours on a bus to be here. They were not disappointed and went home having heard and learned from the word of God.
Also on the 26th of this month we always celebrate Happy Day! Six years ago, God gave us the privilege of adopting Jacob and Hannah. We are so thankful for all that God did to bring them into our lives. We had a great day with close to 100 friends, it really was a blessing to see how many people God has brought into their lives that love them and that care for them.
Last month in our prayer letter we let everyone know that Andria was pregnant. This month we went to the doctors and found out that we are going to have a boy. We were excited about finding out what the baby was going to be but we could tell that something wasn’t right with the lady doing the sonogram. Come to find out our baby will be born with a cleft lip and maybe even a cleft palette. Here in Peru they do not operate but once a year when doctors come down from the states. They leave babies with feeding tubes until then. After having asked 4 peruvian doctors and 3 american doctors they all agree that my wife needs to give birth in the states. We were planning on going back to the states for a missions conference. We had already purchased tickets for the beginning of October. Our plan right now is to stay in the states for a minimum of 6 months if it is just the lip. Pray that God would send us to the exact doctors we need to go to, etc. Pray also that it will be just the lip so we can get back to Peru quickly. If you know anything about me, you know I have no desire to be going back to the states. But at the same time, we have to do this so that our child can grow up as normal as possible. From what we understand they may even have to operate within the first few hours of the babies birth. I hope to be able to travel back to Peru maybe a couple of times during that time.
Please continue to remember us in your prayers that God would lead, guide and direct in amazing ways to see his name magnified and glorified through our lives. During the 6 months that we are back we hope to be able to be in some new churches as well as visit some supporting churches. If you would like to have us please let us know by emailing me at chrisandandria@mac.com. May God continue to bless and use you in all you do for him.
Chris, Andria, Jacob, Hannah, Andrew and ? (boy) Gardner
Check out bcwe.org
August 03 2010 | Missions | 1 Comment »
Dear Praying Friends,
June has been a great month of preparation for our first deputation meetings, as well as seeing God move at Vision Baptist Church!
The Lord has been opening many doors to come and present our ministry in the next few months, and we are asking Him for many more as I am transitioning out of full-time work more and more each week now, to spend the most possible time calling to set up our calendar.
We will be visiting our first church this Wednesday! I cannot tell you how privileged we feel that God would use us to stand in the gap representing the needy country of Spain.
Approximately $300 of our start-up fund has been supplied by generous givers, and we want to express our gratitude to those contributors! With prayer cards arriving this week, we have only two more materials needed before full-time deputation this September, a display board ($250), and production of a video presentation (approx. $500-$750).
Please be in prayer Sunday, July 11th, as Vision Baptist hosts an international friend day. We are hoping to use the final of the World Cup after the morning service as a draw to bring international people in our community under the sound of the Gospel. As I teach the international Sunday School of our church, there are many people I have been praying for and trying to reach that have have said that they will be in the service.
We had the opportunity to be involved in the Our Generation Leadership Camp for college-aged students in June, which is hosted yearly by Vision Baptist Church. There were over 50 students in attendance, and many made commitments that they are “willing and desirous” to be used of God on the mission field. God worked greatly in the camp, and I hope you will make plans to influence young people in your church and family to be a part of the camp next year!
Thank you so much for all your prayers and support, and allowing us to extend your ministry among the people of Spain.
Yours for His Harvest,
Scott, Melissa, and Elena Newton
July 05 2010 | General and Missions | No Comments »
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