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| Like everyone else, we have had lots and lots of snow this winter! |
Dear Friends and Prayer Warriors,
Greetings from cold and snowy Tennessee. It's been a long winter, and this family is ready for spring! I promised you an update on what we've been up to in ministry. The fall was full, fruitful time in ministry. I taught Church History at the seminary extension in Johnson City. We had a great group of students who worked very hard to digest the highlights from 2000 years of church history in just a couple of months! It was a good relationship building time for me and I look forward to continuing relationships with some of those students. I also had a chance to reconnect with our Liberian brothers John and Amos, who are very interested in introducing pastor training for some of their friends still in Liberia and Ghana. We've reached out to a partner agency that currently has BTCP classes going in those countries and are looking forward to a response from them.
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| Our History of Christianity class at the Holston Baptist Association. |
Our Project Thanksgiving outreach went very well. We were able to provide about 50 turkeys with all the fixings to families in our community. Some of them we got to pray with, some of them we got to share with, and some of them we simply got to bless and initiate a relationship with.
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| Lily giving the lady a home-knit washcloth with her Thanksgiving meal. |
Our Christmas Store outreach in partnership with First Baptist was great, except I forgot my camera and don't have a single photo to show you. We helped about 90 families provide toys for their children at Christmas. Each family also had the opportunity to hear the gospel before leaving. We are continuing to follow up with some of these families, and we are excited about what the Lord is doing through the follow up.
Our plans to launch a BTCL class this January have been delayed because we've been focused in other areas, but we continue to labor and pray that we'll be able to continue this spring with the existing group, and hopefully launch a new first class in Rogersville as well.
Our Storehouse was closed a few days because of inclement weather, but we've seen a fair share of clients over the last few months. The lady pictured below needed a refrigerator in order to move out of government housing, and we were able to help her. She's currently raising a grandson and a little boy she found abandoned in his car seat beside a dumpster. She told me when she found him, she knew she couldn't leave him there. She called the police and eventually, she got to keep the baby. (His mom went to jail for a while.)
Our food distribution continues on the first Thursday of each month. January had a lighter turnout, but that's pretty normal. It was frigid! This month we had about 45 families in spite of the cold.
Our current major new ministry initiative is trying to get a program called
Jobs for Life off the ground. To show you what it's all about,
please take 2 minutes to watch the "Flip the List" video and ask yourself, "What if we flipped the list?" "What would it take to flip the list?"
One of the challenges to working with the materially poor is trying to find ways to help them break the chains of poverty and to move beyond dependence on government or ministry assistance. But Jesus was firmly committed to helping the poor, so we must be as well. Often, the materially poor get a bad rep from hardworking middle class. After all, we live in America, the land of opportunity, where anyone who simply works hard can make something of themselves. This lie has a grain of truth in it, which is what makes it so believable. But make no mistake, it is a lie. There are many people who work hard every day of their life, and never rise out of poverty because they never developed the financial discipline to do so. At the same time, there are lots of people who grew up in poverty who never learned the value of work because they never saw it modeled. Their parents or grandparents milked the system, and that's what they learned to do.
As someone who grew up in a hard working middle-class household, that was hard for me to imagine. But as I've labored in this community, I've come to understand that there are a lot of people my age who have some willingness to work, but they simply don't know how. They don't have enough relationships with working people to have a network from which to get a job. (Most jobs happen because of who you know). They don't know how to present themselves in an interview in order to get a job. They don't know what employers expect of them in order to maintain a job. And high school, even if they graduated, didn't teach them any of that.
This is where Jobs for Life comes in. Jobs for Life is a
biblically-based, church-led, relationship-centered, character-driven jobs preparedness program. It sounds great on paper, and they've had lots of success stories in real life around the country. We presently have a group of unemployed candidates from our Christmas Store outreach from whom we hope to gather our first group of students. Some of the volunteers who helped with Christmas Store have indicated a willingness to serve as Champions (mentors) for our students. We're currently in the process of recruiting local businesses to sponsor
the program and agree to offer interviews to our graduates. At least one has already shown an interest, and I am confident others will also as they learn about the opportunity to help break the cycle of poverty in our community in a Christ-centered, gospel-driven manner. By God's grace, Jobs for Life will begin helping "flip the list" in our community this spring.
Beyond launching Jobs for Life in partnership with First Baptist, Greeneville, Charlie and I met with Pastor Steve at U-Turn for Christ, a local addictions recovery ministry that we work with regularly. Pastor Steve is interested in launching Jobs for Life with his leadership. These men come from all over the country to find freedom from drugs, alcohol, and other addictions through Jesus Christ. By the time they enter leadership, they are sober and clean and walking with Jesus. Many of them are preparing to return home and reenter the workplace, and Jobs for Life can help them acquire the skills necessary to make that transition successfully.
Things You Can Be Praying for:
1. Pray for our Jobs for Life launch, that the Lord would open all the necessary doors for this to be a success and that the Lord would enable us to begin helping families truly break the bonds of poverty.
2. Please pray that our church leader training ministry would gain the traction it needs to resume this spring.
3. Please pray for our family this weekend. My best friend, Kerry Lee Lewis, is getting married on Saturday in Fort Worth! Praise the Lord! However, I would ask that you please pray that the Lord would keep Meredith, Lily, and Hosea safe while I'm away. The devil has a way of attacking families when dad's away. Hosea presently has a little virus that we're praying goes away before I leave on Thursday for Texas.
PS. If you're in Denton, it is my hope to be at DBC this Sunday. Please drop by the mission's kiosk after the service and say Hi! I'd love to give you a hug while I'm in town.
