The morning after the storm took our evangelistic meeting tent down

Transcription

1 The morning after the storm took our evangelistic meeting tent down Dear Prayer Warriors and Friends, The month of May has been exciting, with our first ever student run evangelism program, conducted in Preah Vihear City. The highlight of any evangelism program is that moment when people come forward to make a commit to follow Christ and prepare for Baptism. For us, that day came on May 23 when 12 people, young and old came forward as a response to the appeal for commitment. While 12 does not sound many, it will represent a nearly 50% increase in active membership for the Preah Vihear City church. Read on to learn more of our methods, our challenges and lessons learned. Preah Vihear City While the road signs announce entry to a city, it is really not much more than a town, with a population of around 25,000. For many years this city has been isolated by security issues and road access. Now with decent roads and good security this sleepy little city is perched on the edge of rapid growth. As with every city and village in Cambodia, the majority of people in Preah Vihear City are culturally Buddhist/Animist and view Christianity as a western religion. April saw the dedication of the first Seventh-day Adventist Church building in the city, after 14 years of church planting. Preparation As we prepared for May Evangelism one challenge was finance. With SALT Ministries finances extremely tight and evangelism finances limited to $500, the question was, can we move in faith on an $8000+ budget. Experience shows that God honours faith so in faith we moved. First thing we did was truck in tents etc, stored at Wat Preah Yesu,to save money on hiring, then we left it to God. Most of the money came as donations from our own volunteers. Our volunteers are all ready giving so much it was wonderful to see them give until it must have hurt. Thank you Lord, BLESS them Method of Attack We went armed with a multi-pronged approach to reaching the people of the city. Here s the strategy. 1. Prayer Walk the City 2. Use the local FM radio to broadcast our message 3. Strengthen the local church by running worship programs 4. Strengthen the local church by conducting evangelism training 5. Strengthen the local church pastor by mentoring him. May 30,

2 6. Conduct Children s Events 7. Conduct Health Expo s 8. Conduct Vegan Khmer Cooking Lessons 9. Visit door to door 10. Sell Christian Literature 11. Lend Evangelism Videos 12. Operate a street side vegan restaurant 13. Have evening health lectures 14. Have evening contextualised Bible presentations 15. Show Christian movies each night 16. Share Christian media to peoples phones 17. Singing in the Market 18. Have a daily prayer meeting to call on the power of the Holy Spirit. Getting There After three attempts to load our 2.5 tonne truck and the pickup so that we could fit all the equipment and 29 people on board, we finally managed to squeeze everyone in. The 170 km journey began. Four hours latter we arrived at the church with a sense of liberation after escaping the cramped quarters on the trucks. Then it was action, to set up tents, and kitchen before dark settled in- the church was without power, a situation that would take several days to rectify. Prayer Walk Setting out in groups to cover much of the city the students began walking the streets to pray for the city and the people that live in it. More prayer was said than anticipated as some students got lost. FM Radio Until we arrived, the FM radio idea was just that, an idea, as no contact had been made with the radio station, but within a day of arriving arrangements had been made for two daily one hour broadcasts for a month. At $450, that was a good chunk of our available budget already gone. By Faith The radio gave us a presence over much of the province. As we visited people in their homes, many told us they had been listening to and enjoying the broadcasts. Barriers were being broken down, hearts beginning to open. We have asked the radio station if we could continue the 5am broadcast for one year. We are still waiting to see if they will agree to our price of $180 per month. Should they agree, this will be yet another faith venture for the Glory of the Lord. If the broadcasts continue, SALT Ministries will fund the broadcast and the Cambodia Adventist Mission will provide the material for broadcasting. Strengthening the Local Church We recognised the opportunity to work with the existing local members, helping them grow spiritually and evangelistically. To this end we led out in worship programs and conducted training programs using the manual called Bridges to Ministry, to broaden the understanding of how to reach Buddhist people. 2

3 Sabbaths we divided up, some going out to preach for other worship groups in the province. On one day during the evangelism, we trucked in members from several small churches about 30 km away so that they could be apart of what was happening. In the morning, the women joined the cooking class and I held special Bible study for the men. After a vegetarian lunch prepared as a part of the cooking class they all joined a Bible study with me and then went through the Health Expo, and joined the evening program. They arrived home about 10 pm that evening. Mentoring the Local Pastor Sros is the local pastor, he is 23 and has limited training. We were pleasantly surprised to find this young man active in ministry. Sros worked closely with us throughout the evangelism series, going out with our team leaders for mentoring. Being young and not university trained, Sros was not so sure about reaching out directly to adults and had been effectively working with children and using them as a bridge to their parents. We left him more confident about working directly with adults. We also left him with lots of contacts to keep following up. We plan to provide continue mentoring as time allows. Reaching out to Children Our young people have had a lot of experience working with children, so obviously they wanted this to be a part of their outreach. Programs were held during the day and in the evenings. Many children attended often coming early so they would not miss out. Several young teenagers made the decision to study for baptism. Health Expo The Health Expo was to be a main method of meeting with people and attracting them to our evening programs. We held the health expo in two locations. While it was a blessing to those who attended, it did not draw the crowds we had hoped and will need some rethinking in order to have a greater impact. More than 140 people went through the 8 health stations of the expo. We believe that many have learned simple things that they can do to make their lives healthier. 3

4 Cooking Lessons The plan was to have these lessons at the church so that people could become familiar with coming to the church. The problem was getting more than 3 or 4 people to attend. The answer- change the location. One of the members offered her small restaurant in front of the busy bus station. She only opens the restaurant at night. For 4 mornings the lessons we held street side with a loud speaker to make sure everyone at the bust station could listen in. Many people showed an interest and came for free food sampling. Door to Door This was by far the most productive method of getting people to come to our meetings and to inform them that there is a Seventh-day Adventist Church in town and where it can be found. When we arrived it would seem that not many people new of the church, but by the time we had left, I think a good percentage of the town people new of the location of the church. While the majority did not come out to checkout the church, this is a seed sown. The door to door visitation also opened opportunities to conduct Bible studies in a number of homes, with the interests being followed up by the local Pastor. Literature evangelism We went armed with over $2000 worth of Bibles and spiritual books with the intention of selling them. The first day out was discouraging for the students as even if people had an interest in the colourful books, they did not have the cash to invest in purchasing them. Book selling quickly became pretty much a non event. We have decided to develop tracts and look at how some of the books could be published a little less glossy for a much lower price. We are also going to look into producing our own cook book to be used in promoting vegan cooking. Videos The door to door visitation provided the ideal opportunity to test out the Bridge of Life DVD series we have produced at SALTCAM Media. We have packaged the dvd s for taking out on the street and lending to neighbours. While not many people in Preah Vihear City have DVD players, those that did were happy to borrow a DVD. Followup resulted in a number of people watching most of the 20 Bible studies before we left. Sros is continuing to follow up these interests. We gave Sros a portable dvd player with screen so he can go into homes and show the videos as a way of doing Bible studies and developing new interests. 4

5 Restaurant There were lots of skeptics with regard to Khmer people buying Vegan food, as they love their meat. To make things worse, the student who had worked on the plans for the restaurant, fell sick and was not able to join us. Nearly a week into the evangelism, some of the girls decided they would give the street side restaurant in front of the church a go. Within days it was so popular that they would sell out. The final night the restaurant opened, they prepared big plates of food. It was all gone within 1.5 hours. This opportunity to promote health and develop friendships needs to be explored further. Health Lectures These started at 6:30 pm in the evening. The young ladies presented the messages using colourful well illustrated projected slides developed by the Center for East Asian Religions (CEAR), in Thailand, and translated by SALTCAM Media staff. While not well attended the lectures provided a useful activity while people slowly came in for the main meeting. The immediate neighbourhood had no choice but to listen to the lectures as a large megaphone speaker mounted on the roof of the church blasted the message out. One challenge was to know how many chairs to hire for the meeting tent. Hire too few and it is a sign of lack of faith, too many and it is a waste of money. We decided on 400 chairs. We never had more than 50 visitors but people passing by were impressed by the size of our event. Contextualised Bible Lectures These started immediately after the health lecture was over. The young men presented these messages with everyone having an opportunity to be on stage presenting. The lectures were taken from the Bridge of Hope Series, also developed by CEAR for reaching Buddhists with the Gospel. Again the colourful slides with Khmer text and asian people on the slides provided a good interest point. A number of our young men enjoyed the experience of presenting so much they have decided they want to be preachers. Christian Movies Following the Bible lectures, the movies proved to be popular, with many people watching movies like, The Passion (edited), the Jesus Video, the Visual Bible- Matthew, The Creation Video, Final Events, etc, all in the Khmer language. Sharing Christian Media The students had come with the idea of sharing Christian media onto peoples phones. Due to some misunderstandings of expectations this method of evangelism was not trialled, but will remain in the lineup for future events. Singing in the Market This was an unplanned event that drew interested crowds. This idea of promoting our programs needs to be utilised more in the future. 5

6 Prayer Meeting Each afternoon at around 2:00pm the team would meet to pray. We believe the Holy Spirit was empowered by the many pleading prayers for the salvation of souls in Preah Vihear City. This daily time helped us to keep our focus on what we were there for. It was also a unifying time as together we pleaded for the city. In addition to this we had morning worships taken by our team leaders. It was wonderful to see Bible stories and principals take on a deeper meaning as they were applied to what we actually were doing and seeing happen. Spiritual Gifts One of the most exciting things for me was to watch as the students discovered spiritual gifts they did not previously know about. Having such a multi-faceted program gave them opportunities to experience ministry in its many forms and thus to discover spiritual gifts and develop those gifts during the 25 day period. Challenges Twice we had a storm come through and wet our things. The first time we had not set up the evangelism tent and stage, but the storm took down the boys tent. The second time minutes before time for evening program, the storm took down the whole evangelism tent. I missed the event as I was away picking people up for the evening program in faith that the lightning, rain and wind would pass. It was apparent on my return that there was a feeling of discouragement sweeping the camp. With the nights meeting cancelled, I called all the discouraged soaked bodies into the church for a short praise and revival meeting. The next morning everyone got into dismantling the mangled tent (many of the steel poles were bent at right angles) and the meetings went on under the stars with no further rain. We had committed everything into God s hands so when negative events like the above happened, we have God s promise that He will work all things together for the good of those who love Him. With that kind of promise, every disaster is an opportunity. Twenty Five days is a long time to be away from home, sleeping in a hammock or on the ground in a tent, but it was well worth it. The year 11 students are looking forward to moving to year 12 and joining the next evangelistic program. We are looking at January or February 2015, for the next program and probably a whole month to give us more time to work with interests. Thank you for your prayers and support. One day you can meet those saved in the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessings Tim PS. We have need of a number of volunteer teachers beginning in September, If you know someone who might be interested and is a practicing Seventh-day Adventist, please have them contact us. 6