New ministry opportunities

When camp and VBS finished in August and I shifted focus to the start of the academic year in September, I thought I would just be going back to my regularly scheduled ministry activities - English classes for the Venezuelan migrant children, Homework Club for 2022 SEA students, Bible Club for the children in the community, serving on the Digital strategy team at my home church and volunteering with ITNAC whenever my schedule would allow. I had no idea that God would be opening new avenues in which He would have me serve.

The first opportunity came directly out of camp. There was a young lady who surrendered her life to Christ at ISCF camp, and also attended Christian Brethren Camp the following week. She was in need of teaching about the fundamentals of the Christian faith, but I could not find any church that was running classes for new believers at that point, so I offered to teach her myself. I got some material online that I modified and started having sessions with her and one other person on Monday evenings. A couple other girls from camp who were interested in growing their relationship with God also attended when we just started, but when school resumed in September and their work schedule began to get intense they stopped coming. I have been meeting with the initial two persons for the past eleven weeks, and they have not missed a session. I give God all the glory for the growth that has been seen based on their responses to questions I ask, and continue to trust Him to bring the increase as I water the seeds which have been planted.

Excerpt from one of our sessions

After completing my training in teaching English to speakers of other languages in 2019, I was approached by someone from my church who wanted to start a ministry locally reaching out to the Venezuelan migrant community. Refugio was established to support Spanish-speaking migrants initially by offering free English classes. I assisted in planning how the curriculum would be delivered, and we were about to start training volunteers to deliver the classes when the pandemic hit in 2020 so we could no longer have physical classes. We had to modify the program to be delivered virtually, and in 2021 were ready to have our first online classes. 

I was asked to incorporate the children into my existing English classes for children. However after the first week of class, I recognized that there was a huge disparity between the children I had been teaching online since October 2020 and those who just started in September 2021. My solution was to have two sets of classes - one for the Beginner students, and one for Intermediate students. The result is that I now teach four English classes every week - two at a slower pace, and the other two at a faster pace. My students from last year who were struggling are able to benefit from being in the Beginners class, while the more advanced students have moved on to the Intermediate level. I am so pleased with their progress - we can have almost a whole conversation in English now!

Some of my Spanish children at class

God also opened avenues for me to speak truth into the lives of five ladies over the past three months. I did not go out of my way to seek out these mentorship relationships - God brought them along my path, they started opening up to me and I simply use God's Word to guide my responses to them. Some were people I have known for years, but we never had this level of conversation before; others were more recently formed relationships. I am grateful to God for the opportunity to pour into the lives of these ladies, as I myself have tremendously benefited from those who have done the same for me.

She decided on her own to get baptized in September!

One of the things that sets Is There Not A Cause apart from other organizations that do charity is that for us, the motive is not just helping the person with their physical needs: oftentimes this just allows us an opportunity to build relationships with the persons, and out of that relationship we are able to encourage them to know Christ better. In September we were blessed with 300 food hampers which we allocated to families who were negatively affected by restrictions imposed by the covid-19 pandemic. Two families live in my community, and when I shared about our Bible Club, the mothers were very happy to have their children included, so I now have two additional stops to make on a Friday afternoon. 

These children are more diligent about learning the Memory verses than my regular Bible Club children. It warmed my heart one afternoon when I asked one of them to open in prayer, and she prayed using the memory verse from the previous week, Acts 3:19 - "Lord help us to repent and turn to you so that our sins can be forgiven". One of families has a student who is writing SEA in 2022, and his mother was very grateful to send him to Homework Club as well so he could get the additional help he needs in Maths.

They are always so excited to see me on a Friday afternoon

One day in September I went to the ISCF office to drop off something and when I walked through the door one of the staffworkers said, "I was supposed to call you to ask you to be on a panel for a session about Singleness our church is having". I graciously accepted the invitation, not knowing that it was the first in a series of four sessions that I would facilitate over the next two months for four different groups of teenagers and young adults, sharing strategies about living a successful single life, whether or not singleness is a calling from God, how to deal with the desire for marriage if God has called you to a life of singleness, and many more questions. The responses to these sessions were phenomenal - the participants were engaged, shared openly about their experiences, asked their questions without reservations, and expressed appreciation afterwards for the truths which were shared. I am grateful for the privilege of sharing from my years of experience of being single to teach and encourage others.

I make a conscious effort to use scripture to back
up the principles I share

At the beginning of this year I made a commitment to read through the entire Bible - a mission I had started and aborted on more than four occasions. What has made this attempt successful (we are in Jeremiah now, so more than halfway there) is that I am not doing it alone: two friends from church have joined me on this journey through the Bible, so they have provided the accountability and motivation that was necessary to keep me going. We are reading the Bible chronologically, and this approach has brought a level of enlightenment and understanding while reading the Old Testament scripture that never existed before. I am benefiting tremendously by reading books that I had never read before (like Obadiah) and reading verses in context that I had only ever read in isolation. We are learning so much about God's character through how He interacted with the children of Israel. I highly recommend that every believer in Christ have "Read through the entire Bible" very high on their bucket list.

My Bible reading buddies :)

I am grateful to God for the new opportunities to serve that He has opened for me, and I'm excited to see what next He has in store for me!