This is a posting of recent and not so recent documents concerning the future of ICA in Bouaké, Côte d'Ivoire.

A missionary newsletter is an update letter that missionaries send to friends, family members, and partners while overseas or doing ministry locally. This newsletter is usually sent monthly and used to update those following the missionary, about things going on in the missionary’s life, ministry, culture and more.

I have picked out 10 of the top things that I either take note of, or stay away from when writing a newsletter that stands out. These things can look different for everyone, but I hope you can find them helpful as you write newsletters that make your partners excited to know more about what is going on in your life!

And yet, “be careful what you pray for, you might get it!” portrays a Heavenly Father who waits up in heaven for a Gotchya! moment. Every prayer request put before Him is a “teachable moment,” every prayer for strength an opportunity to test your mettle, every prayer for patience an opportunity to run His children through the grinder of difficulty and frustration in the name of “growing” patience in His followers.

These do not seem like the actions of a heavenly Father to me, but those of a Heavenly Drill Sergeant. Who would dare ask a drill sergeant for a favor, lest he require fifty extra push-ups? //

Scripture instead describes a God who wants us to pray without fear. For everything and anything. To pray even when the prayers are ridiculous. Thomas wouldn’t believe eyewitness accounts of men he’d spent the previous three years with, men he surely trusted, and yet, Jesus granted Thomas’s desire, //

Do note that Jesus did not make Peter swim himself to shore in order to teach him perseverance or to teach him that walking on the water isn’t so important, really, and he should desire more holy and less ridiculous things. He just rescued him. Immediately. //

The Bible also abounds with accounts of those whom God made comfortable, with more than they needed. There was food left over after Jesus fed the multitude. (Mark 6:30-43) The widow who fed Elijah had food for many days after she fed the prophet. (1 Kings 17:7-16) Jesus made Thomas emotionally comfortable, (if you’ll forgive the modern idiom) even in his doubt. When Jesus called the disciples, he didn’t just give them enough fish, he gave them so many their nets started to break. (Luke 5:1-11) And when the wine ran out at the wedding at Cana? Jesus didn’t just turn the water into wine, he turned it into good wine. (John 2:10). Even Job, who is surely our best example of suffering and want save Christ himself, was restored two-fold at the end of his trial. (Job 42:7-16) //

If anything, this car is teaching me to hope again, to receive God’s good material gifts without fear that they will be snatched away in order to teach me a lesson. To ask my dear Father in Heaven just as I asked my dear earthly father when I was small. To understand that God sometimes grants abundance, and when he does, it’s because He is good, not because I am.

Katzung doesn’t know if Taiwan is home anymore. He and his three daughters, ages 5, 4, and 2, left the country in a hurry in March when coronavirus case numbers started getting bad and borders started shutting down. His wife, Dava, was already in the States for a visit with family and never got to go back to Taiwan to say goodbye.

They had lived there for two years, sharing their lives and their love with their Taiwanese neighbors as Katzung worked as a counselor at a university.

Now they are living in a borrowed one-bedroom apartment in Colorado. They have a borrowed car, borrowed children’s toys, and borrowed coats that the girls wear when they go outside to see the snow.

“We are in an uncomfortable holding position, a forced flexibility,” Katzung said. “These are the struggles of cross-cultural workers. We get things stripped away. Now we’re at another layer of stripping.” //

The immediate crisis has passed. People living abroad have all made the decision about whether to stay or go. But that was just the start for them. Now they have to deal with the ongoing uncertainties and the changes the pandemic has wrought.

That brings grief, and grief takes time. //

“I think one thing that we are learning is that we can be present wherever we’re at and whatever our circumstances are,” Katzung said. “Even if COVID-19 became the final straw in a series of crazy events, we want to follow God in faith and trust however he leads.”

I keep coming back to John Piper’s description that as Christian exiles in this world, we live with brokenhearted joy. We are not in heaven yet and we won’t find it on earth, so we all, in some respect, live divided between two worlds. How glorious that even in the midst of a broken heart, we can find joy. In all things.

It’s that time of year when articles start circulating about Operation Christmas Child. Having taken on the subject myself, I am always interested to read what others have to say. This week, I read this one from Washington Post: Filling millions of shoeboxes for poor kids seems like a great idea. Here’s why it’s not, by Brian Howell, a Wheaton professor.

The article is excellent. But the comments on that piece spurred me to add a few of my own. I’ve copied a few of the comments here and added my thoughts below.

As an employee of the same parent company, I can tell you that OCC is not run like a ministry, it is a business. As such, it will do what people pay it to do. We can repeatedly sound the alarm that OCC is hurting people in Jesus’ name, but it will not change so long as it’s being paid to continue.
My hope is that good people will stop supporting OCC and force it to start paying closer attention to its results… instead of constantly pursuing better display stats.

Thread of notes comparing the 990 tax forms of

• Samaritan's Purse (2019). CEO: Franklin Graham.
• World Vision (2018). CEO: Edgar Sandoval Sr., previously Rich Stearns.
• Compassion International (2018). CEO: Santiago "Jim" Mellado.

Thread of notes comparing the 990 tax forms of

• Samaritan's Purse (2019). CEO: Franklin Graham.
• World Vision (2018). CEO: Edgar Sandoval Sr., previously Rich Stearns.
• Compassion International (2018). CEO: Santiago "Jim" Mellado.
  👇
  Number of employees / total revenue / profit / net assets:
  Samaritan's Purse: 3,305 / $734,112,873 / $44,985,504 / $701,956,825
  World Vision: 1,049 / $1,135,591,490 / $-13,516,839 / 193,274,099
  Compassion: 1,196. / $953,223,395 / $20,603,361 / 268,592,542
• designates high.

The wounds of trauma are apparent in families, communities, and nations around the world. This includes trauma created by wars, conflict between people groups, civil disturbances, crimes, natural disasters, and epidemics.

SIM Trauma Healing is a church- and community-based outreach that equips believers with Bible-based and mental health principles to care for victims of trauma in their communities. Our vision is to overcome gospel-barriers created by trauma through biblical, compassionate trauma care and to see every person experience healing in the Lord Jesus Christ. Compelled by God’s great love and empowered by the Holy Spirit, we seek to equip the church to contend with brokenness and to proclaim the crucified and risen Christ.

Trauma Healing’s first lessons were drafted in 2001 by SIL members, mental health professionals, Bible translators, Scripture engagement consultants, and church leaders from war zones across Africa. Now, they have spread to every continent and have been translated into many languages.

In 2014, SIM members were trained in Trauma Healing and the lessons were implemented among the South Sudanese refugees in Kenya. This was soon followed by the training of leaders in Liberia in response to the spiritual and psycho-social crisis after the Ebola outbreak. God is using this ministry to engage people with the gospel in deeply meaningful ways.

Then something happened that I didn’t anticipate; a significant proportion of my Third Culture Kid clients presenting with either formal diagnoses of AD(H)D or clusters of behaviours that signalled experiences often pegged as AD(H)D.

First, the Disclaimers.

I’m going out on a limb here, so I’ll put some disclaimers up in advance.

1. I love being a missionary.

This post points out bad aspects you’ll not hear us normally say. It doesn’t mean I’m unhappy or unfulfilled.

2. I’m speaking of feelings and perceptions.

I know what the Bible says and can give a counterpoint to each of these. For example, when I share how we feel about shortchanging my children, I know that there are 100 positive things that people can point out to me.

I’m sharing my heart, how I feel. I don’t need anyone to send me a Bible lesson, in case you’re feeling the itch!
I’m going for what a missionary won’t tell you in their newsletter or at church missions conference.

Sometimes, outlawed grief goes underground. It becomes a tectonic plate, storing energy, swaying, resisting movement, and then exploding in unanticipated and unpredictable ways. A tectonic plate can store a heck of a lot of energy. Sort of like grief, once outlawed. It descends below the surface. And sometimes heaving tectonic plates cause destruction far, far away. Really smart people with even smarter machines have to do smart things to pinpoint the actual location of the destructive shift.

So please allow grief, in your own heart and in the hearts of your kids. If you’re uncomfortable with other peoples’ grief, you might want to look deep, deep down in your own soul and see if there’s some long-outlawed, long-buried grief. If you find some, begin gently to see it, vent it, feel it.

And if you come across someone who’s grieving a loss, please remember that they probably don’t need a lecture, or a Bible verse, or a pithy saying. But they could maybe use a hug. //

One of the best shows of support I had was from a woman in my church, who came up to me on Mother’s Day and just started telling me the things she missed about my son. We sat and cried and grieved. Together. Then we prayed…we thanked God for his life and asked God to help us all heal.

"It's been a really dark time for the people here, and we just want to bring some sort of hope," Samaritan's Purse representative Bev Kauffeldt says. //

Bev Kauffeldt is a team leader for the Christian aid organization Samaritan’s Purse. She joins today’s Daily Signal Podcast from Cremona, Italy, where she works in a field hospital set up by Samaritan’s Purse in the parking lot of Cremona Hospital.

International Bulletin of Missionary Research

Vol. 36, No. 4
October 2012
pp. 200–204

Radio Missions: Station ELWA in West Africa

Timothy Stoneman

Fundraising software built for ministries, missionaries and churches.
MPDX is a free, secure app that helps you grow and maintain your ministry partners in a quick and easy way.

TntWare started out in 1997 as Troy Wolbrink's hobby, so that he could be more organized while raising a personal support team. Today more than 500 mission organizations and 12,000 missionaries use his software.

One of the reasons Troy and his wife Tammy are so passionate about TntWare is that they use it personally. Troy and Tammy use TntConnect to help raise their financial support as missionaries with Global Service Network. The ministry of Global Service Network has standardized on TntWare tools (DonorWise and DonorHub) to process donations and electronically deliver that information to their missionaries (as an electronic report that shows up directly in TntConnect).

Because our financial support team has paid for our time to develop TntConnect, it is our privilege to bless you with this tool as a free gift. In return, if you were to consider investing in our ministry with Global Service Network, we'd be truly honored.

Excellence in Giving is a full-service philanthropic advisory firm designed to increase the joy of the high-capacity donor through a personalized process of discovery, evaluation, participation, and celebration.

Through the Excellence in Giving process philanthropists are able to give confidently and maximize the impact of their philanthropy. This model provides superior value for clients as the Excellence in Giving team partners with them to transform the burden of wealth into the joy of generosity.

We help missionaries design, print, and mail their stories easier, faster and cheaper.

2018 Gerson L'Chaim Prize

Dr. Rick Sacra

2018 Laureate and Ebola survivor Dr. Rick Sacra of Liberia is training doctors and strengthening ELWA mission hospital.

EBOLA SURVIVOR AND MEDICAL MISSIONARY TO LIBERIA WINS 3RD ANNUAL $500,000 GERSON L"CHAIM PRIZE FOR OUTSTANDING CHRISTIAN MEDICAL MISSIONARY SERVICE

Dr. Rick Sacra voluntarily returned to Liberia in midst of deadly epidemic