MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 06-06-2005

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Greetings from Chattanooga! We'll be at BIMI headquarters for our second week of Candidate School this week. The missions conference at Gethsemane Baptist Church in Walnut Ridge, AR (Pastor Derek Collins) went extremely well. They're a great bunch of folks and really make you feel like family. We stayed with Bob and Nedra Guimon (Kyle's parents), and had some real good fellowship with them. The ladies in the church set about their usual conspiracy of trying to feed us to death :). There's just nothing like southern, country cooking. Their associate pastor, Randy Bailey, is real talented, and played some classic bluegrass for us while we were there (good stuff). It's a soul winning church, and we saw ten saved all told during the conference. I preached on Wednesday night on "Where Can I Get a Drink?" from John 4, and two Jehovah's Witnesses got saved! They were baptized on Sunday. Glory! Then, I preached on 2 Timothy 2:1-2, on "Where Are the Faithful Men?", and a fella who had been teetering for awhile surrendered to preach. What a blessing, to get to be used of God to call others to full-time Christian ministry. We visited the jail on Thursday, and two got saved there, and three were saved on soul winning on Saturday, with the rest coming for salvation during the services. The one image that really stands out the most is on Sunday, when a fella came to be saved, and was baptized the same day. His wife stood up front during the baptism, just weeping for him, because she was saved, and he was not, until recently. He got saved, and she had no doubt been praying and yearning for that for some time. That's what it's all about, folks.

We wrapped up the conference on Sunday afternoon, and I have to tell you, we hated to leave. We sure do love the Collins' and the Baileys and all the sweet people of Gethsemane Baptist. We got out of there as quick as we could, but it was still midnight (you lose an hour going east) before we crawled into bed at BIMI. Things are going great today, and we have lots of exciting things going on this week, which we will appraise you on after we get back.

Pray for our kids while we're away. They're home with my parents this week so we can attend Candidate School. Pray for our drive home later this week. Pray about the van. We still need $3000 for that, and it would be great if we could drive to Montana in July in a van with air-conditioning. Pray for our Pastor and his wife, Ken and Beth Spilger, who will be heading home from Uganda tomorrow, along with the rest of the team from our church. That's all for now.

MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 05-31-2005

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Greetings, once again! We're back from Kansas City, and poised to head out again on Wednesday for a missions conference in Walnut Ridge, AK (Gethsemene Baptist Church, Pastor Derek Collins). The missions conference in Trinity Independent Baptist Church went very well. They're a soulwinning church, and Pastor Boos has a real heart for his city and his people. On Saturday, I was able to lead a 15 year old guy to Christ. All told, three were saved that day. To date, they have seen 73 saved in outreach alone. It's great to see a church so concerned for the lost. The preaching went well for both me and Bro. Roverosa, missionary to Cuba, and you could tell God was really working in folks' hearts.

We're home for a couple days to get things pulled together, and then we're heading to Pastor Collins' missions conference. Immediately thereafter, we're heading across Tennessee (9 hours), to Chattanooga for our second week of Candidate School at BIMI headquarters. My sister-in-law is driving down on Saturday to pick up the kids and bring them back to our house, where they'll be staying with my parents while we're in Chattanooga, so pray for them. Pray for the missions conference coming up, and the week of training we'll be receiving very soon. Pray God will soon provide the remaining $3150 to get the new van (He has already provided $4300! Praise the LORD!). Pray for our Pastor, Ken Spilger and wife Beth, and the Uganda Team from our church who are over in Uganda at the moment helping the Guimons train their young preachers.

MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 05-26-2005

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Howdy, everybody! Can you believe it's already almost Memorial Day? Our meeting in Vinton, IA went well last weekend went great. We were able to challenge folks with the needs of worldwide evangelism, and be an encouragement to Pastor Collins and his family as well. Vinton is a beautiful little town, in the heart of Iowa corn country. In fact, their county is the number one producer per acre of sweet corn in the world. I'm glad there's a Baptist church here. One item of note here: Vinton is home to a school for the blind, the same school for the blind where Laura Ingalls Wilder's older sister intended after she lost her eyesight. Pretty cool, eh?

Tomorrow, we're driving to Kansas City to be in a missions conference in Trinity Independent Baptist Church (Pastor Tim Boos), so pray for us. After we get home on Monday, we're home for a couple days, and then it's off to Walnut Ridge, AK and Gethsemene Baptist Church for their Missions Conference. My sister-in-law, Esther, is driving down on Saturday to get the kids, and then, immediately after church on Sunday, we're driving to Chattanooga, TN for our second week of candidate school at BIMI headquarters. Whew! So pray for the kids while we're away, and for my mother and father, Jim and Sue Huckabee, who'll be staying in our home to keep them. Lots ahead in this summer, so pray for us!

MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 05-20-2005

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Hello, all! Bit late with the email this week, but better late than never, eh? Our meetings last weekend in St. Louis and Columbia went well. To start the day off, we were at Victory Independent Baptist Church in St. Louis, MO. John Kuykendall is pastoring a church on Virginia Ave. in the heart of the city. The building is a turn of the century, ex-Vaudville theatre, built by Anheuser-Busch. Now it's a Baptist church. People, that's what church planting is all about. You go in where others might fear to, you claim structures and areas that used to be maybe used for evil, and like a conquering horde, you ride in with the Gospel and do battle with the Enemy on his turf, and prevail. I love St. Louis, and it's very heartening to know that there's guys like John Kuykendall planting churches here and aggressively pursuing revival in the city of St. Louis. Pray for this church, and it's pastor, as they try to reach souls with the Gospel in an area that has traditionally been resistant to such, and therefore needs a Baptist church all the more.

In the evening we were late to church at Faith Baptist Church in Columbia, MO. Now normally, you never want that to happen, but in our case, traffic was backed up forever outside of Columbia on I-70 due to some minivans that had had rollover accidents. We had to think fast to find back roads on the map to get us around the trouble, and got to drive on some gravel roads to finally dump back on to the highway 10 miles down the road. Pastor Joe Kline was very gracious about the whole thing. We weren't alone, as the accident made a bunch of other folks late also. Just goes to show 'ya how important it is to pray for missionaries with the driving we have to do. The service was great. I felt a lot of liberty to preach, and based on all the comments I got afterwards, it would seem that the Holy Spirit really dealt with folks, and led me to say things that echoed what their Pastor and Sunday School teachers had been saying recently. Neat how that whole "unity of the Holy Spirit" thing works, isn't it? We had some good fellowship with the Klines after church, and got home at a fairly reasonable time that night.

Pray for our Pastor, Ken Spilger and wife, Beth, and some other folks from our church. They have travelled to Uganda to teach a class in Bible Study Methods, and on the Pastoral Epistles to a class of prospective preachers. They'll be over there for three weeks. Pray for their safety, their sanity as they endure the rigors of jet lag, combined with teaching through interpreters, along with the stress of the grueling schedule they've crafted for themselves, and their health. I don't want to make Uganda sound dirty or dangerous necessarily, but the tropical climate lends itself to disease and parasites, and the stress they're putting on their bodies will tend to make them a bit more vulnerable to such things. Pray for the return flight that they'll have to go through to get home (22 hours in all). Pray for the Guimons who are hosting them, and organizing everything. It's a big job and there's loads to do. Pray for them as they rebuild from the partial house fire they had recently (got a report from Kyle recently, and it's going well, but it's still hard work). Pray for the orphans as they grow, not only physically, but as believers, those who are saved, which is most of them.

As for us, we'll be heading 5 1/2 hours north to Vinton, IA (near Iowa City), for a meeting in Faith Baptist Church (Pastor Greg Collins) this weekend. Pray for us as we drive, and that we'll be able to minister and be an encouragement to the church and Pastor Collins. Pray for our health (Anna's feeling a bit under the weather at the moment).

'Nuff said…

MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 05-12-2005

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Greetings, all! I've got some good news about the van, which you're all no doubt sick of hearing about by now. Anyway, I just found out that someone sent us another $1000 for the van, for a total of $2000 so far. The van we're going to get is a 2000 Pontiac Montana with 82,000 miles. We're buying it from Mission Auto Connection, a dealer in Ohio, that helps missionaries obtain vehicles for deputation and furlough. It has dual air (great for those summer months), front wheel drive (great for those winter months), and the extended wheelbase on this particular model gives us an additional foot-and-a-half of cargo space in the back, great for those longer voyages where more luggage is needed, in addition to the display and assorted paraphernalia required by the on-the-go missionary. We've sent them the $1000 we had to put a deposit down, and they're holding it for thirty days, so pray that the rest we need will come in this month. The total cost will be $7400, so we only have $5400 to go. It's great to see our prayers being answered, and to know that we'll be in a more spacious and comfortable vehicle soon, especially with the really hot weather coming up, and the extensive travelling we'll be doing this summer.

As far as meetings go, with the exception of a brief hiatus in September for the delivery of our 5th child, Gaelin Joseph, I have booked up 2005 solid, and am already working on 2006. What a blessing! We have a varied and interesting array of locations to get to this year, and we're all looking forward to it. This weekend, we'll be in Victory Baptist Church in St. Louis, MO (Pastor John Kuykendal) in the AM, and Faith Baptist Church in Columbia, MO (Pastor Joe Kline) in the PM. Pray for the meetings, that we'll be able to minister to the churches and pastors, and that God's will will be done in folks' lives.