Dear Friends and Family.
This is the first blog update in a few months and a lot has happened since the last one.
Kenya had our presidential elections March 4th and we had asked you all to pray for safety for the missionaries and for the Kenyans here. Things went very well. For the most part Kenya was very peaceful. We still have a little ways to go because the candidate that lost is challenging the results so when those are announced it could get violent but we are praying against that.
We have also had 2 teams come out in the last month. They were a great encouragement and they both were very fruitful. The First team from Calvary Chapel Bangor Maine Did some orphanage work here with an orphanage we are associated with here, they went out to a more rural community to visit a church that is friends with ours. They also helped us work on the church; since we expanded even more there was a bunch of painting and building that needed to be done.
The second team flew in 2 days before the election. They were coming to do a big evangelism outreach which we were a little Leary about since we were being told to lay low but it ended up being a perfect time to get onto the streets and tell people about the redeeming love of Jesus Christ. Many, Many people heard the gospel including multiple groups of over 400 people and over 100 people asked Christ to come into their lives. Pray for these people as many people claim salvation and then forget about the Lord a month later. Pray that they get connected to good churches that will teach the Bible to them. They did some street evangelism in Eldoret and the Lord used that greatly too. A guy named Ben got saved and has been coming to our church for the last few weeks.
CC Eldoret has been growing immensely which is encouraging and challenging. We are still praying that the Lord will send us a solid worship leader and more children’s ministry leaders. It seems that we just don’t have enough teachers. We are praying that as the people coming to church continue to learn and grow that they will be inspired to want to serve the Lord in the different ways that they are gifted in.
Calvary Chapel Eldoret is now officially all registered and legal with the government. We are working under an umbrella ministry that we started called Gospel for Kenya Missions. The reason we did this is because Josh really wanted to start other ministries aside from just the church so we kind of expanded the ministry aspect with the Government. This means that if we want to we can open Schools, guest houses, send out different churches or open orphanages. That doesn’t mean that we are doing all these things but we would not need to get separate paperwork if we wanted to do all this.
What it does mean…. Gospel for Kenya missions (CC Eldoret) is opening a school of ministry, one year program in the next month. We will be raising people up and teaching them how Biblical ministry is done, teaching them how to defend their faith and how to study the word. We are very excited about this. We are hoping that we can get some different teachers from the States to come and teach a one or two week course throughout the year but we will see what God does.
Our family is doing good. Please pray for us as we continue to labor here in Kenya at the church and on the streets. Josh remains pretty busy with all the different ministries here. Kelsey is continuing to grow as she is in her 5th month of pregnancy. Please pray for renewed strength as this pregnancy is really wiping her out; also chasing Layla around is a pretty exhausting job too.
Thanks all for your prayers and continued support to us through prayer and encouragement.
Josh, Kelsey and Layla.
