Articles by Guest Author

Somewhere in my church life I got the idea that children’s ministry is on the back burner, and all the focus should be on adults and youth...I have been terribly wrong.

When we talk about doing missions, surely many of us think of going somewhere far from home, preaching the Gospel to a lot of people or having a place with a big crowd surrounding us and telling them about Jesus.

In having to dig up repressed emotions and scabbed wounds, Father has shown me it’s best to not leave them that way. He’s had to take me on a journey in order to bring those emotions to surface and teach me to fully trust, to live fully redeemed and complete in Him.

By Jaclyn R. Bonner

In a country where severe food insecurity increased by 30 percent last year, affecting 7.7 million people, imagine reducing chronic malnutrition among the most vulnerable -- pregnant women, children under 5 years old, and the elderly -- and creating food security for rural communities in one of the world’s least developed countries.*

These solutions do not come easily. Problems are complex in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It is the second largest country in Africa and ranked seventh on the 2017 Fragile States Index.* Despite the nation’s instability and broken structures, the local church and leaders in the region have a vision for their people.

Deep in the heart of fertile Eastern DRC, 430 churches from three provinces are coming together to bolster a sustainable farming endeavor -- permaculture. Permaculture is an agricultural practice designed to break the cycle of poverty by diversifying crops, increasing control over production, and generating more income.

Once I realized God was doing this on purpose, I tried to discern the best course of action to continue sharing with Ned effectively.

Who am I? What is my purpose? Where do I come from? When will I feel satisfied? How can I know truth? These were the kind of questions I asked myself the year before my first year of college, not knowing that all these questions were about to be answered by someone greater than I, the One whose existence I dedicated myself to disproof. How naive was I?

I shared with some students about how my parents encouraged me to find truth, which that lead to me to following Jesus. It led to some good conversation about truth and choosing to follow Jesus and I thought, "Alright God. Thank you for letting me talk about my parents and their value of truth in our family."

My prayer is that whatever shame or fear they have in either their society or family, would be washed away, that God would find His way into their hearts and give them a willingness to run to Him and not look back. I ask that they wouldn’t just hear the good news, but understand it so that one day they will be the ones bearing a hundredfold and sixtyfold.

After 23 years in ministry, I find churches are still struggling to win. It seems that many are in rebuilding decades attempting to reach the evasive younger generation. For 40 years we have been chasing the young families in our communities. Yet, when we do the data mining in our records, we find that we are still not getting them en masse.

We were only there for a day, but God had gone out before us and had been working there for years. It was truly beautiful to see God on that island.