The Willful Sin, Part 2 (Hebrews 10:26-27) - Worship Service | Adult Sunday School

Opening Prayer and Missionary Introduction

Okay, well, since everybody quieted down and made their way in here without me having to say anything, I guess we'll go ahead and get started. So if you're on the foyer, please come into adult Sunday school class and join us if you plan on doing that.

All right, let's open with a word of prayer and then I will introduce our guests this.

Morning.

Let's pray. Father, it is by your grace that we are able to gather here. We thank you that you have given us this place together and that you've called us to your son. We thank you for the mercy and grace of salvation and the fact that you continue to spread your gospel around the world.

We pray that you would help us by your grace to appreciate what you are doing and help us to see your hand of providence working in our lives and the lives of others. And we ask that you would be honored and glorified through this time in Christ's name.

Amen.

All right, well, we do have the blessing today of having with us Marty and Jeanette Wendel. How many of you have listened to the missionary interviews that we posted online with the Wendels? Okay, a few, not many.

Marty and Jeanette, I've known them as long as I've been a believer for sure. They have been supported by Kootenai Community Church since the 1980s, about right, 1984. And we continue to support them.

They are on our list of missionaries that we are pleased to support. And I've said before in some of our annual meetings and to anybody who asks that the missionaries that this church supports are some of the finest people that you will ever meet.

Fantastic, doctrinally sound, faithful servants of Christ, every one of them. And so Marty and Jeanette have been on the mission field since, or at least supported by us since 1984, which makes him far older than he looks, actually.

And I have known him all of these years, knew him as a teenager, and have been delighted to be able to spend time with him. So you're going to get the privilege today of seeing what the Lord is doing.

So here's how the Sunday school is going to work. I'm going to turn it over to Marty. Marty is going to stand up and say a few words. And then Jeanette, who is his wife, is going to stand up and she's going to take us through a slideshow presentation of some of the work of BCM.

And then Marty is going to come up afterwards, and he is going to do a Q &A, and I have a few questions that I want to ask him, and so be thinking about questions that you want to ask Marty at the end of this.

So that's how this is going to go down, and I say that so that you understand it is with my blessing, with the blessing of the elders that we've asked them as a couple to do the presentation. And Jeanette is going to be up here speaking, but she's not teaching Scripture to adults in a church setting.

So that is a necessary, needed clarification. The next step is not to do a Rick Warren and ordain three women pastors next week. That's not where this is going. And she wouldn't accept good. She's not going to be here next week, so that's all right.

Okay, with that, Marty?

Marty Wendell on Missions, Church Growth, and John 14

Good morning. It is a pleasure to be here again. I remember the beginnings of the church when they were meeting, I don't even remember the location, down around Hope somewhere. And then they were meeting in the little church over here, and when we drove by this morning, I pointed it out to my wife, and we used to think that was a big church, but guess what?

When I drove up to the tabernacle here, we were so astounded to see what God has done.

Here.

And when I heard how many people are coming here to hear the Word of God spoken every Sunday, this is a great praise, because when we think of 1984, we've seen a lot of churches come and go. And the churches we've seen that have come and have stayed strong and have grown have three things in common.

They preach the Word, they're pro-missions, and they have a pastor who's committed for the long term. Now I like the polish job that, I'm not supposed to use the word pastor, but the word Pastor Jim said when he said I looked younger than I am, don't believe that.

When he first knew me, I had all of my hair and it was the right color. He's still got all of his hair, and he still looks pretty young to me, so I can't believe it's been 25 years. When Pastor? Soon, 25 years, praise the Lord.

So I told you those three things, missions, preach the Word, and a good committed pastor. So let me just give you a couple of verses that I have been meditating on as we travel, and then I'm going to let Jeanette come and talk a little bit about our ministry.

Before I do that, for those of you who haven't met me, I'm Marty Wendell. I have been in missions with Jeanette now since 1984, and my sweetheart Jeanette is, we work together in ministry, but she also does a lot of editing.

So you'll see we have a display in the back where she has some of her publications. They are, let me get this right, international missiological fiction and nonfiction books. So there's some great nonfiction there.

Oh, well, no, that's the books that she's written, and then she edits, I don't even know how to, idea how many clients she's got, but God has blessed her with the gift of writing, and it helps me look much better as well.

So the verse of scriptures I'd like to read, you're in the book of John, where Jesus is talking to someone and he says, Jesus replied, anyone who loves me will keep my commandments. John 14, will keep or obey my teaching.

My father will love them, and I am my father will come and make a home with them. Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own. They belong to the father who sent me.

All this I have spoken while still with you, but the advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the father will send in my name, will teach you all things and remind you of all the things that I have said. Do not, peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.

Do not give as the world, I do not give as the world gives. Do not let your heart be troubled. Do not be afraid. The last 18 months have been probably some of the most difficult global ministry challenges that we have seen in some time.

We've seen local challenges. We deal regularly with natural disasters, with persecution. I was just mentioning to Brother Rick, a persecution that we had in Orissa, where we lost 41 churches in one night.

So we know what it is to deal with disaster. But I've never seen globally so many people so afraid of something that they cannot see. So when I read these verses, it promises me, first of all, Jesus says, if you love me, you will keep my teachings.

We have a standard for daily life that doesn't change, regardless of what happens in the world around us. We have a promise of community, true fellowship, where the Trinity comes and makes himself present with us.

The Father and I will come and make our home with you, the sending of the Holy Spirit. And then we have peace, peace not like the world gives. But peace that Christ gave us, the legacy of peace and that ongoing energized peace that resolves issues from day to day.

You see, peace is not the absence of conflict. It's the presence of Christ and the ability to manage it. That's John chapter 14, 23 and following. Before I ask Jeanette to come, let me just read one of our liaisons who works in the Philippines, BCM has 120 churches in the Philippines and a couple of camps.

And that country's economy and their social structure has been devastated by this pandemic that we have all heard about. Let me just read her response as she talked about how the church saw the crisis, but did what Christ would have done in drawing everyone together to make a spiritual impact with the rising death toll, widespread unemployment, mental health issues, suicide, feelings of isolation, challenges of online education and dozens of other unpleasant stories all attributed to this COVID virus.

It is easy to question if there remains any beauty, hope, or life in today's world. But there is a better way to look at our circumstance. Is there a better way to look at our circumstances? As this issue sweeps our planet?

The answer is yes. As believers, we can look at this situation through the eyes of faith because we know that beyond this pandemic, God isn't surprised. God is almighty. He's powerful. And he brings everything, even though we don't understand it, to glorify his name.

Here in the Philippines, we are seeing the beauty of God's love expressed in the unity of the body of Christ. Within our BCM Bible-centered ministries family, pastors are readily supporting each other's ministry instead of just focusing on their own little church situation.

Local churches are cheerfully extending help to believers from other local congregations. Young people are reaching out to share God's love and minister to their friends. Individuals and families are generously giving financially to assist and words of comfort to pastors and individuals who have contracted this disease.

And to our families who have lost loved ones. You see, we as believers have the word of God tells us how to live regardless of what happens around us, whether it be death, sickness, or anything else. We as believers have community with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

We have his peace, and we're not to be afraid. We are to look at the world we live in. It's always been a damaged, nasty, sick world, filled with death and darkness, and find a way to spread the light.

Jeanette's gonna come and share about some of the things we do to spread that light. And then we'll have a Q &A. I put them to sleep, dear, now you get to wake them up. A microphone for you.

You'll hear me, but you'll know it. Thank you. Now I'm gonna just stand a little bit so I can see the screen myself. And am I blocking anyone's view? For those of you to whom BCM is new. BCM was founded in 1936 as the Bible Club Movement.

Inventors of flannel graph, Genesis through Revelation. But BCM over the last 50 years especially, if you're gonna start Bible clubs and children's ministries in parts of the world without churches, churches grow into.

Or I have a clip, am I getting this right?

Okay, where exactly am I supposed to point this?

Sorry about this, you gotta have the tech, yes.

I'm going up instead of down. Today, BCM has 880 missionaries and almost 10 ,000 volunteers in over 40 countries. Of over 40 nationalities in 60 plus countries on five continents. We still reach 1 .5 million children a year, but we have also seen the planting of over 5 ,000 churches in the last 30 years, especially in Asia.

More than 200 ,000 baptized in that same time period. And we have a BCM camping program that reaches, this is actually outdated, about 35 ,000 children a year. Your Katie Kinney from this church was a counselor in one of our camps in Ireland.

And we would just, people still ask, when is she coming back? Then came 2020, and we all know what has happened. And of course, for BCM, like ministries around the world, everything came to a crashing close.

So what do you do? Well, we old people wondered what we were going to do. Around the world, our millennial generation literally stepped forward. And we learned all about how much you can do with Zoom, FaceTime, YouTube, live streaming, and many other areas.

In the Philippines, Jeraline de Jesus is the one who's, quote, Marty Redd. As mentioned, we have over 100 churches. And when everything shut down, they got organized. The Philippines is known for its tech.

So what they decided to do is they brought all 120 plus churches together for a single live streaming system. And so over the past year, different pastors would teach different Sundays, Sunday school, youth group, home churches.

They basically took every church as it was, broke it down into groups of 25, which was the maximum the government would allow, and created an entire home church network. Here's what you can see. And they decided, if we're gonna have families stuck together for months of quarantine, why not have an emphasis on the family?

So they got together and they literally created an all-Philippines-wide teaching Sunday school church on the family and how to have a godly family. So you can see a bit of this here. Again, on tech, there's one of the small groups up there.

One of the youth groups. Here you can actually see the Mother's Day Pan-Philippines Children's Choir doing their special number for the streaming service. And it has been really exciting, again, 120 churches together.

There is now a fellowship between those churches that are scattered across 2 ,000 miles that was not there before COVID. Peru, Peru is another of our fields where we're reaching tens of thousands of children through our Bible Institute, volunteers, camps, etc.

And again, everything shut down. So our directors, Jonathan and Chantal Odisio, thankfully millennials who know tech. They turned one of their guest bedrooms into a studio. And their incredibly talented young people began creating programming.

So today, they began an online Sunday school that was streaming across six countries, children's Bible clubs, etc. And here you can see just some of the programs they have produced. It was so exciting that people were watching who would never have set foot in Sunday school.

At the height, we have currently 6 ,000 families every Sunday morning tuning in in six countries. And one of the major television programs in northern Peru said, we've got all these kids at home, we don't have enough children's programming.

Can we stream your program? So this is now being streamed across northern Peru by television. If you wonder how kids in these countries could possibly be seen high tech, well, this is Peru and it shows how the world has changed in 30 years.

These are still often very poor people. But you'll see here watching on a screen here, the entire family is literally gathered around the smartphone, which everybody has no matter how poor. And then over here, I'm watching on a laptop.

Children's ministry, through either virtual printing out or most of it for download, they provide homework material and Bible studies and everything that the kids can also do at home. And then, especially in Peru, well, around the world, this is a time of crisis, tiempo de crisis.

And so they created a program that's also streaming, but on Facebook and all kinds of social media, where parents can come and they just do a series of tips of how to work with your children at home and what to do in this crisis time.

Brazil is actually currently in a crisis of COVID because they did not close down. But what they did do is they closed all of the schools, everything that's public. And we reached approximately 10 ,000 children a week in Recife, Brazil.

And what that created was simply pushing all those children into the streets and homes of the slums. No social distancings, no maskings, no medical care, nothing. So instead of being helpful, it just made matters a whole lot worse.

All the Bible clubs, of course, were canceled. So what they did is they started a program with their teams, and they've got several hundred teams that work with these 10 ,000 plus kids. And they started just doing home visits, and you can just see some of the things they did here.

They started tutoring programs, cooking classes. As long as you did it inside a home, it didn't matter how many people are in the home and what you do. And so they have really basically been able to take their outside Bible club program and simply move it inside of houses and do the same thing.

In Ireland, Castle Daly Manor, that's where Katie Kinney served with us. But again, everything shut down. And of course, in Europe, even stricter than in a lot of the other countries. And so once again, our millennials got creative.

This is our annual Easter cookery virtual camp. It was, of course, canceled, the regular camp. And so they just decided to do it online. If you see how the tech is working, that's a smartphone. They ended up having, from the usual 100 kids they have at these camps, they ended up with over 800 because they were sitting at home with nothing to do.

They created what's called, and this is actually in many of our camps across Europe and around the world, they simply created online streaming combined with Zoom programs to reach the kids. So this is some of our camp activities there.

You can see the virtual clubs, Northern Ireland. In this case, one missionary just took her smartphone, her car, and created a little quiz. And she would go to each home outside the home she'd call. They'd take a picture of it.

And then inside, they'd do the little Bible study with their mom, phone the answers to the questions. And then she'd do a five-minute Bible club on the phone with them. In Scotland, again, they created an entire virtual Bible clubs and Sunday school.

The exciting thing is these are all online. So instead of just being used locally, they ended up being used across the English-speaking world. We had a ministry leader here in the States that wrote the office and said, we really appreciate those programs you have that are online that we can use.

But you really need to talk to the producers. They need to learn how to speak English properly if they're going to be sharing material with the rest of the world. And we're thinking, you do realize it's Scotland.

You're listening to their programming. But anyway, if you guys are interested and have kids, it's still all online and available. Canada as well, online camps, one of the ministries, just one small example of ingenuity is that one of our missionaries created a ministry to older people who don't have computers and can't stream or anything.

And it's called Dial a Service, and they would call in. She would take the pastor's message. She'd play the songs with them, sing with them. They'd do a little Bible study, and then she'd do a summary of the pastor's message over the phone.

In Italy, again, this particular men's conference was already on the books when everything shut down, and they just, everything is virtual. A year later, this all seems normal. We all know Zoom, virtual, etc.

A year ago, this was innovative for our ministries, virtual Bible clubs. And all over the world, to be able to see how they've been able to create these virtual Bible clubs and keep going, this one in Nigeria, this one in Myanmar.

I think 30 years ago, we would never have had the tech. You know, God's timing is perfect. If he gave us a timeout, he gave us the tech so we can continue sharing his word. And that's been really exciting, because 30 years ago, there would have been no way to keep in contact with all these people.

In Step with the Master Teacher is our ministry leadership training program. BCM believes in multiplication. You can reach children, you can teach a church how to reach children. Or you can teach area leaders how to teach their own churches how to reach children.

And BCM's program, which is now in over 40 countries, it was created about 15 years ago with the distillation of 70 years on five continents of ministry with children. And again, we had conferences scheduled all over the world.

In Africa, we have a partnership with the Evangelical Association of Churches of the Congo, 60 million members. In Nigeria, we work with the SIM Church, 6 million members. And all of a sudden, everything is closed.

Now, if you wonder why this is so important, this is one Sunday school class in Nigeria. 100 plus children in the five through eight year olds, one teacher. And if you go across Africa and Asia, it is common to have these huge churches with multiple choirs, hundreds of people, and maybe half a dozen people involved in children's ministry.

So that multiplication has been a good part of our ministry. And again, our field director for Africa for children's ministry, Pat Govinder, created a locking down. That's what they called it. And they just simply moved everything online.

And across, they found out to their excitement, they were used to people coming to a conference, being taught, and going home. And like they said, the creation of doing everything through Zoom and virtual, all of a sudden, they're maintaining contacts across thousands of miles, and they actually, a week or so ago, she wrote and she says, you know, everything's opening back up, but there were good things we learned about this we wanna keep, including that ability to communicate.

So we graduated, train the trainer, or the top layer where they're training, they're capable of training an entire region. And then under them is the in-step with the master teacher. And we ended up with training from across 11 countries.

Camps, just very quickly, camps did open up this summer. A Big Sky Bible Camp in Big Fork, Montana is one of our biggest, and this is, but a lot of the camps, again, had to be virtual. And it was interesting, the innovation.

This is just one of our camps. They kinda shared their ideas, so this was literally happening around the planet. Where they had their news programs, worship streaming online, Bible teaching streaming online, and then their meeting individually with their counselors, just as though they were at camp, but through Zoom.

And then the most incredibly innovative outdoor activities, where the kids are on their smartphones, streaming and doing all kinds of things like this competition here. So home activities, how did they do that?

They would, we created camp in a box. So every camper got a box delivered to them with their camp t-shirt and a package for each day. And each day they would open that package and it would have their activities and everything, crafts.

And they would just do it through the internet. And that's a camp, virtual camp Italy. Handy camps as well, Camp Promise here in Montana and around the world. This is actually the virtual, every Friday night at every camp we have around the world is the final campfire.

And this was the virtual final campfire of Handicap Camp 2020 at Big Sky Bible Camp in Montana. Yeah, yes, that was the Canada one. And then Camp Promise in Big Fork, Montana. And again, it's a delight to see a bunch of the camps opening back up.

We're hoping this summer, pretty well, everything will be back to normal. That said, just to finish off, this is, God has done great things despite COVID in sharing his word. But at the same time, there is a lot of suffering and need.

And in India, especially, India is our largest field, one-third of our ministry. This was just the last summary before COVID hit for one year, which would have been 2019. Half a million reached with the gospel, 168 plus children, almost 28 ,000 youth, or 28 ,000 received Christ, 4 ,000 plus baptized.

Well, again, then came COVID. And one of the hardest things, this is a picture, if you're following the news, India has now just gone wild. They've got almost half a million cases a day. This picture here is just one of the crematoriums where they're dealing with all the bodies.

And you can see this lady on the street with her oxygen. Now there isn't even oxygen to be on the street with. So with BCM, we have 240 plus church planting missionary families, many with very young kids, plus our other ministries.

So it's been very, very difficult, and we have done aid ministry outreaches for them. These are just some of the pastors in the different areas receiving their aid. That picture up at the top, you can see that somebody donated an entire truckload of coconuts.

So those are going out as aid as well, as well as to widows and needy people. In Madagascar as well, where the children are just dying in the street, because all of a sudden there's no work, there's no social services.

And so we've done a fair amount of feeding programs as well, as far as we can go. In Bolivia, another place that's been a hotspot, we have missionary couple that are doctors. And they have an actual Christian clinic that they founded.

And once COVID came and people started dying, and if you follow, that's one of the countries that they're just stacking up in the streets now. They created a mobile clinic with oxygen and everything else, and pastors would be calling in.

We lost 40 pastors in one week in their city, beyond church members and everybody else, just 40 pastors in one week. And so they work by phone and by driving around and helping the churches and the pastors who have no access to medical care.

Myanmar, I will end with this. If you have been following the news as well, Myanmar had a coup on February 1st. And of course, it has been 50 years of military dictatorship, 10 years of democracy, and then the coup where they arrested the newly elected president and all of her people.

So we have 18 church planting families, a Bible Institute, an orphanage. And Jacob Mung, our leader, is also the main Christian publisher in the country. Just some pictures here. I don't know if you've heard of the Hunger Games.

But the Hunger Games, I guess, is kind of global. And there's a symbol of defiance where they lift up the three fingers, and that means freedom. And you'll see that all of these protests, mostly young.

Ten years ago, people were scared to death. They're marching in the streets now, the new generation, holding up their fingers in the Hunger Games signal saying, we are not going back to that, we want democracy.

So in the meantime, our people, everything's on lockdown. The Bible Institute could not send the kids home. And so we have ended up with 54 orphans, 34 Bible Institute students, nine BCM children's workers, and then the 18 church planting families needing fed, all locked down in a compound.

So we have been able to get aid and bless them. They managed to graduate their latest class in the middle of all of this. But that's an ongoing prayer request. So pray for India, pray for our people around the world who are dealing with these situations.

Pray for Myanmar, and praise God for what God is doing despite the setback of this last year. So with that, I'll hand it back to Marty, and how much time do we have?

I don't know if Pastor needs that back. I'm sorry if Jim needs that back. Okay, questions and answers. Do I turn this off? Got it. Wrong language. Just a couple of prayer requests. Jeanette did ask about prayer for Indian stuff.

For those of you who have Canadian connections, BCM Canada initiated a class action suit against the government of Canada for civil rights of the believers to practice their religion without praevisio, whatever that is in English, to freely practice those rights.

So that case, it's being presented. We are the people that are presenting the case against the government. It was defended by the Christian Association for Civil Rights in Canada out of Calgary. That went to court on the 14th of April, and the judge has said he's gonna make a ruling on that by the end of May.

So be praying for that. What's happening is we're having our camps shut down because of some of the funding that we used to get for college kids. Because of the LGBTQ people working behind the scenes to marginalize all Christian activities and organizations.

So be praying for that, especially of those who are Canadian. This will affect a lot of missions and churches in the future there. All right, Q &A, pastor, excuse me, Jim. Yes, we do. Okay, we deal, you are correct, we deal with permanently 50 countries, and we have another 15 countries that we deal with on an itinerant basis.

Many of those are closed. In fact, we have several closed countries that we don't talk about at all. If this wasn't going online, we'd talk about one country that begins with a C, where we're involved there.

Yeah, and it ain't Canada. On a scale of one to ten, from ten being the most hostile, I would place Canada at about a two or three. We still don't have any bloodshed yet. And hopefully you never will, because of the stability of the Canadian society.

But be praying for that. Our Canadian ministries, what shut them down was a lot of the Department of Health would shut them down this last year because of the COVID thing. So we found a way around that.

We've done the virtual camps. The camp in the box was a Canadian idea. And everybody who had done traditional camps said it'll never work. But it was sort of exciting because not only did you deliver the boxes by hand, when you deliver to them, you got to make an initial contact with the parents who usually don't show up at camp anyways.

So we had an evangelistic thing there. We don't know what's gonna happen in the future. We've had problems for some years getting into schools now, especially in Ontario, to do the release time projects.

You can be praying for that. There is a trend there for it to become more difficult in Canada. But that's not unusual. We see that trend in pretty much all of the countries we deal with, including this one.

Africa is probably the most open continent now for the ability for us to come and do ministries. As you know, Africa was colonized in years gone by by English speakers, Francophones, that would be French and Portuguese.

The Portuguese ones, especially, and some of the English ones are, well actually all of them, you either had Protestant, the English speakers were more Protestant, the French speakers were Catholic and the Portuguese.

So in those countries that have that background of Catholicism or traditional Christianity, such as South Africa has a lot of reformed church people. Those countries are opening up rapidly, and we can get in there and do ministries.

We're having troubles in the northern part of Africa where it is Islam, that'd be Muslims, and we are doing some active ministry there. We do itinerant work in those countries. Just to give you an example, Christmas of this last year, my main guy who works in Africa got a phone call from a village in Africa, in Niger.

And the brother that he'd taught when he was there before said, pray for us. The terrorists are in our village, they're going from hut to hut. They're killing some people and dismembering others with machetes.

And you could hear the gunfire and the screaming in the background on that phone call, and the brother just, he didn't ask for deliverance. He asked for prayer that they would remain strong. So when I look at that kind of closed persecution, when we complain a little bit about some of the minor inconveniences that the walking dead place on us, we still have a ways to go to defend our faith.

All right, another question? Yes, sir. Okay, is it more prolific in the east in Canada regarding difficulty? We would find, yes, I would say that answer is correct. We find Alberta, where we have had work, we don't have work now, we're trying to expand back into the western provinces.

Alberta, especially where those Bible school belts were at, so you had all those Bible schools for years that did make an impact on society, even though society refuses to recognize that, especially as far as values go.

The most difficult place we find right now is Ontario. It's interesting, for those of you that are Canadians, you know exactly how people from Quebec think. They're not part of Canada, and everybody will speak French if they're true Canadians.

So we have ministry happening in the streets of Montreal, and that's growing quickly. The amount of international people that show up in a large urban area with no connections and no anchors will readily listen to you and debate with you.

And in many cases, they will come to the Lord. So that's sort of a bright spot in Quebec, where evangelism and discipleship is happening. It stopped for a little bit this last year, not due to Canada or due to the COVID, but our evangelist, Tony Chapman, his wife is Polish.

So they moved to Poland for a year. He learned Polish, and he was out doing street evangelism for a year. But now he's back in Quebec, so he's back into French. So that is an exciting piece. Nova Scotia, we had a camp.

Canada shut all overnight camping down for the year. Nova Scotia, we had a camp, so we transitioned to day camps. But the donors in the churches in Nova Scotia saw the lack of revenue to help with the funding of the camp, and all of the churches stepped up on their donations.

Our camp in Nova Scotia was fully funded and was able to do other ministry even though they didn't have camp scholarships. So yeah, we find that the more conservative provinces are more open to overt Christianity, okay?

Another question? I'm sorry? Eastern Europe.

Eastern Europe.

How's that going?

Eastern Europe, there's a lot of lockdowns there. The problem we've had with several countries, including Eastern Europe, is that the ability to deal with the COVID situation has caused a collapse in the health systems.

We had that in Mexico. We've had that in the Ukraine where we lost our national director, a man of 51 years old, caught that virus, and he was dead within six days. We've got some major spreads for whole churches and communities are now sick and many of them dying.

Russia, that's one of our close countries, so maybe we should just say the country that begins with R. And we have one missionary there, and she caught the virus. There were no medical doctors, so one of her cousins came and started giving her whatever IVs they had.

When she got better, it was her job to help the people in the church, because the pastor and all of the people in the church got the same thing. So the infrastructure is much more difficult there. We do have a growing ministry, especially like the Ukraine.

We have ministry camps to deaf kids, to handicapped kids, and to regular church planting in orphans. Russia, we have some stuff going. We desperately need missionaries for Hungary. I've got two missionaries now, aged ladies who were sent by BCM Germany, who are starting to time out.

We have a camp there. We desperately need, especially men and couples, to demonstrate Christ in Hungary. If you decide to go to Hungary, you better learn to like paprika, because it was in everything.

And their national dish is catfish soup made with paprika. I'm not a big catfish fan. Thankfully, I do like paprika, though. So we have great need in Hungary. We are doing some itinerant ministry in some of the other Eastern European countries.

We aren't in the Istans yet, Kyrgyzstan, a bunch of those. But we're doing itinerant training in some of those countries, and we do that undercover online through Zoom. So if you know one of those languages especially, I'm happy to talk.