Ministry Newsletter for May and June
I apologize for being late getting the May and June updates out, and am combining them here. My father was admitted to the hospital with congestive heart failure at the end of May so I travelled to Texas to help care for him for about a month. He is doing better now and we are thankful for everyone who has been praying for him.
Me and my dad
In early May I was invited to preach at the funeral of a young man who was kidnapped and murdered over a tribal clan war that went on for several weeks around our village. It was a sad occasion, but I was thankful for the opportunity to proclaim Christ crucified to a large number of people.
Funerals in western Kenya are always large public events
Wednesday May 15, we had a Mercy Baptist Church member meeting in which we voted to receive into the church 34 new members. We are very excited to be baptizing them this Sunday. Soli Deo Gloria!
Our new church members!
The Lord’s Day, May 19th, I preached for the first time in Swahili. I did the introduction to my sermon from Genesis 7:1-16 in Swahili, then switched to English for the rest. I still have a lot of work to do, but my goal is to be preaching full sermons in Swahili by the end of the year, God willing.
We are hoping to raise $3,000 for school supplies. We currently have $1,019. Please click here if you would like to donate to this need, and make a note “School supplies” so we know what the donation is for. Here is the post Stephanie made on Facebook about this need:
Our school has grown a lot since we opened it in 2019. What started with just some kids from our home attending MCA has grown to over 300 students and 14 grade levels. 200 of our students come to our school from our local village, the rest from our home. All students attend our school for free because of the many hands that have come together to stand in the gap for them and their families.
Because our students getting a quality Christian education is so important to us we have some higher than usual expenses. Our Rafiki curriculum (PreK-6th grade) has certain books that are required reading for specific grades. We have made sure that we have a few copies of each book, but we really need class sets (25 copies) of these books. Most of these books cannot be purchased here in Kenya so we need to buy them in America and ocean ship them to us. This ends up being around 750 books needed.
We also need lots of scientific calculators and various other math supplies. In the past we purchased 24 calculators, but with having a K-12th school it is hard to share just 24 calculators. Realistically we probably need over 150 calculators to ease the “jam” of so many students needing to use them.
Running a school and keeping up with all of its material needs and the students’ and teachers’ needs is a huge mental load. If you have a brain that doesn’t shut off then you know that all of these undone things live in your head on a regular basis. For the sake of the school running more smoothly and to lighten my mental load we have to get some of these things taken care of. To get our school into a better place with more of the required supplies needed we need to raise about $3000 which will go towards the needed items above and to help with some of the shipping cost. If we have more than $3000 come in it will be put towards more school supplies that we need!
We had two groups from America visit Mercy Ministries in June, and both were such a blessing!
The first was a family from Hawaii, the Riley’s, and two of their friends. This was the second time that the Riley’s have visited. They love art, so they taught several art classes to the children of Mercy Home and Mercy Christian Academy. They also helped mud a house and took the Bys family on a 3 day retreat to the Kakamega Rain Forest.
The second group was a team of 7 from Cherokee Baptist Church in Kansas. While they were here, they coached basketball and volleyball, did some training workshops with our MCA teachers, helped us organize our out-of-control storage room, treated some elderly folks for jiggers, had a spa day for our girls, held a dinner for the widows of Mercy Baptist Church, gave a special staff appreciation dinner for our Mercy Ministries staff of more than 60, and helped us throw the best Wonka birthday party ever to celebrate all the birthdays of our Mercy Home kids.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this update. If you would, please take a moment to pray for our ministry. Mungu akubariki! (God bless you!)