Lumenations

As part of our mobilization efforts, we continued to host several groups and families from abroad, allowing them to get a taste of our work and envision how they might be a part of it. We also hosted many members of our congregation in an effort to connect more fully with the work that they are a part of. Finally, we worked with our ministry partners to provide avenues for them to be more involved in our work, what we call Ministry Partnership Development.

We continue to build towards having a center for developing media-based discipleship training resources. We are networking with others in our region who have similar passion and focus. We are investing in the ability to create quality media for mission purposes.

We are continuing to support an evangelistic and disciple-making effort in East Africa (primarily in Kenya and Uganda) through the International Missionaries for Christ group of evangelists. Ken first connected with this group during a trip to Uganda in 2019 and John Paul Wornock (our board chair) two years before that. The evangelists and disciple-makers have seen literally thousands of people come to Christ and begin their life journey with Jesus. Our involvement with this will grow in future years as we see our time in North Africa coming to an end.

One other major expense was the somewhat urgent transition of the entire Shackelford family back to the United States due to security concerns. This included travel as well as the shipping of a small van load of household items to Italy and then shipping that to the United States. This also included getting them set up back in the states since they left almost their entire household items. These were donated to other ministry partners as well as some refugees from Syria who had become believers and were in dire need of help. This also included extra trips to Italy to see if starting and International Church there would be feasible.