What A Blessing

A couple days ago I had some major apprehensions about how today (the first day of training) would unfold. I so glad to tell you it was a tremendous blessing and success. Though many challenges still remain many more blessings have been thoughout the day.

Approximately 10 youth from Blue Creek (a Mennonite community nearby) can to the training time. It might a pretty long ride down some pretty brutal roads but they came anyway. We weren't orginally planning to have them but I rescent revival broke out among the youth and they really want to reach out to the communities around them. It was so good to have them join us.

It was a bit of a motley crew of people. Three churches we represented and they were all very different. The Blue Creekers were just like having a group from Winkler. You could immediately tell they had a solid youth group because they were very eager. Pastor Philippe is the pastor who's church we are using. He too has a big heart for children and youth and it really shows in the youth that came. They too were very involved.

However, the last church is probably more typical to Belize. They don't really have a youth group and the youth were dis-interested and frequently excused themselves. Two were obviously a couple and were open in their display of affection. It's amazing just how much difference that little bit of nurturing makes. I wish their Pastor had come to see the difference it would make if he would engage his youth like the others. I wish many of the other Pastors would have simply brought their youth (or even have youth in their churches). It's a real crisis here in Belize.

A perfect example is what happened yesterday just down the road from us. A 12 year old girl was found by her mother very "involved" with her boyfriend. After a harsh repremand the girl ran off to find her father's (who is a local policeman) gun. The result was that she took her own life. That's the destiny for too many youth here in Belize. You see way too many teenage moms. The boys across the street regularly smoke drugs right outside their door. I'm so glad these two churches have a vision to reach the youth of the community but I am so grieved to see that so many churches simply don't even care.

I'm confident Alex will be God's instrument here in Belize. He's got such a big heart for his country and has already been a blessing to many churches and leaders. Please pray for him and the churches he connects with. Some of them are waking up to see that it is their responsibility to reach their youth but are severly under resourced. Pray that they would gain vision and ideas to engage their youth.

Two pastors have invited us to come to challenge their churches tonight. We will join Philippe's church on Sunday but tonight we will chose to serve Pastor Marlon's church. Presently he has no youth attending his church at all. However he has many children. He'd really like to change the pattern of children growing to youth and leaving the church by ministering to them early. He's got a big heart and a big task. Please pray that his church will be motivated to help him in his work.

Other than that we're loving the food, sweating a lot and surviving quite nice (you're going to laugh when you see where we're staying - we call it "economical" - it keeps us out of the rain).

Training Begins

Today is the big day. There's little idea as to who will show up for training and how they'll respond. We've had such a wide response already - some who believe this will be a great success and those who believe it will be a great big flop.

We've certainly seen one thing that is consistant - in most churches youth have no way to serve and therefore they often end up getting into trouble and leaving the church. So we may have a bigger job ahead of us to help the churches re-engage their youth, prepare them for ministry and them give them opportunity to serve within the church. Maybe it's a little more than a 2 week project.

However, we visited a place called Blue Creek and connected with Darryl Dyck (a former pastor of the EMMC in Reinland, MB). He is now pastoring a church in a Mennonite community here in Belize and has a thriving youth group of over 50. He called last night to ask if his youth could be of help. So we may have a very broad spectrum of participants today. I praise the Lord that He knows what He's doing because I certainly do not. I'm confident that He will guide us and at the end of the day I will have many exciting things to share.

If you are sending email to me - for some reason I am unable to check my regular address (the site does not load all the way down here) so please send any messages to szacharias@rocketmail.com