Our heart, in all sincerity, our heart, when God gives us the opportunity to stand before his people, to either present from his word or to present his work, is to do this. We realize that we're just like you. God just asked us to go and do something for him in a place that he hasn't asked you to go and do it. And with that understanding, we are very mindful of the responsibility that goes with that because we've been given a voice that perhaps many of you has not been given. And anytime that we have the opportunity of speaking, we do, we want to educate, we would have said this to you in 2003 when we first came to you, we want to educate, we want to encourage, and we want to excite. We want to educate people on Africa and God's calling on our life, we want to encourage you because God's calling and God's working, we want to excite you to want to be a part of that. But the reality of it is, is you will likely never go and stay on the African continent for any extended length of time. Now pastor asked or suggested that maybe what you see on the news is worse than what's actually happening there in South Africa, and unfortunately the opposite is true. It's actually much worse than what you guys are seeing. We live there, we see it, we minister to the people that are affected by it. And I may or may not share a little bit of those details with you tonight, but here's our real heart. As God's given us an opportunity to stand before his people, we wanna be a representation of the fact that God still uses his people to accomplish his work. He's doing that through you as you invest in your missionaries. He's doing that through the individuals that he has called to go who are supported by you on the mission field. I listened to Brother Carpenter. It was in May, actually, that he was here. And I listened to the sermon and listened to his presentation as well. And I got excited. I got excited all again. I'm a missionary. I get to live the life. I get to go through the process. And yet I'm encouraged by another missionary because God is showing his faithfulness. And my heart tonight really is to just emphasize for you Maybe you're in a discouraged point in your life, and maybe you're at the top of the mountain, I don't know, but somewhere in between a valley and a mountain, that's where you're at. And I just wanna encourage you a little bit from God's word, from Proverbs chapter three, if you have your Bibles, open them there, and you probably already know what verse I'm gonna look toward. And our plan tonight is I'm gonna lead you through just a focus and a thought from Proverbs chapter three, and then I'll share our presentation, because all of it, it's tied together. And that's what we want you to get. When you walk out tonight, here's what my heart and here's what my prayer has been for you, is that you will be encouraged by what you hear and by what you see, not because of the person that stood before you, but because of the character of our God. the one who has done the calling, the one who is enabled, the one who has opened doors, the one who has provided answers to prayers that have been offered either by a missionary on a field or by those sitting back in the church pews. And I wanna get this one thought across to you from Proverbs chapter three, verses five and six, and it's one that we've quoted, memorized, given to people, told to our kids, taught to our kids, and done our best to live out. And the first song, A Passion for Thee, was great. I think that's one of Herbster's songs, A Passion for Thee, tells the same story. Trust in the Lord with all thine heart. Lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him and he shall direct thy paths. And as familiar as that verse is to you, I wanna try to bring out a reminder to you of what that means for you and for me today. And before we do that, let's pray. Father, thank you for tonight. Thank you for the opportunity that you've given to me. Thank you for the grace of Pastor Travis and just his willingness to allow someone to step into the pulpit again as he's been gone for a few weeks. And Father, I pray for your blessings tonight. I pray for your strength, for your power. And Father, while this verse may be familiar to all of us here, Father, may we process it in our hearts tonight in a different way. that you might get honored and glorified through it, and that our lives might be changed and even transformed because of it, I pray, in Jesus' name, amen. You know, as I've looked at this verse and I've heard this verse quoted countless times, just as you have, I've always thought of it as multiple stages of the commands. Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, command number one. Lean not unto your own understanding, command number two. But is that really what it's saying? Or are they tied in together? In all they ways acknowledge him, and then there's that promise, he shall direct thy paths. When we think of that word trust, there are three primary, they're fundamental things that trust. Anytime you trust someone, or someone trusts you, There are three foundational elements that, I mean, maybe there's more, but I know that there's at least three that that trust is based upon. It's based upon, one, the position of the person, who they are. Who's making the promise? Who's asking you to trust them? It's based on the promise of that person, what they've said they would do or would not do. And it's based on the pattern of the person, what they've done or not done. Now just think about that for a second. Who they are, what they've said, and what they've done. That pretty much captures every relationship that you and I have where trust is involved. Whether it's a business relationship where there's a contract that's been drawn up, Or whether there's just a familial or a family relationship where it's a husband and a wife. A husband and a wife, I just married my son Austin, our second son, to our pastor's daughter. The pastor and I both tag teamed with it just a few weeks ago. I'll show a picture in a second of them, just in case you're interested. But I had the privilege of giving them the charge. As I stood before them and as they stood before our church and a ton of other people, they were demonstrating trust to one another. And the trust that they were demonstrating to one another was based on the person who was standing across from them, based on the promises that the person standing across from them was making back to them, and based on the pattern that they had lived out during their dating relationship. And had any of those things been skewed, there would have been a lack of trust. When we look at our verse of Proverbs 3, 5, and 6, and we look at those other identities that are represented there, when it says, trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and the all thine heart is very important, because anything shy of complete trust is incomplete trust. So if we're not trusting God within the context of what this is saying, if we're not trusting God with all of our heart, then it cannot be said that we are truly trusting God. And if we are trusting God, trusting in the Lord with all of our heart, would there be any question as to whether or not we are leaning on our own understanding? Can you lean on your own understanding and still have complete trust? I don't know, I don't think so. Can you acknowledge others? And that idea of acknowledge is not just saying, God, you're the Lord. You're important, you're the creator, you're my savior. It's acknowledging him for everything that he is, as the I am, the all-inclusive. When we are truly trusting God, it is, it has to be all-inclusive. Or that expectation that's given to us here that he shall direct our paths is also gonna be off. So here's where I want to take us tonight. I want to ask you the question, and I want to answer the question from my own experience, and my experience which matches up with God's word, and which matches up with this verse. I want to ask you this question, is God trustworthy? We've been doing this mission journey by God's grace for 16 years. 2002, we joined Baptist Mid-Missions. I was still on staff as one of the assistant pastors at Providence Baptist. I finished a year there and then we launched out in 2003 for full-time deputation. We did a survey trip to Zambia in 2003 and in September 2005, we hit the field to begin our first term there. As I look back, And even as we were preparing to go, that idea of God's trustworthiness has been at the center of our mind and our heart from the beginning. Some of you might know Joey Ford from Providence. We served together on staff and we're friends. And during the time in which we were accepting the call to Africa, he said to me, it must have been really hard, Jim. It must have been really hard to say yes to God on this, to take your family to Africa, knowing the statistics, knowing the details that you knew. And I thought about it for a second and I didn't want to give him a quick answer and I said, Joey, it came down to this one thing. It came down to me asking the question and answering it in my heart, how much do I trust God? Because I knew the statistics in Zambia. I knew that AIDS was prevalent there. I knew that the life expectancy there was in the range of 30 to 35 years of age. I knew that the average age in Zambia of the 11 million people that were there was just 16. I knew we were going into a dangerous area. But I had to ask myself, can I trust God even if something happens to my wife? Even if something happens to my children? Even if something happens to my family? Even if we don't get the support that we need, can I trust God? Can I still say he's trustworthy? And that got us to the field, and honestly, that's what's keeping us on the field, because I'm here to testify to you tonight, and that's what this is, this is a testimony of God's faithfulness, that he is trustworthy. And in emphasizing the heart of this passage, because trust is not something, yes, it's a command, it is a command, we understand that. Trust in the Lord with all in your heart. This is one verse out of many that emphasizes God's call on our lives to trust him. It is a command. But no one can make us trust another person. And God in his grace, in his goodness, while he commands us to trust him, he does not make us trust him. So what does that mean? It means that not only is trusting God a command, it's a choice. It's a personal choice. You can't make that choice for your child. Some of you understand that with older kids who you have taught, you have grown up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord just like you were taught by God's word, from God's word to do and yet they have gone wayward. You would testify with me that you cannot make your children or your spouse trust God. It is a personal choice. And it's conditional. This is not a promise that says absolutely, because when we look at Proverbs, there are statements that are made in Proverbs that are principles in general. But what we can see from all of Scripture is this. When we do trust the Lord with all our heart, When we are obedient to him, and that trust involves submission and surrender, and just literally our hands up in the air and saying, God, whatever, whenever, however. When we do that, there are, guaranteed on the authority of God's word, blessings from God that will be bestowed upon you. And when you and I fail, there will be blessings withheld from God. Now God's grace works through all of that and that's an amazing part of God's character. We understand that. But if there's that condition that says there are blessings for us when we obey, then why won't we trust with all of our hearts? And I go back to my first statement. Looking at the person, the position, Looking at the promise, looking at the pattern of God in your own life, does any of us have reason to not trust God? I didn't ask you is there a reason to not trust your spouse. I didn't ask you is there a reason to not trust your kid. And I've raised four teenagers, okay? I know there are times to not trust your kid no matter what they say. But none of us, none of us here tonight has legitimate reason to not trust the Lord with all our heart. And I just want to testify of how God has proven his trustworthiness to us and our family. And I have three or four areas here, and I just want to go down through that. This is going to cover our 15, 16 years of ministry on the field. And in each of these areas, I would say that it's representative of our entire time. My wife and I started dating at 16. We both gave our lives to the Lord at 16 and said, God, whatever, wherever, whenever, our lives were surrendered. God's path for me was both church ministry and business. And I can say, I sat with the business owner that I helped transfer ownership of a company, the dream job that I had in my 20s. I sat with him after 25 years, just this last week, and I thanked him for his investment in my life and business. And I told him, everything I learned while shadowing you, while traveling with you around the world literally, I am using on the field today. Thank you for what you taught me. 25 plus years ago of that person's investment in my life. God has proven himself in multiple areas of his trustworthiness. The first area is in his protection, the protection of our family. And if you followed us from the beginning, you know of all of our bouts with malaria. Every month, somebody in our family had malaria for the five years that we were there. Malaria is still Africa's number one killer. It's not AIDS, it's malaria. And we battled it continuously. And yet God got us through that. We've had our son twice on the table in the doctor's clinic there in Zambia with no pulse. And one time in particular, and I may have shared this story in the past, but one time in particular, the doctor backed away from the table, looked at the nurse and says, I find no pulse and I don't know what to do. And you know where my mind went back? And this is as honest as I can be. My mind went back right there. God, is this my test? to my statement that even if I will trust you. Because I looked around the room and all I saw was an oxygen tank and that was literally all that was in that room and my son, my youngest son, laying on a table not breathing. And that was a crisis of belief, if ever there was one. And then he took this big needle and he gave my son an adrenaline shot and my son came back. We have almost lost our son Camden four times, at least four times, and I'm not talking, you know, Well, the car just missed him. I'm talking emergency, almost emergency evac situations. And yet God has been faithful. Now, had my son died, can I still stand up here and say, God is trustworthy? Absolutely. By God's grace, I would say it. I'm asking the same question. Is God trustworthy? As I just left my father-in-law just a few hours ago, where my mother-in-law is saying, we're going to have to go home as a family. We're going to have to make funeral arrangements. Three months after we got to the field, my stepdad died. Three months after we got to the field. In a crisis situation for us, was God trustworthy then? Absolutely. He has proven to us over and over again his protection of our family. I've had a motorcycle accident in Zambia, God protected me through that. God is trustworthy not only in his protection, he's trustworthy in his provision. Missions is expensive. If you're on a missions committee, you know that. You shake your head every time. How can a missionary require so much money? Can I just say to you, missions is expensive? I was a church administrator for six years. I know the salaries of your pastors. Not your pastors, okay? I don't, Pastor Travis, I don't know your salary. But I know in general what the salaries are of those serving in full-time Christian ministry. I get it. And it's hard to take a step of faith to say, you know what, I'm going to leave the business world or I'm even going to leave the comfort of a church life and I'm going to go to the mission field on the hopes and on the prayers and on the promises of God's people. Can I say to you that in 16 years not a single church has dropped our family? Not a single church. We've had individuals that have contacted us that I've never spoken to. We have a church that supports us. We've never been to the church. I don't know why they support us, but they do, and I'm not gonna change it. God has been faithful in his provision. Our son, our second son, Austin, who just married our pastor's daughter, somewhere between either his second or third year of school, if you've got kids in college, you know college is expensive. My son kept calling me up, said, Dad, my school bill is due. And we have an arrangement, my son works at school, and he worked during the summers, and he's put as much towards the school bill as he could, and it was our job to come up with the difference. And I said, son, we've got some things going on right now, and we don't have the money. And he's like, okay, dad. I said, God's gonna have to provide for it. Called me up a few weeks later, dad, I'm still getting those notices, they're not gonna let me take my tests. Have you paid my bill yet? Son, I don't have the money. God will have to provide. We've taken the position that because of a challenge that I got from a missionary early on who said, God knows you need a new transmission before your church families know it and before you know it. Trust him to meet the need. So we have had a pattern. We've taken that challenge and we've had a pattern where we don't write back to our churches and say, we need new tires or we've got this financial need. And we know that church members have their own kids in college and they don't get to write to their bosses and say, hey, I got a kid in college, I need a raise. So we've trusted God. My son called back a third time, and he's like, Dad, have you paid my bill? And at this point, I'm getting frustrated. No, son, I don't have the money God is gonna have to provide. He said, Dad, wait, that's what I'm talking about. I just got a slip in my box that said my bill's been paid. We hadn't said anything to any family member. We hadn't said anything to any pastor. We hadn't said anything in a prayer letter. We just prayed and asked God. And my son said to me, Dad, not only is this month paid, the rest of my school year is paid. There were four months left on his bill. And I'm like, wow, praise the Lord. And here's the coolest thing. My son said to me, Dad, I've seen God do this for our family over and over again. But this is the first time he's done it for me. This is cool. Last month, because my son got married last month, Our other son who lives in South Africa, he and his wife scraped as much as they could to come to America to be a part of the wedding. And they said, you know, one thing we'd really like to do is we really would like to go to Universal Studios. That's what our son David and his wife said. And if you've ever been to Universal Studios and the other thing, Adventures of Whatever, my word, it's expensive. It's like $200. I thought Disney was bad. So we're like, that's not gonna happen. Here's what happened the week before my son and daughter-in-law came. A friend of ours in our church called me up on Tuesday, and he said, hey, what are you guys doing on Friday? The boys and I are planning to go to Universal Studios, and we thought it'd be really cool if we took you. Our treat. I was just like, there's a text message. I'm thinking, are you serious? Now, I realize these are little things, but these are God-sized things to us. So I keep reading down through the message and he's like, okay, well, I've already bought the tickets and I've got the VIP pass. So it's the all day fast track or whatever they call it at Universal. And it's a two day pass because it's Florida resident thing. So not only can you go this Friday, but if you want to go when David and Michelle get here, then you can go then too. So I told my wife, she literally, she was already in bed. She literally jumped out of bed and said, woohoo. Now my son Austin, the one that I just told you about with the school bill thing, he came back to play basketball at Providence. He's 6'5, he wanted to play basketball. So he's not been with us since the latter part of his junior year in high school. And I heard my son Camden, my youngest son, explaining to him while he was in the bed after I gave all of this information to them, the door was partially closed, they didn't know I was outside. And my son Camden said, Austin, This is the way we live. God does this for us all the time. Is God trustworthy in his provision? Absolutely. God took me through the process of being in business where I got to live a nice life. But the life I get to live as a missionary, as God's servant, is beyond anything I could have ever asked for. It is exceeding abundantly above. God's trustworthiness in his protection, trustworthiness in his provision, has been limitless with us. He's trustworthy in his promises. We had this prayer request when we started out, and I think I'll end with this point. This is the one thing that we said in every church we went to. And I think if I could go back and re-listen to everything, I believe I can make that statement emphatically. When churches asked us while we were on deputation, how can we pray for you? This was our answer. We don't want to mess up our kids. We do not want, taking our kids away from mom and dad, they grew up here. Hope's born and raised in Tampa. Our first grade teacher was our son's first grade teacher at Providence. We have deep, deep roots here. And our kids love their grandparents. And ministry can sometimes mess the kids up. And our prayer was this, that God would guard our children from growing up in a situation to where they would not passionately love God and love his call to ministry. And a few weeks back, I had the opportunity of being, some of you may know Tom Craig up in Tennessee. He and I served together in South Carolina at Calvary Simpsonville. He passed away a few years ago. I had the opportunity of being back in his church just a few weeks back. And we had Austin, Camden, and Taylor, three of our four, with us there. And I had spoken in Sunday school and I preached in the morning service and I had responsibility for Sunday night. And I was like, you know, the people have heard from me all day long. And I just asked my kids, I said, would you guys mind just sharing just from your heart what God has taught you through your time on the mission field? And I'm not going to tell you what to say, how to say it, how long to say it. I'm just going to give you an opportunity. And my wife got up and she spoke first. And then my little girl Taylor is now 17. She was three and a half when we took her to the field. Then my son Camden who's now 18 and getting ready to start his first year of Bible college with a sense that God's calling him back to Africa as a pastor. And then my son Austin who just finished his undergrad in pastoral ministries with the intent of being a youth pastor. And I heard them testify, not my mom and dad are awesome, they're cool, but that God did this and God did that. And this is what he's doing in my life. And then I had to get up and speak after that. And you know what happened, I got up and I started crying. Because I thought, I sat there and I thought, full circle, full circle by God's grace, taking my little girl as a three year old, and I'll show a picture, you'll see a picture of her with a little grass thatched church building behind her, where she's barefoot, running with the children behind her, with the African children running behind her. And I say lovingly, she's been running barefoot in Africa ever since. God has protected the hearts of my children by his grace, And I give testimony because of this, because of the prayers of God's people. Every one of our supporting churches who have been with us since the beginning heard that prayer request of ours and prayed that prayer for us. Now our kids can mess up tomorrow and they can turn from the Lord tomorrow as well. But I'm testifying before you tonight that God is trustworthy in his promises that we claimed on his authority of his word before we went to the field and while we've been on the field. He's taken what was the beginning in our track of life, and our sense of God leading us into ministry, and our preparation for ministry, and our experiences in business and in ministry, and he's moved all of that to use it to where we're out in the field, and that's what we wanna show you tonight. Our presentation is not about fully educating you on Africa, but rather giving you a glimpse into how God has used you and worked through us to advance his church in Africa. And that's our heartbeat. We want to say thank you, we want to say praise the Lord, and we want to say God is trustworthy. Wherever you are in your life, whatever your circumstances are right now, whatever your burdens may be, whatever your capacities are, would you take the promise from Scripture? Would you take the command from Scripture? Another power outage? I heard you had power outages last night. That's my signal to stop, I don't know. I'm looking at the floor. Wow, I knew you had a techie, tech, well, anyway. I will stop in a second. I don't know what that was all about. But would you take the command, the invitation that God gives us in his word to trust him? Trust him with all your heart, not just a piece of it. Trust Him with your job. Trust Him with the community that He's placed you in. Trust Him with the position that He's given you, the financial bank account that He's given you, the challenges that you have as a parent, whether old or young as a parent. Would you just trust Him? Take Him at His word. Because God is trustworthy. He's trustworthy because who He is. He's trustworthy because what He has said. And He's trustworthy because what He's done. And I'm just one example. This book is full of so many more. And you have your own story of that as well. So overlay that understanding with where you are today in your heart and let God work. What we wanna do now for the next few minutes. is to take you quickly to Africa, give you a quick insight. And by the way, we have some of our little prayer. This is all we could afford, the small cards. We couldn't afford the big ones. I'm joking. They messed up, so they gave us small cards instead. But these are in the back. There's a website on the back. If you go to it, it's just going to basically say it's under construction. We need help in that area. It's been under construction for a while. But Lord willing, we're going to get that sorted soon. So just keep that and pray for us. We're going back. We're going back with just one child this time. And so that'll be hard on both my wife and I. But let me take you real quickly and give you just a quick little recap of what God's been doing in our lives. This is our family now. Camden, the one that's next to Hope, will be staying behind to start his first year of Bible College. And Lord willing, he'll come back to us in December. We're going to try to keep Africa in his blood, trying to take him back as often as we can to keep all of that active in his life. So this is Austin, our son Austin, just graduated from Bible College. And this is Holly, our pastor's daughter. And they will be traveling for the school for the next two years. He'll start working on his master's, Lord willing, very soon, and then they'll be searching for a church that God would lead them to. This is our son, David. He did his studies in South Africa. He's our oldest. He did his studies there in Johannesburg, has an undergrad in film and screenwriting, and then got a post-grad degree as well. His wife, Michelle, is South African, and she's an architect. They now both live in Cape Town, which is about 16 and a half hours of a drive from where we are in Pretoria and where they are. We are with Baptist Mid-Missions. We, as I said earlier, we joined Baptist Mid-Missions in 2002 and have been active missionaries with them since 2000, well I guess technically since 2002 as well, but been on the field since 2005. So when we first started out, we started out in the country of Zambia, an English-speaking country. At the time when we went out, Zambia had the second highest proportion of orphans anywhere in the world. There were about 11 million people there. And as I already said as well, the average age was 16. It was a rural ministry. And most of our ministry was based on the rural environment that we were in. But we, from the beginning, have always had the heartbeat of being, of setting up a model for ministry. And what God has allowed us to do is now we've relocated into South Africa. Our mission is now registered in South Africa. We opened it for Baptist Midmissions. But we opened it as Baptist Midmissions Southern Africa because our desire is to, to work with the lower half of Africa. They call it Anglo-African. You have Francophone and you have Anglophone. This is the English side of Africa with the exception of Mozambique, which is Portuguese. But we've had ministry that has been able to allow us to go into both Mozambique and to Lesotho and also into Zimbabwe. And God is continuing to allow us to touch and also into Malawi as well, which is right above Zambia. So God is continuing to grow our ministry. What he's done for us is he's provided a greater base of operation for us in South Africa because of it being first, second, and third world development as a city. So what I would like to really be able to communicate to you is, first of all, where we started out in Zambia, from 2005 to 2010. Our purpose in being there was to provide leadership to the team, but to also provide sustainability for our ministries across the board. Baptist Mid is a church planning mission. We were a part of a church planning team both in the village as well as in the city there, both rural dynamics that are there. This is our very first Sunday there that I alluded to with my little girl, Taylor, who went initially to church with hose and her patent leather shoes when she came out. We were like, where are your shoes? Where are your stockings? And she's like, well, none of the other kids had them, so I took mine off. I wanted to be like the kids. And my daughter's heart is African, and we praise God for that. So in our ministry there, we helped to set up an orphan care ministry through the local church. We were trying to create a model that could be replicated to other churches as a model for God's mandate for the church's response when the family fails to step in. And God allowed us to be a part of the work there to get some, this is, by the way, a village that was just a few minutes away. If you were with us in the very beginning when we started out, these are some of the same pictures, just these two or three would have been the same pictures we would have shown you in the beginning. This was the village that was closest to our house, and we had ministry there. There's now a church in that village, Salvation Baptist Church, and we praise the Lord for that. And we started out with this family. This is the Muwallis and the Jerries. We took in in 2006, March of 2006, we started caring for a group of families. five sibling orphans that were all orphaned by both mom and dad dying within a matter of two months from complications from AIDS that they had. And the church maintained oversight for the children. Our organization, our mission that I was overseeing did not sign the dotted line. Everything went through the local church, and that was our model from the beginning, was how can the local church respond? So the Jerries, the adults in the back, took these five children in on their own, and they've raised them. In memory, the youngest one, who is, well, you can see which one would be the youngest. She just graduated high school, just this last December. And I literally heard just last week that she's changed her name. Now, she came into the family as a Mawalla. That's the same name, that's her family name. but she's changed her name to the Jerries. And so now she's taken on the last name of her adoptive mom and dad that are there. And so we've been able to see the church just step in and minister to this family and grow them. Many of the children, several of the children are still actively serving in the local church, but others have graduated and gone on for their college studies there as well. And I know cows are a little unusual thing to see in a presentation, but this is the basis for which a lot of the ministry that God's allowing us to be a part of in Zambia, I'm sorry, in South Africa, has been started by. God provided, miraculously provided a farm to us there in Zambia, a 2,000 acre farm. And through that farm, I mapped out a five-year business plan for using these cattle. and growing a cattle operation so that we could generate income to be able to sustain not only the work that our ministry was a part of, but also our churches and our Bible school ministry there as well. And through this, we had 290 cows when we finalized the project and began to sell off. And through this, we have been able to help ministry after ministry. There's a church plant in Chapata, which is near the Malawian border. We were able to send $30,000 to that church. This is one of our mission works there in Chapata to be able to help them. Another $30,000 was invested in the same town that we were at there in Choma. We have been able to provide back to our nationalized Bible school ministry now 40 acres of land that has buildings and houses. We built a house there for sustainability for the school there as well, in addition to some of what you'll see on our side in South Africa. And so we praise the Lord for how God has used the cattle and the ministry there on the farm to be able to not only sustain work, but to create new opportunities for getting the gospel advanced and more churches being established. So we're excited because that's a ministry that is continuing to work. We nationalized the work there in Zambia. This is Pastor Harrison Banda. He now is continuing the work on his own with the orphan care ministry going out through his church and he's going into the other churches there in the rural communities and continuing to invest in them as well. In 2010, we shifted to South Africa. And this is quite a contrast from where we are before. There's a pioneering workforce there as well. And we've been there since 2010, but we had to take an initial six to eight months just getting permission from our mission to be able to stay there because it was a new field for us to open up. And while it has been a pioneering work for us, it has been It has been a super exciting ministry for us because it has just taken the lid off of the opportunities for us in getting behind local pastors there, and getting behind local churches there, local gospel-centered Baptist churches there, and being able to launch ministry out. And being able to have an investment through the relationships that we have with the pastors to then be able to encourage God's people to get out of the pew and out in the community for the sake of the gospel has been an exciting thing for us to be a part of. If I think of South Africa, I think of, in one word, I would describe South Africa as being a nation of contrast. There is extremes from one end to the other. This is a shack community that is not too far from where we're at. This is the way many people, three minutes away, I don't have a slide of the shack community that is literally three minutes away from our house, three minute walk by the way, but this is the way that many in South Africa live. Poverty in South Africa, the unemployment rate is about 26 and a half percent. And officially and unofficially, it's been estimated at nearly near 50%. So you can just imagine the extreme. But while we have this in one background, we have this in another background. This is Naisna. This is about 16 hours away from us. But that's the contrast. From where we live, we have people living in a shack community. We can get in our car and drive 20 minutes, and we're in Africa's largest mall. In some sections of our mall, it's five stories. There's Cartier and all the other fancy big names that are there as well. So one extreme to the other, a great, tremendous amount of contrast. The poverty hits both the black communities as well as the white communities. These are Afrikaans children living in their own squatter camp and it's something that just hits everybody and it's something that we're confronted by on a daily basis. One of the other great areas of contrast that we see in South Africa is with the relationships of the people that are there. I have had opportunity of traveling to many, many places around the world and I've never been in a place where I've seen a more gracious people group than I've seen in South Africa. some of the characteristics of a South African will cause us as Americans to just step away in amazement with how gracious South Africans can be. And while that statement is true and it's from my heart and it's representative of what I see every day, not only is it a place where there is great peace and great graciousness, there is also a very, very prevalent understanding of what we see right here. And this is one example and the story that I'm gonna tell you right now happens on a daily basis. The man that is standing up has, you can't see it in the picture, but he has a pipe in his hand and he's beating two guys. And the reason he's beating these two guys is not because they've stolen something, not because they've done something, it's just simply those two guys that are on the ground are from Malawi, another country. And the guy that's standing up is South African. And he doesn't like the fact that there's a Malawian in his area. And so he's beating him just for that reason. There's a term that maybe you're familiar with, it's called xenophobia. And it's a fear of nationals. It's a citizen of one country having a fear, supposed fear, of other people coming in from other nations. And what they fear is that their jobs are gonna be taken and their land is gonna be taken and everything else is gonna be taken. South Africa is the New York City of Africa. And there are people desperate to get out of their countries where they are oppressed, where they are under dictatorships, where their lives are threatened daily. And so they've come to South Africa, much like many come to America, for a way of escape. But the violence that we see, you see, I'm telling you, you see a bit of it on the news. We see it daily. We see it weekly. Maybe weekly would be a better way to describe it. We hear about it. As often as we talk with another South African, we hear of another story, of another beating. And the beatings that happen there are brutal. It's not just somebody broke into my house and stole my stuff. It's slicing and dicing of people. There is a very obvious lack of value of life that we see in South Africa. And when I think about South Africa, and by the way, even in this presentation, there are some aspects that I just wish I could talk more about, but I won't be able to because of time. But when I think about South Africa, I recognize it as being a nation like most nations, where there is the depravity of man. It is a nation in great need. And what do they need? Do they need more missionaries to just get up and say, hey, I've left everything and I've come, so listen to me? Do they need more programs? Do they need more government intervention? Do they need more sensitivity classes? No, they need the gospel. They need the gospel. And the exciting thing for us is they're open to the gospel. Much more so even than what we see here. The church is active there in South Africa. The church is awake in South Africa. Many of the churches are awake. The church that God's allowed us to be a part of as our primary church for involvement, they're awake and they're active and they're looking for more opportunities to embrace the new South Africa. South Africa's only been independent since 94. When apartheid ended in 94, Nelson Mandela came into power as the first black president in South Africa. Apartheid ended and there were radical changes and those changes are still happening but it's still first generational for many. And they're just trying to figure it out. And the gospel already has it figured out. We're excited because we have the opportunity of partnering with local national pastors, South African pastors, in other countries where we have had opportunity to step in. And we build a relationship with them to say, how can we help you accomplish the mandates of scripture? How do we help you get your people more involved? We're not coming in with our programs and trying to pitch an idea to you. My job at Providence was this, John Monroe, my pastor, that I served under for six years, said this, I'm hiring you, and this is why I left the business world, because he said, I lack the gift of administration, I don't want to hurt God's people, I need your help. Would you quit your job? Would you come on staff and help me with this one job description? I know where I want to go. but I don't know how to get there. Well you, your job is to hear my heart, to look for my heart, to listen to my heart as I listen to God's heart and then map out a plan to help us get there. In God's faithfulness in preparing me, he's positioned us in South Africa to get to know the South African pastors, to know their hearts. to take what their hearts being expressed are and how it lines up with scripture and then helping them get there as a partner without threatening the autonomy of that local church. And I know that's a lot of philosophy, but that's just the bottom line. We get to help encourage pastors and churches to strengthen them in their ability, in their efforts to advance the cause of Christ. To embrace and to respond to the needs of the orphans, the widows, the broken, the hurting, the destitute, the refugees. We're able to get involved in all of those through the local church. This picture right here is representative of a church that is being planted or replanted, I should say. It's been a stagnant church for the last two or three years. The grass was all grown. You'll see another picture of it in just a second. I'm almost out of time. So I'm talking fast. Everybody breathe. I forget. I forget to let you guys breathe. And I do want to say this. Can you rejoice with me in God's goodness that I'm still excited about what God's doing after 16 years of doing this? I could talk about this all night. This is not, look what Jim and Hope have been doing. This is, look what God's doing. This is not, I had so many manuals, so many strategic planning manuals when we went to Zambia. You know what we did the first week? I threw them all away. They were worthless. This, what's represented in this picture right here is a replanting of a church, a Baptist church in a Muslim and Indian community on the west side of Pretoria. And five Baptist pastors got together, and I happened to be at a fraternal where the pastors were meeting, and they talked about this plan of working together as churches to say, how can we come together as independent-minded, focused Baptist churches to restart this work in such a needy area? I don't know, there's 20 or 30 mosques in this community. And so I sat down with them and I said, well, let's talk this out. Well, they talked it out and I was listening as well. And I said, you know, one of the things this church has been sitting empty and it's overgrown and it's going to have maintenance needs and everything else. You know what? I'm kind of good at organizing work teams. How about we set up a work day to get all the churches involved to come out for a work day? And they said, that's a great idea. I said, all right, I'll map out a plan. We don't want it to be overwhelming. We'll make it simple. We'll outline everything. I went out there with my guys a few days ahead of time, mapped everything out. We prayed for 50 people to come out. We thought, boy, that would be awesome if, on average, 10 people from each church came out if we had 50 people. And on the day that this work day happened, we had 152. And I'm excited about those extra two. Because if I say 150, you might think, well, he really meant 140. But we had 152 people. And I just want you to think about the imagery of that as the cars holding 152 people in this Muslim community started caravanning through the community and pulling up to what was known in that community as the Old Baptist Church. And that church is now holding weekly Sunday morning services and weekly Bible studies throughout the week, reaching out in the community. There's only about a dozen or so that are coming to the church. but it's Christ's church, and Christ has a promise that he will build his church. God's people responded, these are South Africans, not a single other missionary in there other than my family. All South Africans came out, and you'll see some more pictures of that. We praise God, I spent too long on that slide, but we praise God for what he's doing there. Our ministry that God's allowed us to be a part of, this is a ministry that we've started, it's a continuation of the Ark ministry that we had while we were in Zambia, but it's now called Crosspoint. We have three priorities, church planting and development, strategic resourcing, and gospel advancement. And that looks like, within our context and for simplification, looks like two things. We work with churches to help either get them started or to help sustain them. Baptists have done a good job planting churches. We've done a horrible job, from my estimation of being in Africa, we've done a bad job or a poor job or an insufficient job, however we want to diplomatically say it, at watering those churches. And God's giving us opportunity to go behind some of the other missionaries that have done a good work in starting a church to encourage the pastors, to provide resources for them. Using my background in business, I have applied strategic value points in going into a church where I meet with the pastor and I can assess in ways that that pastor, because he's too plugged in, he misses. And he's given us an opportunity to finding out needs, and then we facilitate meeting those needs. I've got a guy, my kids tease me, they say, Dad, you got a guy for everything. Literally, you need a leg amputated? I got a guy for that. You need a car? I got a guy for that. By God's grace, he taught me networking when I was in business, and we've done that. We've created a network through churches and through businesses in South Africa. that honestly, if somebody says, we need this, it doesn't matter how big it is. If somebody came to me and said, we need a helicopter, if it was a legitimate need, I am convinced, based on God's pattern of how he has proven himself to us over and over again, I would have a helicopter for that person, for that pastor. And we've provided, whether it be training or computers or conferences or whatever else the need might be, God's allowed us to meet those needs in a way that helps to strengthen that pastor, to encourage that pastor or his family and to strengthen the church as well in the process. We have our involvement in helping churches and helping pastors as our one entity. We have children's ministries that is divided up into both the black communities and a white community as well. We have 40 children from our Bible Club ministry. You'll see a slide of that in just a minute. We have 83 children that are All for Connors, predominantly white population, they're All for Connors. The intent is not to segregate them, but it's just because of the political scheme that is there That's the way it is. All of these children, all 83 of them have been physically or sexually abused. And God has now allowed us to take where there was no church involvement. God has now allowed us to bridge a connection from Pretoria North Baptist Church with the Gratia Children's Home and seeing the church And God's people through the local church respond to the heart needs and the physical needs of these children as well. And then obviously the evangelism and discipleship. We have about five or six Bible studies that we lead throughout the week. Our kids are involved in that as well. I also teach Sunday school. And the evangelism and discipleship is involved with our getting people involved as well and actually acting out on God's mandate of involvement in caring for the needs of the broken and hurting and filling out, finding programs to help meet that need. And just to give you one perspective of God's provision, this was not necessarily, this is actually an old presentation, and that's probably why I'm scrambling here a little bit, because this is one of my older ones that I sent. But I'm not sure how many pictures of this is, but this is when we landed in Zambia, this was the house God miraculously provided for us. I really have a description for this that should be from barn to beauty. This was a barn that was on our property and God gave us a vision to develop it into a ministry center and this is the ministry center that has been developed because of it. And we have had 150 plus people in there in that building from one of the area local churches. And you'll see through the slides, you'll see some of our uses of this building for camps, for conference center, for pastor's conference, for teen camp, and for special workshops that we've been able to do. So we praise God, this is the building that he's provided for us. This is on our home property, and it's our ministry center there as well. And I think I will end with that, and not tell you about this one. But if you guys, next year we'll tell you about this one.