Moondougie's Blog

Please let me introduce the 2013 TACC Summer Mission to the Adivasi Team:

Ladies first…

Marcia Lichte, AJ Ferrari, Anna Lichte, and Emily Wojtanowicz (left to right.) Marcia and Anna made their first trip last summer. This will be the first (of many?) trips for AJ and Emily.

And now the gentlemen…

Doug Keller, Blake Keller, John Kruckenberg, and Mitchell Runion (left to right.) John was a member of the first two teams we sent to India and Doug made his first trip last summer (I feel so weird talking about myself in another person…). This will be the first trips to India for both Blake and Mitchell.

Please keep us all in your prayers and when you see us out and about, ask us to share about what God’s doing in our lives as we prepare.

I’m waiting to hear back from a couple of those who applied and were interviewed, as to whether they choose to accept the mission…

…then I can announce the team members for our summer mission to the Adivasi of India’s chicken neck.

Stay tuned…

We are interviewing prospective team members for both the summer and fall teams this Sunday, February 24th.

If you believe God is calling you to go to India as a part of one of these teams, please join us in the Fireside Room. We will begin at noon and continue until all those who’d like to be considered have been interviewed.

If you’ve been on a previous trip, you still need to submit an application and testimony. Interviews of people who’ve been team members on prior trips will be abbreviated, but applications and interviews are still required of them.

If you need an application, please contact me (Doug Keller) and I’ll get you one by email.

I’m looking forward to what God has in store for our ministry, in partnership with LTC/SAS, to the Adivasi, for His glory!

Plans are underway for TACC’s 2013 trips to India.

If you’d like to find out more about what we are planning for our two trips this year – whether or not you know for sure you’d like to participate as a team member who actually goes to India – please come to the info meeting this Sunday.

We will be providing pizza for those who come to the Fireside Room right after church (planning to start at noon, unless Bob’s sermon goes long…) Join us as we share about the two trips we are planning: the dates, purposes, goals for each trip. We will try to share as much information as we think you might be interested in and are planning to answer any questions you might have. Applications to join one of the two teams will be available at the meeting.

Interviews of those who’d like to apply will be two weeks later, on Sunday, February 24th.

Let me know if you have any questions…hope to see you at the meeting this Sunday, February 10th!!

It is Sunday and we are back in a village church. Andrew delivered a powerful message from Acts 4 with Sanjay right on his heels with the translation. We met in a small house church and it made many of us think about what it was like for the early Christians.

After church we split the villagers into two adult groups and one children’s group. Andrew and Rick led the two adult groups through the discipleship training on the parables. The rest of us worked with the kids and shared the cube, played some games, taught them gospel songs and just loved them.

We then had lunch in the village and then said good bye to our translators and gave them small gifts. Our final bus ride back to the hotel included a stop for some last minute shopping and then we begin preparations to leave for the Bagdogra airport tomorrow morning.

This week has been a great blessing and had many different components than previous trips. The discipleship training was new, the medical camp hasn’t been done in about five years and both went extremely well. We also found that there is some success with the cows and sows project. We look forward to providing a report to the church so you can share the experience with us.

Tomorrow morning we will be going to the Bagdogra airport, then fly to Calcutta, then to Delhi, spend the night, and then to Dubai, and the last flight of 16 hours will bring us to LAX. Therefore, you will probably not hear from us again until we get to the church around 4:30 or 5:00 on Tuesday afternoon.

Your prayers have been appreciated and they worked !!! Everyone stayed healthy and safe during our time in India. We cannot thank you enough for your consistent prayer support. See you soon.

Today was our second day of discipleship training with about 100 Indian brothers and sisters in the LTC Hindi church. Before the gathering, we had the opportunity to tour LTC. Since it was Saturday morning, we found the campus filled with students doing their weekly chores to keep the facilities clean and running. We also got to witness firsthand some building projects that have begun as LTC continues to expand.

We then traveled a short distance to the school where the LTC Hindi church meets. After a short greeting, we broke into song. Auntie Mary Beth took the lead and had the whole group (American and Indian) singing praises to Jesus together. What a joy to worship together with our brothers and sisters in the Lord!

Just like Tuesday, we split our team and the large group into three. Mary Beth and I took one group, Pablo and Bill another, and Rick and Cathy a third. Our group was again very interactive and many of the believers jumped right into the training. We worked through the Parable of the Sower from Mark 4 and Acts 2:42-47 which describes the body life of the early Jerusalem church. All along, we sought to teach them a simple, 4 step approach to studying the Word of God which they could adapt and use for any passage of Scripture. We also shared our testimonies and took some time to train them in using the Evangecube to share the gospel with their friends and family.

After the training we gave Evangecubes to several who desired to use them in sharing their faith. We also spent about 30 minutes in prayer for any that had need. One young man came forward and shared that he was a new youth pastor. It was a great joy to be able to pray for him as he enters into his new ministry, a ministry similar to my own.

In the evening, we had the joy of sharing a meal of Domino’s Pizza with Peter and Moala Kashung and some other leaders of LTC. As Rick said, that pizza really hit the spot! It was also a blessing to be able to sit down with Peter and hear some of the future vision for LTC and the various ministries here.

Tomorrow is our last day of ministry here in Siliguri. What a blur! We will be visiting another village church where I will be preaching. After lunch, Arun, Mary Beth, and Cathy will be leading us in a children’s program with (we are hoping) 150-200 children. Pray that the Holy Spirit would give us the words to speak and the energy and strength to finish our trip well. Thank you for your prayers and partnership in the ministry of the gospel. Your prayers are bearing much fruit!

Jai Mashi dear friends! God has blessed us with good weather, good health and a good harvest. This morning Bill shared letters he got from his prayer partners, Dave and Gail Arneson. We were amazed at how fitting their words were to us on this particular day. Thanks Dave and Gail.

We prayed together for God to show us a miracle of healing at the medical camp. We again loaded up the van and headed out to Manja Tea Estate. We traveled for an hour and a half when Themrei announced only 2 hours to go. Themrei seems to enjoy teasing us. We love that guy!

We picked up our translators along the way and were joined by a doctor and a nurse/pharmacist. The villagers arrived slowly today but we were able to share the Gospel with about 130 men women and children. Andrew was on a roll today and the Holy Spirit was upon him and giving him just the right words to speak. Bill was soaking wet after playing Frisbee with the kids and Pablo got to pick tea.

The boys and girls really liked the ‘tricks’ I performed and they enjoyed blowing bubbles, too. A cooling rain showered down on us from the mountainous jungle. A really great day! Incredible India!!!!

Today we were unable to go to the villages due to a strike by merchants and business people that included all commercial transportation. This meant that we wouldn’t have the bus and for the most point it appeared that most people stayed off the roads today. They were protesting the rise in gas prices ($6.00 per gal) and the government allowing Walmart and Carrefore to come into India. The concern is that these super retail stores will kill the business in the small village stores. – Sounds just like home.

So we had an unplanned day of rest at the hotel. Andrew had an opportunity to go to LTC and sit in on a class on World Religions and then he addressed the class of 19 students for about fifteen minutes. It was a good day for us to catch up on sleep, laundry and play a few card games. Tomorrow we are back at it with a medical camp and on Saturday we have discipleship training.

Your prayers are appreciated and it has been really good to connect with many of you on Skype.

Halleluiah, Halleluiah what a blessed day for the glory of God. We went to the village of Jamakial. Today was our Medical Camp and it was unbelievable with so many people you could not keep up with them. The registered number of people there to see the Doctor was 250 with another 50 who came to see what we were doing there. We could not keep up with the number of people that were waiting to hear what we had to say and most of them had not heard about Jesus. All of us were kept so busy spreading the good news to all of them waiting for us to start a new group.

It was truly amazing and they just kept coming and accepting Christ. Is that something? The day just kept on going strong with many wonderful experiences by all. The story of a women who said “I am so glad that you came from so far away to tell us the good news”. We gave out many Bibles to so many new believers and they were so happy to hear about God and how they would go the heaven and have eternal life with him. At the end of presenting the cube one older woman said “when can I go to heaven?”. I almost cried. She followed me throughout the village the rest of the day. This new program was a very successful way to have many receptive people who stood in lines waiting to hear the good news. Another thing that I noticed was that there were a lot of men there today. What a great harvest for the glory of God.

Today we embarked on a new mission. After prayer over Skype with Rob Marton’s life group (very encouraging- thank you!) and a short devotional from Mary Beth, we hopped into the bus once again to go out to the villages. Yesterday our focus was evangelism, going hut-to-hut sharing the gospel. Today, we gathered with believers from three villages for discipleship training.

Discipleship training is a new element added to our short-term mission here. For this time, the pastors gathered believers from three villages to be trained by our team in one of the essentials to the faith, reading and studying Scripture. When we planned the discipleship training over a month ago, we determined that this training would need to be interactive and take a question and answer format. This would require more than simply us coming in and teaching and the Adivasi believers listening. This would require a back and forth interaction. This is not something we had ever done before and we had some concern as to how well the format would work, especially considering all of the communication and translation issues.

By God’s grace, the interactive format turned out to be a great success! The people were very responsive and volunteered answers to questions freely. You could sense an excitement in their eyes as they engaged and grew in their ability to answer questions by reading the text of Scripture. Through our interactions, we were also pleasantly surprised at how well many of the young believers knew Scripture already.

Mary Beth and I spent several hours with about 35 believers in the village of Jabra. We began our time with them by singing a few songs and sharing our testimonies of how we came to know Jesus. Then, we dove into the training. They were very receptive and enthusiastically participated in everything. We together worked through the parable of the Sower from Mark 4, and the three “lost” parables from Luke 15. While at first they were slow to respond, by the end I would ask a question and the whole group would respond in unison.

We concluded our time with the believers in Jabra by offering to pray for any that had need. One after one, nearly 10 of them came forward and asked for prayer. Mary Beth and I laid hands on them and prayed for healing (for those who were sick physically and mentally), for faith (for a woman who asked that God would increase her faith), and for a new pastor who traveled from another village just for our training! What a blessing to pray for these brothers and sisters in Christ.

Overall, we were blessed by having wonderful fellowship with the believers here today. God’s Spirit is working in their hearts and the Word of God is spreading and taking root in fertile ground. Pray for these believers from these three villages that they would grow in their love for the Word of God. Pray that the Holy Spirit would continue to help them understand the truth of Scripture and to apply it to their lives. Pray also that they would take the Word to others in the villages. Thank you for being our co-laborers in the gospel…you are truly a vital part of our team.