Leaving for Africa
date posted: Jul 22, 2007
Monday afternoon, my wife Linda, sons JD and Andrew, and our team of Wayne and Barb Vibbert, Becky Bell, Karen Parsons, Jason Clanton, Maxine Huff, and Francis Huff, will leave for Burundi to serve on a 3 week VISA pilgrimage. The group will be involved in teaching at our growing Hope Africa University in Burundi, helping Karen Parsons organize the library, organize some Basketball camps, teach children’s Christian Educators, and serve wherever else we can.
I will be speaking at a Burundi pastor’s retreat on July 27-28 and then teach a Master’s course in Biblical Leadership and Communication at Hope Africa University for the following two weeks. Linda and I and our sons travel to Rwanda where I will preach, then hold a Missionary Retreat near Kibogora, where we have a medical facility. It is the same one where Dr. Al and Louise Snyder served many years. We have friends and former parishioners from Indianapolis, Dr Dave and Kathy Fryman who have just moved to Kibogora to do medical work. It will be fun to see them and to see the hospital that I have read so much about and had so many friends and family serve at. Al Snyder’s book “On a Hill Far Away” describes medical missionary life at Kibogora and the middle of the night escape in April of 1994 on the day that tragic genocide broke out in Rwanda. Many of the Kibogora staff were killed during that time.
The Kingdom is large and God’s servants are everywhere. This joyful realization came to many of us again during the recent General Conference. We were blessed and enriched to have so many international guests in our homes, in our church, in our community.”
We rubbed shoulders with so many heroic servants of God from Haiti, Dominican Republic, China, Cambodia, Nigeria, Brazil, Europe, and India. We have much to learn from them. I will go to teach and preach, but I know that I will have much to learn from my brothers and sisters in central Africa.
If you think to pray for us, please do – that we may in some small way bless the church there, and that we may come home with ever enlarging kingdom hearts
Pastor Mark