26 Sep Great News From Europe!
Today we share excerpts from a remarkable letter we just received for associate evangelists ministering in the refugee camps of Europe.
…The most overwhelming adventure is our visit and ministry to the 7,000 Muslim refugees at the Calais Jungle [a refugee tent-camp just outside Calais, France, labeled The Jungle]. It has been a humbling and a wonderful experience. The need here is astronomically huge and the challenges are multi-faced, but the joy of having unprecedented and unparalleled opportunities to minister and be a hope for these people is very rewarding. It’s life changing. We gave them food and other items, we sang, danced, cried with them and preached hope and redemption messages in the name of Jesus. Not only these Muslims (from Sudan, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Eritrea, Iraq) accepted the messages but many of them used their phones to record them. It has been an amazingly bold step. They officially thank us for doing this, and they urged us to sit in their small tents and drink their teas and eat their date nuts. We were humbled to be treated this way by people who literally have nothing. It’s heartbreaking and heart lifting. They begged us to come back more often. Many escorted us to edge of the Jungle.
The biggest problem here is that there are very few churches and believers in the area, so the presence of the church is nonexistent. For instance we had our training camp in the area with many villages and large population, but there is only one church with 15 believers, and not even a functioning catholic church. The nearest largest city of Bologne-sur-mer (80,000) has one Catholic Church with 100 members and one evangelical church with 30 members. That’s it. In Calais there are only 4 churches with less than 60 Christians in the whole city, whereas the Calais Jungle has 7,000 Muslim refugees. A missionary couple in the area told us that if we want to take care of the refugees who would be converted to Christ we must establish not only a training center but also a new church right away. The need can’t be much bigger and urgent than this. The church must forget talking about the immigration but start talking about the strategies to win the migrants to Christ, because they are already here, and by the thousands, even by the millions. A young Christian said that once a believer come to this camp and hear these stories of survival and resilience, his view of refugees and immigration will change.
Yours at the front-lines,
Emmanuel & Astrid and Salem Soni
Christian Adventures Partners, your faithful giving is helping fuel this vital outreach and many others just like it. We are initiating a November return to these same areas as we further our plans for training, outreach and the launch of tents across Europe. Thank you to our friends and partners for your prayerful support of this collaborative effort toward bringing the Answer to the desperate spiritual and social crisis Europe is presently facing.
Truly, now more than ever, the harvest is great! And thought the laborers are comparatively few, our partnership is having a significant influence at this crucial time! Thank you for your continued and faithful connection with your prayers and financial support. …And remember, 1 billion souls!
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