Evangelism

The pastor has encouraged several organized evangelism events during the school vacation. Yesterday afternoon we loaded up over a hundred of the church members and drove a short distance to an area call Nan Plezi for the purpose of seeking lost souls. 

Pastor divided everyone up into small groups and then from there we walked through the village singing and stopping at houses, praying for the sick, encouraging believers, and inviting people to accept the Lord and be saved. 

Afterward we met back at the church for a final prayer and brief sharing. It was reported that eight souls chose to follow the Lord as a result of this time of witnessing. Pastor Voltaire plans to make contact with a church in that area for follow up and the group leaders agreed also to visit them again to see that they get connected with a church. 

Please join us in praying for these people and that true discipleship could take place as Jesus said, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And lo I am with you always, even unto the end of the age. Amen 

Youth Project

This is an epic event in my opinion.

The youth from the church were inspired to take on a building project for a family recently deported from the DR. A local family, Raymond Louis from our church, had taken them in to their own home when they had no place to go. Raymond has a wife and two children and this other family is a man and wife and I think three children or so. That's quite a crowd for Raymond's two room house. 

The youth along with the deacons decided to raise money and material donations among themselves and other church members to build a house on a piece of property donated by Raymond Louis. 

Again, I say this is epic. I am so excited to see them taking initiative to do something on their own and not sitting around expecting the mission to do it, or to pay them to do it. They now have a sense of accomplishment far beyond what there would have been if they were hired to do a job. They are beginning to see what they are able to do by themselves and that is a major step in development. 

I should say that much of the inspiration and motivation came from a very energetic source, namely, Wismith Joseph who is one of the deacons at our church. And I should further say that the first project of this nature was to finish out the little "deacon's depot" at the church. The youth were tasked then, as with this house project, with calculating the budget for the project, gathering supplies, coordinating the volunteer laborers and assuring that construction was executed according to specs. An "engineer" was assigned as project manager.  

Mike Martin assisted in an invaluable way with teaching construction methods and techniques; some of the guys do already have experience in masonry and building, but all were very enthused about the project. 

 Boss Hérode Fevry

Mackenson Laguerre

 Mike Martin

 Laine Sinexant (L) the engineer; and Nerlange Volcy (R)

 Mike and Deacon Augustin putting the metal on.

 Tiboutson and Renald working on the door

Teachers Seminar

We decided to try having a teachers seminar this year to address the need for more intellectual continuity among Christian teachers. It was a little intimidating since neither Mike nor I have teaching experience. We decided a two day seminar would give us a good gauge of both our capacity to host such a thing and also the interest for it in the community. 

Our goals were to equip teachers with better understanding of the issues and to consider answers to the questions of humanism and socialism. Also, to encourage a more disciplined learning environment. 

Pursuant to those goals we had the following subjects:

-The Christian Worldview (by Tony Jean)

- Student Discipline (Tony Jean)

- Classroom management (Moïse Oscar)

- Science and the Bible, can the two agree? (Matthew Morhart)

Tony Jean is a man who was instrumental in developing a new curriculum for Christian schools in Haïti, called Mwen Kapab. Currently the other books available are written from a evolution/humanism perspective and most of the teachers don't even realize what is at stake. The state creates the exams for 6th, 9th, and 12th grades and naturally they correspond with the secular content of their curriculum. 

It was a Godsend to meet Tony just a few weeks before the seminar when we went to check into using this curriculum in our own school. He understands the dichotomy in which the Christian teachers work and think and had already done some teaching on worldview. 

Moïse is the pastor's son and works in educational development. He has visited many schools and probably seen it all. 

Matthew Morhart is from the far NW corner of Haïti. He has translated a number of materials from Answers in Genesis and has mastered Creole making him a valuable speaker in the areas we were considering. He was the only non-native that we had speak this year. 

It's always difficult to gauge the effectiveness of a training of this kind, however I do think that the 90 some teachers and school directors that attended have been made to acknowledge the tendency to crawl out of their sacred box and into their secular box on Monday morning as the head off to work. They now have more exposure at least to the issues and hopefully a few tools to deal with them. 

Lidios Delouis having devotions at the start of the day. 

Pastor Matthew Morhart. 

Small morning refreshment. 

Mike takes care of registration and all the badges and certificates that are absolutely culturally essential. 

The schedule. 

A local school administrator filling out a worldview survey that Matthew used during his discourse. You can take the free worldview test here: http://www.worldviewweekend.com/test/register.php

Matthew explaining the difference between Science Historique and Science Experimental with the five stones on the floor.