It had been three years since IBC has been able to have a Global Outreach (GO) Team, sending IBC’ers on short-term mission trips. It’s exciting that God enabled us to send five teams in 2023—to Brazil, Vietnam, Utah, Kosovo, and now Spain.
This week and into next, five of our members (Dave and Helen Stansbury, Linda Watring, and Chad and Michelle Wingert) are partnering with IBC sent missionaries, Daniel and Karrie Bethel in Spain. Our team departed on October 6 and will return October 17.
Daniel and Karrie serve in Malaga, Spain at the International Headquarters for Christar International Mission, which focuses on the least-reached regions of the world: areas where people have no access to a church that presents the gospel in their language and in a culturally relevant way. Daniel and Karrie planted churches among Hindus in Bali, Indonesia. Now, Daniel serves as Director of Church Planting and Karrie as Women’s Ministry Coordinator for their Mission.
This week, the Bethels are sponsoring a THRIVE Conference for missionaries who work in these difficult unreached fields. They come together in Malaga for a week of fellowship, refreshment, and training to prepare to return with renewed strength to their challenging and often dangerous settings.
Our GO Team is ministering throughout this entire conference caring for and providing a VBS for the Missionary children.
These precious MK’s (missionary kids) live far from family and mostly in settings where there are no churches to provide fellowship or children’s ministries. Our team has prepared an entire curriculum to teach Bible lessons, crafts, and activities that they can enjoy.
Our GO team members can be stand-in grandparents for a week and love and encourage these kids, freeing the missionary parents to focus on their sessions and be refreshed themselves. When Gerri and I and our two daughters did this years ago for missionaries and their children in China, we were totally impressed with the character, teachableness and heart of the kids. (For one thing, they weren’t spoiled by American TV, etc!)
Be praying for our Spain team to:
1. Be an encouragement to Daniel and Karrie and the other missionaries.
2. Provide effective lessons and special love to the children.
3. Have a good one-day visit with Alvin and Kristen, who also serve missionaries from another agency while living in Malaga.
4. Have health, strength, safety, and unity.
5. Return to us encouraged with what God is doing through Christar, the Bethels, and the Hulls in some of the least reached and most challenging mission fields in the world today.
Thanks for praying! It is exciting how God uses the people of IBC to touch the world for the sake of the Gospel of Christ.