Hello everyone!
Hope you’re all doing well! This was a pretty big month for us. As we told you last month, Matt had the opportunity to travel to Ethiopia for the first time with Gilax, one of our Global mentors. They found that the church there is really struggling to reach the next generation. Very few of the churches did any sort of ministry with the youth, despite 75% of the country’s population being under the age of 25. They were able to teach many pastors in training at the Addis Ababa Bible College. We hope to continue teaching there, and eventually place a missionary there full time to train the locals.
Sam and Zephaniah, two of our mentors also had the opportunity to travel to Burundi! Burundi is a country has faced great hardship, but they are very receptive to the gospel and churches there have a desire to reach the next generation for Christ. 45% of the population there is under the age of 15. We were able to partner with the Baptist seminary in Burundi, and taught hundreds of pastors and church leadersabout how to start a youth bible study. Please pray that these pastors will put into practice what they learned.
A little update- back in November, we taught a total of 8 conferences, encouraging pastors and church leaders to pioneer a youth ministry at their churches. We recently followed up with all of the senior pastors who attended these conferences. Forty-one of them reported back that they had started a youth ministry at their church. In total, they added 315 youth and 184 parents of these youth to their churches in the last few months. This is a total of almost 500 people. Several of the pastors had also took our encouragement to involve the youth in evangelism. Their youth were the catalyst in planting 3 new churches, which have exploded to over 200 members total.
Thank you for your support and involvement in our ministry that allow ministry like this to go on. We are thankful to God for continue to bless us and increase our “borders”, and we pray that God will do the same for you!
Thank you,
Matt and Kelly Elmore