Park Street Church

[missions response] 2010
  

Say "YES" to our mission program and missionaries 

For 200 years Park Street Church has been passionate about her commitment to missions and concerned about the good news in all its aspects. We have planted churches, started schools, opened hospitals and clinics, empowered local people to start businesses and invited many people to salvation in Jesus. We have welcomed internationals into our homes and reached out to students on their campuses.

We had prayed for 1000 to say "YES" and 1025 have responded "YES"Your yes simple means you are on board as a stakeholder in our church and her mission here in Boston and around the world. It means you are going to PRAY, GIVE and INTEGRATE missions into your life.

When you said “yes” to missions, you agreed that Jesus makes a difference to you and you think other people should be offered the option to say “yes” to him, too. We do this together at Park Street because doing it alone is  hard abd inefficient. Jesus calls us to it together. We call the joint effort “missions.” 

Missions is taking the good news of Jesus, the words and the works of God, to people who need and want it. To people who have never heard of Jesus, to thoswho are living in countries where they have no access to the good news, to international visitors, to our countries, to students at Boston universities, and to struggling people on our own streets.  

When we said “yes” to missions, we agreed to buy into this mission during 2010, to pray for someone else who’s bought in, and to put our money where our mouth is. This is to remind us of ways we can live out together, this is our “yes.”

To pledge to our Missions Budget for 2010  go to www.parkstreet.org/pledge
To get on our YES email list send your information to missions[at]parkstreet.org

Integrate

Is God calling you to volunteer your time, skills, and gifts this year? There are several opportunities in the coming months:

♦  Haiti (April): Volunteers for earthquake relief and rebuilding.
♦   Kazakhstan (May): Experienced professionals in human resources to train executives in HR skills.
♦   Dearborn Mission Plunge (June): This weekend trip is particularly geared towards anyone interested in becoming a Park Street Church Missionary. Learn about Islam and join in friendship ministry with Arab-American Muslims.
♦   Indonesia (August): Team members to lead a spiritual retreat for World Relief staff in Asia.
♦   Kyrgyzstan (November): Team members to partner with IFES Ukraine in doing outreach in Central Asia.

Support

At this year's annual meeting we approved a mission budget of $1.765 million for 2010. This includes around $850k in missionary related support, $255k for outreach to internationals, $182k for campus outreach and local ministries, $250k for missions support staff and programs, and about $228k for partnerships and short-term missions projects. 2 Corinthians 9:7 reminds us “Each should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” With around 1000 of us who said “YES” to missions, that is an average of around $150 per month per person. We appreciate your personal pledges to missions, both big and small, and your passion for Jesus and his work in the world.

Please remember:only offering designated to Missions contribute to the missions budget.

Prayer

Prayer requests from our missionaries: 

Jim and Andrea

♦   The book of Psalms is being printed now, out of country. Please pray for this to go well and for distribution to speakers of the language in 3 countries. Distribution is difficult due to controls and restrictions.
♦   Please pray for permission to be granted to the Bible Society to publish Isaiah in-country. They have been waiting for permission since Nov 2009. The book is ready to be printed and distributed.
♦   Pray for Jim who will be traveling to a conference in Turkey for organizations (local and from abroad) partnering in ministry in Central Asia (Feb 26 - Mar 2).
♦   Pray for Katherine. She is competing in an away basketball tournament in Germany (Feb 24-27). Pray for safety and for the team to play well. Pray that she will be able to keep up with her schoolwork.

Stuart & Sindia Foster

♦  Praise: We are on chapter 27 of Isaiah. Pastor Simoes left at 4 this morning and his son, Benjamin, seems to have bronchitis and is on antibiotics.
♦  His fever is down finally, but he is still too weak to eat (not eaten for 3 days). But it sounds less scary than it did yesterday.
♦  Pray: We sat at dinner (the whole team) and talked about the scariness of Bible translation -- about deaths, scary illnesses, and other dramatic events that seem to mysteriously coincide with progress in Translating the Bible for people who have never had it in their language. • Pray: It is sobering and scary to realize how much this work is a target of Satan. And it is humbling to know how precious to God it is.
♦   Pray: We are glad of your prayers and support. A smaller crisis of today is the accidental breaking our water filter (to enable safe drinking water) which we don't think we can replace for months. Cholera is a major concern at this time of year (rain spreads the disease in water sources. It is such a concern that the governor of the province is visiting the area because a man was murdered near here this month because he was suspected of spreading cholera).

Tom & Terri

♦   Praise God for His Spirit in ministering to fellow workers here, healing and preventing various misunderstandings.
♦   Praise God for renewed health after a few weeks of lingering sicknesses in our family.
♦   Praise God for the strength to speak very frankly to co-workers about the need to make ethical decisions in our work. (We successfully suspended a project in which Sudanese translators had been receiving money for years while producing virtually nothing.)
♦   Pray for our growing church, and its building fund campaign to increase ministry capacity.
♦   Pray for my (Tom) participation on a discussion panel in an Embassy-sponsored, internationally-broadcast event, around a pre-screening of a new MLK Jr. documentary. Many community leaders will be in attendance, and listening very closely (March 5).
♦   Pray that our team become more confident in limiting projects in order to do them well. (We tend to say "yes" to too many requests, and end up not fulfilling most of them to a quality-level.)
♦   Pray for Treyson's school situation: We are choosing not to pay a non-refundable deposit for next year at his current (sub-standard) school, but still don't know how we're going to pay for his new school.  

Tom & Michelle

♦   Please pray that people were renewed in their walks at our Kazakhstan Staff Conference.