Stephen Bradd
Stephen is the preacher at the Clinton Church of Christ in Clinton, Illinois. We give him $200 a month which he says helps to pay for his health insurance for he and his family. The Clinton congregation currently averages 32 in attendance with 10 of those being children. Stephen works about 32-40 hours each week for the church and about 15-20 hours a week as a bookkeeper for a trucking business. He tells me that the majority of his time spent for the church is spent studying and preparing material for classes, sermons and articles for their website. AudioEvangelism. com is essentially an online tool for daily Bible study. Each weekday a lesson is posted as a transcript and as an MP3 file. This enables interested students of the word to either read or listen to the daily message which is generally 3-5 minutes in length. Soon they will have 600 lessons online in full text and MP3 format. Stephen tells me that they are getting over 200 unique visitors almost every day.
Audio Evangelism also has two CDS available for free to those that request it. They have had requests from over a dozen states and 20 foreign countries.
Sammy Flanary
The church gives Sammy Flanary $100 a month to help with his work with the Sunset International Bible Institute. Last fall he worked in Athens, Greece and Cairo, Egypt. In Athens he taught the books of Ephesians and James. The Athens Branch School has grown to 37 students now from the 4-5 that started with the school in 1997. The sampling of students has shifted form refugees of Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Nigeria to nine different nations with the greatest constiuency of Nigerian students. Although Sunset's objectives are for training men to carry out God's mission, there is opportunity to teach the nations by evangelizing, which has been done on a limited basis.
In Cairo, Egypt Sammy met up with Francis Habashy. Francis is 68 years of age. He told Sammy that one of his great battles was knowing how to deal with losing members to the upbeat worship styles of some of the coptics. The use of bands appealed to the people and they disregarded what they knew from Scripture. He had lost some 20 members to this type of movement. Does this sound familiar? Francis thought that his son, Alfred, would be the one to take his place in Cairo or some other Arabic nation. He is 42 years old and is willing at this time to start working on it. He just needs the help from our brotherhood to do it. In Cairo there are 16 million people living there. Another 5 million live in the outskirts of Cairo. Islam is the predominate religion.
Williams Benjamin Anarfi
Williams Benjamin Anarfi and his wife Josephine have 6 children. They have three boys and three girls. He writes that given to the poor state of work, he could not provide for his children's education. His senior daughter even left school at the basic state of her education, and the second one, through our late brother Walter Martin's encouragement, entered the secondary school. However, due to her poor foundation she could not make it to the top and is in the house without working. His senior daughter got married just the past April 8th to a preacher in Kumasi. The boys are very good in school due to the fact that they have had a good foundation, owing to East Peoria's support.
This year is Benjamin's twentieth year of service to the New Offinso Church of Christ as the preacher. Many congregations have been established over the years and so many Bible teachers trained in the Offinso district. As a result, a school was founded to train preachers when liberalism openly got out of hand in Ghana. He uses the money that we send him for his children's education, family care, outreach programs, local church programs, the aged, the sick, the needy, etc. Though East Peoria did not change his class of being it has always kept him going. New Offinso is a small congregation yet works hard taking evangelism to both far and near. Gospel Campaigns are taken across 22 working outreach communities and there are 52 Sunday evening Gospel Echo for local broadcast a year. For 12 years there have been end of year Gospel Meetings meant at reaching the lost for Christ. Twenty locally trained outreach workers are sent out as a house to house squad weekly and then they have the School of Preaching to operate. The church has youth programs, a woman's annual workshop, Bible teacher annual seminar, an annual Children's day program, New Convert's Day, Bible Lectureship, quarterly health talk, quarterly Christian home lectures, quarterly prayer night services, 3 day a week Bible study classes and worship services.
Currently, they are collecting funds for a new building because the current building is getting too small for all of the activites that they have going on.
The first graduation for the Preaching School was last year. There were 17 graduates. They had a record of 169 baptisms resulting from practical evangelism of the school. These students just enjoyed their first annual seminar on the 11-13 of April of 2007. This year there are eleven students from three different regions in Ghana, namely: Ashanti, BrongAhafo, and the Western regions. Benjamin says that they train only faithful men of the Churches of the Christ. This is the only Preaching school in Ghana that has a 6 month practical evangelism training program.
Benjamin's first quarter report shows that the average attendance for the week is 250 people with an average of $89.85 in giving a week. There have been 29 baptisms so far. The economic conditions of Ghana continues to keep the village churches from growing because after baptism they all leave Offinso and head for the cities.
For the Ghana work we send $800 every 3 months for two brethren there to split. It costs us an extra $120 for the four transfers for the year.
Tuesday Morning Ladies Bible Class
Last fall the ladies class made and collected many baby hats, blankets, booties, and crib sheets for the Zambia Medical Mission Peoria Members to take in July to distribute to the babies of that part of Africa.