Global Mission Mondays: Afghanistan

Tonight at our church's weekly prayer meeting we will be praying for the country of Afghanistan. As I did a little research, as usual, I realized that so much has happened in Afghanistan over the last 2 centuries that it would be nearly impossible to sum up the state of Afghanistan in a few paragraphs. So instead I decided to look at how the country is doing and what the major needs are.

Afghanistan is an impoverished country, one of the world's poorest and least developed. As of 2008, the nation's unemployment rate is 35% and roughly 36% of its citizens live below the poverty line and two-thirds of the population live on fewer than $2 a day. As much as one-third of the nation's GDP comes from growing illicit drugs, including hashish and opium. Opium production in Afghanistan soared to a record in 2007 with some 3.3 million Afghans reported to be involved in the business. The population is about 28 million.

According to the Human Development Index, Afghanistan is the second least developed country in the world. Every half hour, an average of one woman dies from pregnancy-related complications, another dies of tuberculosis and 14 children die, largely from preventable causes.

Religiously, Afghans are over 99% Muslims: approximately 80% Sunni, 19% Shi'a, and 1% other. Some unconfirmed reports state that there are 500 to 8,000 Afghan Christians practicing their faith secretly in the country. In the 20th century two churches were built in Afghanistan: a Catholic Church in the Italian embassy, and a protestant church in the US embassy. The protestant church was destroyed in in 1973.

2010 summer camp

For the last few years our children's ministry team has been helping a church in the city of Zvenygorodka to put on a children's camp. Each year our team has been more and more involved and this year our team organized the whole camp program. It was a big project and our team worked together with the youth group for months planning lessons, games, stories, etc.

Our church sent 24 kids from Sunday school, Saturday kids' club, and friends and neighbors who don't come to church. 10 teenagers from our youth group and children's ministry team went to the camp as counselors.

They drove a couple hours down to the city of Zvenygorodka for the 10 day camp. The kids all had a great time and even though the camp's living conditions weren't the best, none of the kids wanted to come home.

The counselors had a great time getting to know the kids, learning what it means to serve and to lead, and teaching God's word. This last Friday night we had a special dinner for the counselors and they said that the highlights for them were working as a team and getting to know their groups of kids.



This is the first year since we moved to Kaharlyk that I haven't been in some way directly involved in the annual summer children's outreaches/camps. It was very encouraging for me to watch everything come together and see how all of these people have grown in their ability to work together, to train others, to organize, to plan ahead without any input. The team took the ideas and principles of teamwork, planning, and relationships that we've been talking about for the last 5 years and put them into practice.

Global Mission Mondays: Pakistan

Tonight at our church's prayer meeting we will be praying for the country of Pakistan. Pakistan is in need of prayer this week due to massive flooding that have affected 20 million people.

Pakistan has a population of 170,285,500, is the sixth most populous country in the world, and has the second largest Muslim population after Indonesia. About 20% of the population live below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day

Pakistan occupies a crossroads position between South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. As an important juncture it has been invaded and/or settlemented by the Indo-Aryans, Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Afghans, Mongols and the British.

Since 2004, Pakistani armed forces are engaged in fighting against Pakistani Taliban groups. Ever since the militant groups have been retaliating by suicide bombings in Pakistani cities, killing more than 3,000 civilians and armed personnel in 2009.

Pakistan is a multilingual country with more than sixty languages being spoken. English is the official language of Pakistan and used in official business, government, and legal contracts, while Urdu is the national language.

Pakistan is a parliamentary federal democratic republic with Islam as the state religion. The main religions in Pakistan are Islam—96% of the population; Hinduism—1.85% of the population; and Christianity—1.6%.

While the constitution of Pakistan allows freedom to confess any religion it also limits the political rights of non-Muslims.

In Lumine news

I just did a quick revision of the cover of John Piper's booklet For Your Joy which In Lumine printed a few years ago for Desiring God. DG wants to do another print run so we are sending off the booklets to the printer this week.

In Lumine is getting ready for the Desiring God national conference in October. We'll have a booth at the conference and Olya, Jake, and myself will all be going. It should be a great time to make contacts and network with people and organizations who want to spread a passion for the glory of God through literature. I've been working on getting some brochures made, revamping our website (it should be looking better in the next couple weeks), and designing a cover for Heaven by Randy Alcorn.

Here are a few of the preliminary ideas for the cover. They all were rejected for various reasons and we ended up going a very different direction thanks to a great idea from Liese. But you'll have to wait for that cover until it is finished.

Global Mission Mondays: Sri Lanka

Today our church will be praying for the country of Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka, known as Ceylon before 1972, is an island country in South Asia, located about 31 kilometres off the southern coast of India. The country is famous for the production and export of tea, coffee, coconuts, rubber and cinnamon - which is native to the country.

Its population is about 20 million. There is a significant population (8.0%) of Moors, who trace their lineage to Arab traders and immigrants from the Middle East.

A civil war was fought from 1983-2009 between the minority ethnic group the Tamils and the majority ethnic group the Sinhalese. For over 25 years, the insurgency caused significant hardships for the population, environment and the economy of the country, with an estimated 80,000-100,000 people killed during its course. The civil war hindered economic growth and recovery after the Tsunami of 2004.

Sri Lanka was ranked the 3rd most religious country in the world by a 2008 Gallup poll, with 99% of Sri Lankans saying religion is an important part of their daily life. Buddhism constitutes the religious faith of about 70% of the population of the island. According to tradition, Buddhism was introduced into Sri Lanka in the 2nd century BC. 15% of the population are Hindu, 7.5% Muslim, and 7.5% Christian. Of the Christians in Sri Lanka, about 88% are Roman Catholic.

15 questions to evaluate your marriage

Liese read these questions on Justin Taylor's blog a few weeks ago and we printed them out and went through them together last week on our vacation. I thought it was helpful and would encourage anyone who is married to sit down together and work through these questions. They come from the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

1. On a scale of 1-10, give your overall assessment of our marriage in the past six months. To be sure, this is a very broad and subjective item, but I have found it helpful to open the conversation with an item of this kind of breadth, because it helps to prime the pump. Obviously, you won’t hit on a ton of specifics with this one—that’s what the rest of the questions are for—but I have been truly amazed at just how much discussion this assessment alone can generate, as various issues come to mind. From there, we’re off and running. Follow-up questions in the event that the conversation fails to gain traction initially: What have been the strengths of the past six months? What would make your assessment higher?
2. How has the husband’s leadership been over the past six months? The wife’s support? Follow-up: How can I improve in fulfilling my respective role?
3. How is your walk with God, both personally and as a couple?
4. Where do you see ungodliness in my life?
5. Do I have any unconfessed sin that needs to be shared with my spouse?
6. Are we guarding meaningful time together? Prayer? Conversation? Date Night?
7. How is our sex life?
8. What could I do to make you feel more loved/secure/respected?
9. How can I serve you better?
10. What are the issues that we need to anticipate in the upcoming six months?
11. What’s your greatest personal disappointment and your greatest satisfaction in the last six months?
12. How can I best pray for you?
13. What are our major upcoming mutual prayer concerns?
14. Spend a few moments, in an encouraging fashion, sharing several of the things that each of you loves and appreciates about the other.
15. Then close, by spending some concerted time in prayer for those prayer concerns you just shared, as well as thanking God for his faithfulness to you as a couple over the past six months.

Carl Trueman on gay marriage

I read this article today by Carl Trueman about gay marriage and thought that it would be helpful in light of some of the events that are transpiring in my home state of California.

Trueman writes about 4 challenges that Christians should be thinking about in the gay marriage debate. One of the challenges is "the impossibility of criticizing gay culture without being labeled a homophobe means that a whole heap of other cultural traits will fly in under the radar..."

If the culture as a whole in California (and the USA for that matter) is not brought into the light of the gospel and Christians don't look beyond gay marriage to see what is happening culturally then "culture traits" that are opposed to the gospel will come in unnoticed and just be a part of life in America, and even a part of Christian life in America.

Read Trueman's article, it gives you a lot to think about and doesn't just tell us that there is a problem with gay marriage.

a disappearing act in which we go on vacation

This last week we asked our friends the Knotts if we could use their dacha (a "dacha" is a summer house in the countryside, which isn't as fancy as it sounds) for a couple days so that we could have a mini vacation. The dacha is in a small village in a pine forest about 40 miles north of Chernigov where most of the houses look like this:


The pine forest grows in a really sandy soil that is very different from the soil that we are used to here in Kaharlyk. The sand attracted the sand mining industry which began to dig sand quarries. These quarries filled up with water that filtered through the sand forming pristine lakes in the middle of the pine forests. We decided that sounded like a great place to go for a small vacation so we cleared our schedules and headed up to Chernigov.

Ethan Larson, a friend of ours who used to serve with us in Priluki, was visiting Ukraine last week so we planned as part of our trip to spend a couple days in Chernigov catching up with Ethan and hanging out with the Knotts and the McNamees (we got to celebrate Arden McNamee's first birthday with them). Ethan had been in Kenya teaching pastors and church leaders with Training Leaders International. TLI is doing some pretty cool stuff around the world and it was interesting to hear about Ethan's experiences in Kenya. Ethan, Jake, and I spent a lot of time talking about book publishing and church leader training in Ukraine.

Then we drove out to the dacha and spent a couple days relaxing, swimming, reading, praying, listening to round table discussions of dispensational theology on mp3, and swimming. We had been in need of time together talking, praying, and seeking God and it was a great time to be away from everything and be able to focus on those things.

This is where we stayed. The Knotts have been slowly fixing things up around the property. They are putting in a new fence this weekend which is why the fence looks so run down. One of the days we were there the Knotts and McNamee families came out to spend the afternoon at the lake with us.


We'll probably be doing this sort of thing more often as it pretty much only cost us the price of gas to get up there and back.