While We're Thinking about Missions Giving...

A reminder that Pastor's Training Institute, Round 4 is happening this January in Addis Ababa Ethiopia. PTI is preparing close to seventy men to take the gospel of Jesus into some of the most unreached portions of Ethiopia. Some of them do so at great peril. But the name of Jesus is worthy of their peril...and our support!

As many of you know, this is a pastoral training program in which I have taught, and which PRBC has supported and prayed for. The cost for housing, food, and transportation for these two weeks of intensive training is roughly $40.00 per man - or about $2800.00 total. Would you consider giving to PTI? Would you consider sponsoring one or two (or ten) pastors-in-training for this fourth part of their curriculum? Would you consider taking some of that Christmas money that was going to go toward a train set, or a diamond pendant, and sending it to spread the gospel of Jesus in Ethiopia?

If you would, make your check payable to Christ Community Church, earmarked for PTI - Ethiopia, and send it to:

Christ Community Church
P. O. Box 795
New Albany, MS 38652

To find out more about the work in Ethiopia in general, click here. Here's an excerpt about PTI-4:

Three weeks from today we will all be observing Christmas. The day we all give each other gifts to celebrate Someone else. Go figure! And two weeks after that the Ethiopians will be celebrating their Christmas, but in a much different way than us. The exchanging of gifts is absent, for the most part, from the culture, but the enjoyment of food and fellowship is not. Families and friends will gather and feast on whatever meat they can afford after pooling their funds together. For the more well off, an ox will be slaughtered. From four o’clock in the morning when the process begins they will begin consuming the ox, red meat (lean) and white (fat), and eventually even cook some of it to enjoy also. Other families will merely have a chicken or two to commemorate the day together, and some will delight themselves in sheep or goat, roasted or stir-fried.

For about sixty-five men, this will be their last meal before they board a small 65-passenger bus with 110 other people and make the several hour (or in some cases all day) journey into the city for ten days. Why would they succumb to such misery as being cramped on to a stuffy 105-degree bus in which no one will dare open a window for fear of moving air making them deathly ill? And ride that way for so long only to finally arrive in a city that is not their home and to a thin piece of foam (AKA a bed) while being fed crushed peas, some boiled veggies and sour fermented mush made from a grain that we have for the most part never even heard of in our country.

“Why?”

To read more about PTI-4, go here. Thanks so much!