Mission News and Word of Life July 2011

Mission News

At St Thomas’ we follow the biblical principle of giving 10% of our income away. We support and have links with a number people and missions. These include The Children’s Society, Tearfund, Word of Life, CMS where our link missionary is Shelagh Wynne working with Friends of China in Thailand, Interserve where we have links with D and M W with K working in South East Asia and Jo and Denny Fleming working at the Christian Medical Hospital in Vellore, India. We also support Serving In Mission and are linked with Nathaniel and Donna Jennings with Micah and Tabitha at present in Ireland and the Children’s Uplift Programme where Beth Jennings works in Bangladesh.

Word of Life

This month Gill Gosling from Word of Life will be speaking at our service on 10th July.

In June WOL held a very successful Conference and Annual General Meeting. Topics such as multi-cultural worship, using the bible correspondence course, visiting Mirpur and sharing Jesus with integrity were on the programme. Last year’s calendars were very popular and some languages sold out. A number of people have made contact with Word of Life including 11 women of varying nationalities from 2 Turkish prisons.

Andrew is currently using some of the Word of Life materials with the Iranian members of our church.

Current developments include:

• Working to update the leaflets which Steven Masood wrote some years ago.
• Revising the basic course to produce new worksheets and use simpler vocabulary.
• Improving their website to make it more flexible and easier to update.
• Producing a new outreach tool, a 75 minute audiovisual overview of the bible called God’s Story.
• Updating the database to reduce overheads.
• New contacts being made by Gill Gosling, Liaison Officer. They are still looking for contacts in a number of places with high Moslem populations where they have only tenuous links.

Rev Phil Rawlings has been appointed the new Chair of Trustees.

Do pray for the staff and Trustees as they work together to meet these aims.

Biddy Dawson