Please be in prayer for those who will be going to the retreat at Conception Abbey to pray and discern God’s will for churches in the Northwest Area becoming more missional.  The retreat will be March 15 and 16 with 25 persons in attendance.  Due to the retreat, the area office will be closed on Thursday and Friday.

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Ivan & Lois Buckman were long-time members of the Marceline Christian Church.  Ivan has just recently been diagnosed with Aplastic Anemia.  He is currently in Boone Hospital in Columbia in a private room where you have to wear a mask and wash your hands to see him as his body has no immunity to any kind of outside sickness.  He is currently getting IV treatment for the anemia, but this is just a rare thing and with his age, I believe the doctors have said that he would not be eligible for a bone marrow transplant.  Please pass this along to anybody and everybody to pray for Ivan & his wife, Lois, I would appreciate it.  Also, I know Boone hospital has e-cards you can send to him online and volunteers deliver them...if you have time!

THANKS A MILLION!

Jenny Day

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YOUTH RALLY FRIDAY MARCH 16

By HYDE PARK IN ST. JOSEPH

Hey Youth Leaders,

We are hoping to have a fantastic Youth Rally this Friday.  It is a Rollin Rally.  We will have a Picture scavenger hunt.  So you need to bring a digital camera.  Then for the Rally we have Recording artist, David Glenn.

He opens for Casting crowns.  Then we will go roller skating here in town.

The church that brings the most teenagers, will win up to $500 in Worlds of Fun Tickets.  We need to know if you are bringing a group.  Please E-mail me back or call us and tell us an approximate # you are bringing by Thursday at the Latest.  We will need to bring in extra chairs.  Call us at 816-238-4999 and make a reservation for your youth group.

We hope to see you there.

Jon Henderson

Midland Ministries

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Sunday March 18, 2007

First Christian Church, Hopkins celebrates 125 years of continuous service on March 18.  They would love to see you there.  For more information call: 660 778 3684 or send an email to the pastor, Frank J. Chlastak [fjchlastak@earthlink.net].

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Chase Peeples will be installed as the pastor of First Christian Church, St. Joseph at 3:00 pm, March 18.  (This time is corrected from last week’s Connection.)  Come help the congregation celebrate a new chapter in their journey together.   Call 816-233-2556 or send an email to fccstjo@sbcglobal.net for more information.

The NW Area Beta-website is up and running, although it will be significantly expanded over the weekend.  Our aim is to accommodate a shift in web use from an electronic newsletter to a resource and communication hub for congregations that are gearing up for a fresh start or for a significant increase in local mission and witness.

Brian Bullock has added several features including a blog and several forums for posting questions and helpful suggestions about nearly every aspect of congregational mission.  We are adding to the on-line resource links all the time at your suggestion.  Once the site is working well for you, we'll begin to get it to show up sooner on web searches so that more Christ-followers of any denomination can benefit from and give to our shared work with Christ.

The current site will continue to run for the next month or so.  www.nwareacc.org
 
We really want your input to make the site as useful to you and your congregation as possible.  To check out the work thus far, please go to: www.nwareacc.org/new/new_v2 

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CWF

SPRING WOMEN’S RETREAT

THE FOUR FACES OF SPIRITUALITY

Head, Heart, Mystery and Imagination

REGISTRATIONS ARE DUE BY MARCH 14, 2007

March 23-24, 2007

4:30 p.m. Friday to 3:30 p.m. Saturday

Rickman Center , Jefferson City

Participants will be led through an interactive “quiz” to discover their spirituality style and entertained and inspired with storytelling and on-the-spot chalk drawings.

Keynoter:  Rev. Romney Nesbitt is senior minister at First Presbyterian Church, Cleveland , Ohio .  She is an ordained Disciples of Christ minister with a Master of Divinity form Phillips Theological Seminary and a Master of Arts degree in painting from the University of Tulsa .  She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from William Woods University in Fulton , Missouri .  In 2003, she was the keynote speaker for Encounter, the annual state-wide meeting of Disciples women.  Romney conducted a workshop on spirituality for Central Rocky Mountain Region Disciples in 2004.

This will be a terrific retreat so don’t miss your opportunity to attend!!!

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2007 Boundaries Training

Christian Church of Mid-America

Northwest Area              Friday, April 20, 2007
          9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.                                        First Christian Church , Cameron
        Leader:  Dr. Jeanne Hoeft                                    

 For more information, please contact:

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Camp registration packets were mailed in January along with a color poster.  Dates are:

123 Go #1                  July 2 – July 4 (must have completed Grades K-2)

123 G0 #2                  July 11 – July 13 (must have completed Grades K-2)

Junior Camp I            July 6 – July 10 (must have completed Grades 3-5)

Junior Camp II            July 14 - July 18 (must have completed Grades 3-5)

Chi Rho I                    July 19 - July 23 (must have completed Grades 6-8)

Chi Rho I                    July 24 - July 28 (must have completed Grades 6-8)

CYF                            June 26 – July 1 (must have completed grades 9-12)

Plan to register early as we are expecting full camps again this year.

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UPDATE FROM CARLA GIGER

FROM AFRICA

Greetings,

I hope that this email finds you all well.  I wanted to send out an update about how things have been going since the beginning of the year.

GASA:

The GASA program started on January 8th.  At our first meeting we had 13 girls present, and over the past couple of months have grown to almost 20 girls who come to the program regularly.  I have tried many times to compare the original group of girls, with our current group, and I am just not able to.  They are so different, which in ways is good, but also a struggle for me, in trying to adapt to them.  The difference in the groups, is the original group was recruited from the Saturday tutoring sessions at

Bridgman, and these girls were literally recruited off of the streets.   

This has left us with some big challenges to face, but at the same time, I feel like we finally have a program that is reaching out into the Zola community.  As the program as gone along and the girls are becoming more comfortable with it and myself, they have been opening up about serious personal problems and life situations.  Their stories are hard to hear and at times make me wonder how I can encourage these young women, when I grew

up in a world so much different than theirs.   There are a couple of the

girls who have been raped, one with a very abuse mother, others who are feeling trapped by their situations and have considered suicide, and many of their parents have HIV or have already died from it.

One of our earliest sessions, we were discussing ways in which we protect ourselves from HIV/AIDS.  We get to the end of the session and I ask the question “Who is afraid of getting HIV?”, and almost every hand goes up. 

Feeling pretty disappointed that I had not gotten a message across, I asked why.  One girl answers me, because we are afraid that our husbands will infect us, and then the other girls agreed.  Here it is culturally acceptable for men here to have more than one wife or partner, and often it is the first wife, who remains faithful, but in the end gets infected with

HIV.   That day, the girls made me realize that most people here have

accepted that at some point they too will be infected with HIV.  That is still something I am struggling to understand.

At the end of March, we will be ending with the first phase of GASA, where the girls are trained as peer educators.  This is where I left the program in 2005, and after this we are on to uncharted territory.  I am excited though about where the program is headed.  Much of this month will be spent in planning the rest of the year.  It seems that God is leading the program in a slightly different direction than we had originally thought, but are excited about it all the same.  Since there are so many girls struggling, we are feeling the need to help them deal and cope with their personal lives before they can be effective in helping other’s around them.

Aftercare:

      The after school program has been going great.  It was decided to completely change the program at the beginning of the year.  When the kids arrive, they do homework for 30 minutes, have a snack, and then rotate between a couple of stations everyday.  Our current stations include: 

crafts, recreation, life skills, board games, and computers.  (It is our hope as the year goes on to add more stations for the kids.)  On Thursdays, the kids get to do something called “Special Snack”.  It is a snack that focuses on a bible story, in which the kids participate and then get to make their own snacks.  They love it.  It is so much fun to watch them, running into the big hall, saying “Special Snack”, “Special Snack” all of the way.

Since Bridgman is currently very short of staff, I was asked to help with crafts.  (Originally, my focus was to only work on the GASA program and than assist with any administration that needed extra help.)  This has been fun for me, and provides some relief just getting to hang out with the kids for a while.  Crafts for them are a special treat, since all they really get to do at school is use crayons, and that would only happen a couple of times a week.

There is one little boy (Thokozanie), who is so adorable, but who we really struggle with.  He likes fighting with the other kids, and will make sure that everyone in aftercare knows he is the strongest, even though he is one of the youngest.  We all struggle with patience with him, and feel like all we are ever saying to Thokozanie is no or don’t do that.  Last week had been a particularly challenging week with him, and honestly I was kind of dreading having to do crafts and deal with his behavior at the same time. 

Then God provided me with an amazing moment, and a chance to see Him in this little boy.  We were doing crayon rubbings, Thokozanie was totally concentrating on his paper and watching the shape under his paper appear as he rubbed a crayon over it, when out of the blue he just starts singing “Jesus, Loves the little Children” in Zulu, next was “Jesus Loves Me”, and by then he had all of the grades 1, 2, and 3 singing while they were working.  It was amazing to just stand back and listen to the kids sing, and knowing that it started with Thokozanie, made it very special.

Personally:

There have been several highs and lows for me over the last couple of months.  I have been very excited starting the GASA program again, and spending time with girls.  My first 3 months were mainly spent adjusting to the culture again and planning/preparing for this year’s programs, but it feels great to finally be getting to the actual work that I was brought here to do.  I love being out at Bridgman and look forward to spending time out there everyday.  In a lot of ways, I like Soweto much more than Johannesburg .  People are more friendly in the townships and there is a

greater sense of community.    I also look forwarding to coming home at

night and spending time with the people who live around me.  Our doors are always open and we pop into each other’s homes for tea and talk about our days.  (Although, I have yet to even see any of the people who live in the homes outside of our lot’s 4 walls.) There have also been some challenges.  One of the greatest, has been learning to deal/cope with the crime and violence that happens here.  I have had to take greater precaution while at Bridgman.  Unfortunately we learned, that some of the GASA parents were offended that their daughters were trusting me with their problems, and telling me about their situations.  I now have had to be cautious in meeting with the girls.  Plus making sure that Malusi, the director, or another man is present while I am at Bridgman.

  Honestly, I have never felt threatened while I am there.  While frustrated with the new arrangement, I do understand.

Prayer Requests:

*Sanele(a GASA member), late yesterday afternoon she gave me a note to read in private, I learned it was a letter telling me she was planning to commit suicide.  After a conference about her, we were able to reach her by phone.

(One of the women living in the lot, is getting her PhD in Psychology…what a blessing she was to us last night.)  Sanele promised not to do anything last night and meet with us today. Unfortunately, driving deep into Soweto at that time of night was not a possibility.  Today, we were supposed to pick her up from school and take her to the hospital. However the high school students were on strike.  After a tense day, not being able to find Sanele,

she showed up at Bridgman.   When she got there, it was evident that she has

done than think about suicide, as she had cuts on her wrists.   Things did

not go that great at the hospital.  She was seen by a doctor for 2 minutes and told to follow up with a social worker tomorrow.  However, Malusi and I are both still very scared for her, and are planning to take her back again tomorrow to try to get her some real psychological help.  Please keep her in your prayers, and that we will be able to find suitable help for her.

*for wisdom and vision in planning the next few months of GASA

*Thokozanie:  that we would be patient with him and be able to get through to him also *Time for personal rest, since the beginning of the year we have been working almost non-stop and we are all feeling pretty tired and overwhelmed

Thanks for all of your prayer support and I will try to update you all more frequently in the future.

Carla

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Have a Blessed Day,

Jan Shrewsbury

Northwest Area Administrative Assistant

816-632-2237