Mission Weekend

This past weekend marked our first ever IMM missionary tour! The IMM students along with their teachers, went to a village and spent 3 days getting to know the villagers, treating the sick, and doing an evangelistic presentation. Around 150 people attended the meetings, even though it is the middle of the rice harvest and nobody knew that we were coming! (Ya, we have a bit of work to do on our organization and planning)This was an important step for the IMM program. Our students and the teachers needed to get a glimpse of what they will encounter when doing evangelism, and what kinds of things they will need to learn in order to be effective in reaching the people. Already some great new ideas have been generated, and more are sure to come.The plan was for the students in training to deliver the message along with the power point pictures. They were to cover the time period before Satan sinned to the death of Jesus. This was to be done in under an hour. Now you may be thinking that we are crazy. That is a lot of information! Well to make a long story short we were putting the power point together right up to departure time. (This whole trip was a last minute decision due to an unplanned school break) Our backup plan was to have Micheal and I do the speaking, with Ehkenyah to translate from English to Karen. So off we went to the village.Loading 17 people, including a baby, into the Steck's vehicle and three motor bikes, we were on our way. Up, up, up we went. It is really beautiful in the mountains and much cooler. After reaching the trail head we were confronted with a near vertical assent. We arrived at the village in time to get settled a little before bedtime.Friday morning after worship we began to finish the last touches of how the presentation would go, and we realized that it was going to take between 2 and 3 hours with all the songs and the talk and the translation. So I began to go through the script and reduce the amount of speaking. We made a trial run and realized that there was still too much time spent. Three hours before time to start it was decided to have Ehkenyah use the English script and deliver the presentation in Karen, thus eliminating the translation time.Starting with nature DVD's the villagers began to come to the door. 40 to 50 children gathered around the front, but many parents just wanted to sit and stand just outside of the door. Then the pictures began with Ehkenyah speaking. The whole audience was spellbound. 150 villagers were hearing the plan of salvation. About two thirds of the way through I could see that Satan's followers were getting agitated. Some got up loudly telling their children to follow them. Most of the children refused. Soon it became quiet again with maybe 100 intently watching the program.We are moving into Satan's territory with the plan of salvation! I am praising God that we were able to see the Spirit of God working on peoples hearts.We are now working on being ready for the next trip. God is definitely leading in this program. Pray for our 11 missionary students. They are the ones that will eventually be taking Gods message to their own people.