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October 1991 Newsletter
COLOMBIAN CHRISTIAN MISSION
Dale and Jeanie Meade, Missionaries
Preaching Christ from the Amazon Jungle, through the Andes Mountains, to the Caribbean Coastal Regions
Volume 19, Issue 10 October, 1990
THE NATIONAL MISSIONARY CONVENTION
The World Evangelism Conference, sponsored by the National Missionary Convention, is just around the corner. The first weekend in November is upon us. I approach that date with a sense of nervous anticipation. It will be the culmination of a long year of hard work. In a way, it will be a relief to be finished. For me, the time has been an exhilarating one. I have been privileged to meet many ministers and Christians from the Illinois area. I have been honored by invitations to speak at several of our Bible Colleges. Lord willing, I will be delivering one of the evening sessions at the Convention itself.
The Convention has always been an engine for the cultivation of missionary zeal among our brotherhood. This year we hope to capitalize on that by providing far more for the local church missions program. There will be over two hundred missionaries present. The workshops will deal with everything from lighthearted vignettes of missionary life to serious scholarly treatment of current missiological issues. The convention starts Friday night, November the first. The last session will conclude on Sunday evening. The entire conference will be an excellent occasion for improving your church's missionary program and also for capturing some of the excitement that missions can bring. Don't miss this chance for grasping this opportunity for growth in your church.
LONG DAYS; SHORT NIGHTS
Although this is the time for waning daylight hours, it has been a month of long days and short nights. As the Missionary Convention draws nigh, I have increased my time on the road. With so many changes being made this year, Walter Birney and I felt that we needed to "get the word out." We did not want people to be confused by what was going on. Besides, some general encouragement for the Missionary Convention and the World Evangelism Conference that it is sponsoring is very helpful in boosting attendance.
As a result, I have spent a great deal of my time on the road for this last month. Each week I have spoken in one church for the morning and then another for the evening. (One weekend those churches were more than six hours drive apart.) I have had several mid-week speaking dates, including a minister's breakfast, a Bible college visit, and a TV interview program. As the convention's date approaches, I have picked up the tempo. Most weeks I have been around the house here in Rittman for only a couple of days a week. I have been driving an average of 1,200 miles or more per week. These extensive trips tend to make for long days and short nights. It takes about ten or twelve hours on the road for each leg of most trips. That means that I frequently have been arriving home in the wee hours of the morning. Yesterday I got in at two in the morning. The week before it was 4 a.m. Normally if I cannot make it by one or two o'clock in the morning, I stay over and try to get an early start the next day.
Without a doubt, the Missionary Convention is the most significant format we have in our brotherhood for the cultivation of interest in missions. If I can contribute to this effort in some small way and by thus doing, encourage a great missionary effort by our churches, it will have been most worthwhile. Since the convention is located in Springfield, Illinois, most of my efforts have been in that part of the country. The distance, however, is not so great as to prevent many of you from attending. If you have not already planned to do so, why not plan now to travel to Springfield and attend this year's World Evangelism Conference.
JOIN THE "BOOK OF THE CENTURIES" CLUB
Every year, during October, we conduct a drive to raise funds for the purchase of Bibles and other Christian training material. In Colombia, a person living in the countryside may need to invest more than one month's wages just to buy a Bible. In the city people fare a little better. Still they might need to spend an entire week's wages for purchasing a Bible. There is much valuable Christian literature available also. The average Colombian would be hard pressed to buy a training book for Christian ministry.
In order to help alleviate this situation, and in conjunction with similar drives by the Bible society, we make October our "Bible Month." In our program we raise funds from our supporters for subsidizing Bibles and other Christian literature. We rarely simply give away books. We have found that if people pay nothing for them they seldom care for nor read the books. So we use your offerings to reduce the cost of a Bible or other training book to about one day's wages. In this way your offering also goes much further. It can help many more people.
If your Sunday School class is looking for a missions project, or if you would just like to help place the Bible into someone's hands, why not send an offering to our "Book of the Centuries" club. In that way you can be preaching the Gospel by presenting god's word to an interested person in Colombia.