July Prayer Update
We have two areas of prayer focus this month. Thanks for your ongoing partnership through prayer!
(1) Connecting with Area Churches
We are currently sending out letters to area churches seeking opportunities to connect with them and equip their congregations to serve refugees through our programs. Will you pray with us as we communicate our vision and ministry distinctives to new churches? We hope that they will respond positively and meet with us so that we can build better trust with more Christians who would care about what we do! Do you realize that we’ve accomplished all of our work with only 6 formal connections with area churches? There are so many churches who could equip their congregations to step into the lives of refugees!! If you belong to a church you think we should connect with, would you let us know?
(2) Reworking our Mentorship Program with Better Goals
We are blown away by the number of new relationships we’ve formed among Amarillo’s refugees. Our mentorship program has counted over 1200 hours spent in the homes of refugees in the first 5 months of 2022. Praise God! As we reflect on this growth, we want to be good stewards of the people God is bringing to us. We are recognizing that many of our mentors are struggling to help their mentees integrate, develop the language skills they need, become leaders, and have good spiritual conversations.
Our team is currently addressing this by building a much more robust set of goals for our mentorships. We’re so excited to finally have the staff capacity to grow a program that uses our time wisely to grow our refugee friends relationally, spiritually, and educationally. Will you pray for wisdom for our team as we develop our program? We have a thousand little decisions to make for this to work well.
Our goal is that every mentee will not only meet educational and life skills goals, but also…
- Make an American friend who has welcomed them into their own home,
- Learn important things about American culture,
- Process their own traumas as they read through one of our storybooks,
- Lead us to address problems in their own communities,
- Pray together with their mentor,
- Be introduced to a local body of believers,
- And much more.
This is a big undertaking requiring lots of critical thinking. Please pray especially for Jennifer, Betty and Ryan as they work through the early stages of this plan! This is a cutting-edge approach, so there aren’t many examples we can pull from.
We believe God will use our new revised approach to help us have even more local and national impact. Praise God for this vision and what it will mean!
Thanks as always for your monthly prayers, friends!
