How are you?

Good.

So good to see each and every one of you so thankful for the opportunity and I am so

thankful to be just called Aurora’s dad.

if you have the same opinion of her as I do, I’m pretty proud to be called that.

And um

I want to tell you as we begin how much we appreciate the opportunity to be here, give you

an update on the work that we have been doing and the work that we are um trying to do

right now and then the work that we’re looking to do.

And may have some major goals right now that I want to put before you if I can.

And I um tonight, listen, if you if you leave here and you come away with nothing else,

and maybe you can do nothing else but but just pray for us.

Please do that.

It’s so good to see the Hotem.

here.

All right, we’re gonna start.

I’m gonna most of you do not know

what we do.

And so I want to kind of explain how we got to where we’re at in a mission field and we’ll

go from there.

In 2010 I had the opportunity to go to Kathmandu, Nepal and teach at a preaching school

there.

And the very first day that I was there at the preaching school, I had 26 students.

All the students were lined up at the end of the first course in the morning and there was

this little break and they all lined up to shake my hand.

And as they did so each student would come up

And he would shake my hand and he would ask me if I would support he and his family, and

then he would say this, because my family’s home starving.

And I would say, that’s terrible.

And I would think to myself,

Man, I wanna help them, but if I help this guy and the guy behind him has the same request

and I don’t help him, then I’m a bad guy to that guy and I thought I’m in trouble here.

So I just calmly asked, I said, Is everybody gonna kinda make the same request?

And they all said, Yes.

And I said, Okay, everybody sit down.

I said, I I I have a couple of questions for you.

I said, Why is everybody’s family home starving?

They Well, we’re we’re very poor.

They acted like that was a dumb question.

And I s I said, Okay, well

Now I grew up on a farm in western Oklahoma.

I said, why is your family in such an impoverished state?

I mean, I was very poor growing up.

And I mean you might not believe it now, but I had a dirt floor in my bedroom.

I did not know that until I was about uh ten years old and I was vacuuming and we had a

carpet in there that my mom had laid on top of dirt.

And I was vacuuming and she had just bought one of those Amway vacuums that that was

cyclonic and you could see in it, you know, and you could see it spinning around the and

I’m over there vacuuming and I could see that dirt going in.

I just thought that was the greatest thing.

And I kept vacuuming, it kept filling.

I’d go outside and dump it and I’d vacuum, I’d go outside and dump it, and I’d vacuum.

Well finally I went and told my mom, I said, Mom, it just keeps filling up and she said,

Well, um go pull the carpet back a little.

So I did, and sure enough there was just dirt underneath it.

And so that was kind of how I grew up.

So we we were pretty poor.

So if we were gonna eat

We grew pretty much everything we ate.

So as these guys are telling me this, my first thought is, now here I’m a gospel preacher,

but this is my background.

My thought is, why don’t you grow a garden?

So I asked them, I said, why don’t you grow a garden?

They said, Well, we don’t know how.

I said, What do you don’t, what do you mean you don’t know how to grow a garden?

That’s dirt, seed, plant, water, weed, pick, eat.

And

They said, we we haven’t raised a garden in several generations in our family.

And I said, Well

That’s terrible.

What if we what if I could train you guys how to do that?

And it just kind of did it off the cuff.

And so classes end at four o’clock every day.

And I said, What if at 4 30 we start an agricultural class?

I’ll teach you how to raise garden.

If we have enough time, I’ll teach you how to raise chickens.

I’ll teach you how to raise rabbits, how to build a compost pit, and how to how to turn

manure into free fertilizer.

And they said, That would be awesome.

So from 4 30 to 8 30 every day, we did an agricultural course there at the school.

And now Katmandu is a big

City, millions and millions and millions of people.

It’s very crowded, very congested, but it’s a Hindu city.

And the Hindu religion believes that your grandpa is a cow or a goat or a chicken, or if

he was a really bad person, he might come back as a snake or a worm.

And everywhere in the city are cows laying in the streets.

They’ll just rest in the street and they’ll have cars backed up for miles because nobody

will get out and move grandpa.

Because you know, that’s not nice.

So every day now I grew up, if if we passed a cattle truck when I was growing up and you

smelled it, my daddy would say that smells like money.

And so everywhere I looked in this city, I saw cows making money.

And so I knew where they were gonna, they were all asking me what about fertilizer, and um

I knew where to get fertilizer because it was everywhere in the city, everywhere you

walked, it was there.

So one night we actually took twenty-six students and we all had a five-gallon bucket and

we all had a shovel, and we walked through the city streets picking up manure, and people

thought, you know, this crazy white guy there, you know, what is he doing?

And but here here’s what happened.

Several of those students went back after they graduated, they learned to grow a garden.

They several of them raised rabbits, and they were able to produce enough food for their

family to survive much better, and they were able to stay preaching.

And so I came home with a kind of a burden in my seat, and I thought, man, I need to, I I

think I could really do something to help the mission field here.

I wonder how many mission workers are out there in the mission field today that don’t know

how to support themselves, and maybe they’re not doing mission work anymore because they

can’t support themselves.

So, what if I could help them do that?

So we began doing that, and we began teaching preaching school.

Students spent several trips going to the Andrew Connolly School of Preaching, helping

them learn how to grow food, trying to help those preachers learn to do that.

This is some rabbit cages.

You’ll hear us talk a lot about rabbits.

One of the reasons is rabbits are the superfood of the third world.

Um I’m I’m just just think with me briefly.

How much noise does a rabbit make?

And when you’re teaching your kids, you know.

Cows, they make the noise moo and the pig it oinks.

When you get to the rabbit, okay, so it doesn’t make noise.

How much room does a rabbit take?

Anybody ever raised a rabbit in a cage?

It’s about, well, here.

It’s about that much room.

You know what rabbits eat?

Just stuff that grows in your yard.

You know what rabbits taste like?

Come on, this one’s easy.

Yeah, there we go.

Chicken.

Alright, y’all are catching on.

And they reproduce like rabbits.

There’s a reason this is the superfood of the third world.

Okay?

One rabbit through her litters in one year produced more meat than a cow or a pig

combined.

That’s an amazing fact.

Zero cholesterol.

And it’s a mill ready to serve.

It’s the MRE of the mission field.

Now you gotta think, if you got a cow and you raise it and you and you’re trying to to

support your family but you don’t have electricity and you don’t have refrigeration and

you butcher the cow, what are you gonna do with all the cow?

All that beef.

What’s you gonna do with it?

You gotta either eat it quickly or you gotta give it away.

Or you gotta dehydrate it.

You gotta do something with it quickly.

A rabbit, you just peel the skin, heat and serve.

And it’s awesome.

And so and it tastes like chicken.

So it’s tremendous.

So you got one meal’s worth right there.

Prepackaged for you by God.

So we we teach a lot about rabbits and uh teach this is us building some drip irrigation

stuff, just using what they had.

We teach a lot of classes on scrounging.

This is us teaching about the moringa tree, the most nutritious plant on earth.

We try to grow it all over everywhere we go.

If you have questions about that, come see me afterwards.

We’ve taught in Cameroon.

Um, you know, my dad was pretty ashamed of me.

My dad’s a cattle farmer, was most of all of his life, and I remember leaving to go on

this.

trip to Watutu, Cameroon, and I had done a lot of research trying to find out what they

wanted to grow there and what would grow there.

And and the preachers kept responding back we’d love to grow snails.

And so I tell my dad, I’m going to grow, going to Africa, and I’m gonna teach him how to

grow snails.

I’d done all this research and I’d hired some people to come actually teach the class, and

I was gonna get to learn as well and put it into practice.

And my dad said, You’re gonna go teach them what?

You know, he was quite bothered that I had fallen so far from grace, I guess.

And so we taught.

Now, this is not an ordinary snail, okay?

The snails that you see behind me, these are called the Atachina Adachina.

It’s the giant African snail.

They get about this.

Big, the size of a youth football.

um I don’t recommend eating one.

They taste about like an inner tube soaked in tomato juice.

But a five-gallon bucket of these snails is worth $50.

And the average monthly income in Watutu is $25.

Now tell me, would you grow snails if you could do double your income just by raising a

little enclosure of snails and feeding them the refuse from your kitchen?

Yeah, that’s a big change.

So we we’ve done a lot of different things.

We’ve worked with orphans in Haiti.

We actually had to build an aquaponics unit.

This isn’t the first one we’ve done.

I’ll tell you a little bit about another one we’ve done.

Um, on top of an orphanage because they didn’t have any land to cultivate.

And so where they were at, it was all rock and concrete.

And so we went in on top of this orphanage and we built them an aquaponics unit.

So we’d raise fish, and then in the buckets we would raise tomatoes, and so the water from

the fish tank would circulate through the tomatoes and come back and be.

filtered for the fish and so they would raise fish and tomatoes together and then they

would take the tomatoes and they would trade those tomatoes for things like rice and beans

and meat.

Very very productive system there.

So you can see some of the produce of that later there.

You guys helped us tremendously in 2015 if you remember during the earthquake that

happened in Tipling, Nepal, epicentered there, and there were six congregations there that

we helped tremendously.

And

that was a uh that was probably one of the most difficult things we’ve ever done, but it

was one of the most rewarding.

Uh there were those six congregations, there’s six villages in the Tipling area, and every

person in those villages is a member of the church, which is I’ve never been to a place

quite like this.

Um and there was a lot of need there and so we were able to to carry a lot of a lot of

help and a lot of aid there.

Twenty sixteen we built our first preaching school and it was in Uganda.

Um we built it from the ground up

Um it’s no longer in operation.

We actually closed it down in January.

Thankfully, if you keep up with world news and know where Ebola is located right now in

the world, it is literally in the village that our preaching school is in, and so we would

have had to have closed it down anyway.

My wife and children and myself went to Chamala.

We spent about six months out of a year for several years going back and forth to Chamala,

working with the mission farm there, of course, raising rabbits, teaching them to grow

food for the mission.

m Raised a lot of produce, acres and acres of things like eggplant, things like squash and

zucchini, teaching them to raise um green beans and different things.

You might find this surprising when we would raise squash, they would all go out and pick

all the leaves.

Now I grew up eating squash.

I love squash.

I love yellow squash.

I love every form of yellow squash.

um

And I would get really excited when I would see the blooms and I would see the fruit, but

they didn’t get excited about that.

They got excited about the leaves.

They would take the leaves and they would boil the leaves down and make greens out of the

leaves.

Did you know you could eat squash leaves like greens?

They love that.

they actually thought that squash was poisonous.

And so they watched us very concerned as we ate a squash.

And so I had them all over the house one day.

And I said, we had 15 mission farm workers.

I said, come over to the house, I’m gonna show you how to grow squash or to eat squash.

And they all watched, thinking we were gonna, you know, kill over at any moment as we ate

it.

And then I put a toothpick in little pieces and handed it around, and they would all look

at me like, there’s no way I’m putting this in my mouth.

And finally one of them ate it, and he said,

This is so good.

And the next one he ate it, and the next thing I know I look over and one of the guys has

got the pot that we had cooked it with bacon and onion like you’re supposed to, and he had

tilted that pot up and was drinking the juice that was left.

He thought that was pretty awesome.

We’ve taught a lot of classes, a lot of varieties.

we teach over ninety varieties of agricultural classes now.

Um this was one we did in Myanmar teaching how to raise mushrooms to the local.

Preachers there, mushrooms being a high price commodity for them.

Anything we can do to help encourage them and strengthen them so that they can stay in the

field preaching.

That’s what we want to do.

In 2018, we built our second preaching school.

This one is healthy and thriving.

It’s in eastern Africa, in Tanzania.

It’s called the Talawanda School of Preaching.

It’s very bush.

If you’ll notice behind me, we have huts for our school dorms.

We don’t want to build fancy American facilities.

There, we want them to leave their home and go to a school that’s very similar to what

home is like because we want them to go back to their village.

That’s very important.

And so we don’t give stipends to our students.

Matter of fact, our student our students have to work every day on the farm um for an hour

every day.

And so they all help in the producing of the food that they eat every day at the school.

We’re located in a very Muslim-centered area, and I want to encourage you.

to when you’re thinking about mission work and the mission field, to be thinking about

getting the gospel into Muslim dominated areas, brethren.

Um you know you look on the news right now and you’ll see all about Iran and all these

places that we’re constantly battling.

Um and most of it comes from Islam.

And we get very terrified by that.

We get very bothered by that.

And almost to the point where we resent them and we don’t want to go teach them the

gospel.

And I’ve had multiple people tell me, why would you go to someone where there’s Muslims?

Don’t they want to cut your head off?

And I tell that person, you’ve watched too much Fox News.

Okay?

Brethren, uh on the day of judgment, when we stand before Jesus Christ.

And we give an account for the things we’ve done in this body, one of the things we’re

gonna be held accountable for is who we spread the gospel to, and that’s gonna include

Muslims.

And we have had tremendous success reaching the Muslims.

Matter of fact, the very first convert we had in this area, his name was Baraka, he was

our taxi driver driving us to the land when we were going to go look at it.

He had a radio in the cab and he had it turned on to a radio station and it was playing an

American preaching.

And I could just barely hear it.

And being having spent so much time in Memphis in my life, I recognized the voice very

quickly.

It was that of the Baptist preacher, Adrian Rogers.

very distinct voice.

And I I asked him, I said, Are you and he had a Muslim hat on, full garb.

I said, Baraka, I said, Aren’t you Muslim?

And he said, yes, yes, yes, yes.

And I said, But you’re listening to a Christian from America preach.

I know he’s not a Christian, but for our conversation at that moment he was.

And he said, yes, yes, I love him.

I love Christianity.

And I said, Barca, do you want to learn more about Christianity?

Yes, would you teach me?

Hook line sinker, right?

And we baptized Baracca on that trip.

And he became one of our first students and now he’s a gospel preacher in that area.

He went back to his Muslim dominated village and planted a congregation.

Let me tell you, all our students, almost all of them come from Islam.

We don’t get many students from the church that want to enroll at our school.

It’s not fancy.

They have to work on a farm and they get no stipend.

So when we send out applications to churches for students to come to our preaching school,

guess what?

Nobody signs up.

But we get a lot of applications filled out by Muslims.

So what we did was we extended our school out by one quarter and we opened it up to them

if they wanted to come to school.

And we said this: if if they will convert by the end of the first quarter, we’ll keep them

on as students.

If they don’t, we’ll just send them home, no harm, no foul.

So our first quarter, we opened it up, we had 13 students graduate.

From that class.

All of them came out of Islam.

Those men have now gone back and planted congregations in their villages that never had

the church and are controlled by Islam.

Rather than we can make an impact in the world in places that are even scary, such as

eastern Tanzania.

We’re doing a lot of work down in Central America now.

Um been working a lot in Honduras.

Matter of fact, our family is leaving tomorrow.

I’m gonna just kind of fast forward here to get where I really wanted to uh we’ll be

heading, my wife and I’ll be heading to El Salvador.

we’ve got a lady from Forest Hill or two ladies from Forest Hill that’ll be going with us

this week to El Salvador.

We have a group trip there.

one of the things my wife has been doing is she’s been teaching sewing classes in El

Salvador.

there are a a large number of women.

That are widowed in El Salvador that would love to learn how to make some money for

themselves and they don’t know how.

And so they can learn to do things.

And it was weird.

When I announced that we could do some classes there, including sewing, this widow woman,

as soon as it was over, she like bull rushed up to my wife and just wanted, and she

started talking to her in Spanish.

My wife can speak a little Spanish, but not a lot.

And so our translator’s trying to kind of get in there and help.

And she’s telling her, please teach me how to make mop heads.

Please teach me how to make mop heads.

Please teach me how to make mopeds.

mop heads.

And what she wanted to do was learn how to make this mop head out of a towel that

everybody buys, I guess, at the market there for about three or four dollars.

And that’s a very lucrative concept for her because it doesn’t take a long lot of time to

make, doesn’t take much resource to make, but she can make a lot of them in a day and make

a good income.

And so she was very excited.

Matter of fact, our m our biggest classes now that we teach around the world are our

sewing classes.

They are packed.

they love when my wife teaches sewing and so we’ve been doing a lot of that

here recently.

We use a lot of old Singer sewing machines.

If you remember the old what my my grandma would call the horse head sewing machine, the

blackhead singer, even using treadle sewing machines.

And so uh I’ve learned to become quite the sewing machine mechanic as well.

uh We’ve been teaching a lot of beekeeping classes to preachers and members of the church

down there.

This is a this is called the top bar beehive.

It doesn’t look anything like what we would use here traditionally.

I have some in my house, but not most people don’t.

ah

One of the things we have is at the church in Apopa, El Salvador, we’ve helped them build

the giant aquaponics unit.

So aquaponics, you have fish in water tanks, and that water is pumped into buckets or beds

where that water goes through and the roots reach down into the water and pull the

nutrients out and they grow lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, things.

And so Victor, who um Abrego, who works down there in El Salvador, asked us if we’d help

him and the church there build an aquaponics unit.

Um Victor’s story is pretty unique.

He, if you know anything about El Salvador for the last seven years, they’ve been

relatively safe compared to what they were before.

um Considering how unsafe it was, it was the most dangerous country on earth for about 20

years up to that.

And he lived at the junction in San Salvador where MS-13 gang owned.

And their house sat on the property line of where the 18th Street gang owned.

So they were in the crosshairs of a gang war incessantly.

And somebody came and taught Victor.

As he was being recruited into the 18th Street gang at the same time, they somebody else

came and taught him the gospel, and he was able to get out of that.

He became a gospel preacher eventually.

And I’ll tell you, Victor’s pretty awesome.

He’s very tech savvy.

He has his own YouTube channel, he has his own uh Facebook channel where he teaches the

gospel online.

He’s just tremendous.

Tremendous worker.

we found out this year that somebody that was supporting him heavily, pretty much n all of

his support was coming from a group that was pretending to be the Church of Christ in El

Salvador and they were not.

They were the Christian church.

And they had been deceiving people all over El Salvador.

Well when this came to light.

And I exposed that.

It caused a problem for Victor.

They cut him off in support.

And so Victor is now very encouraged to be self supporting because he lost his support

from America.

And so what we’ve done is we’ve built this giant aquaponics unit.

There’s my my fancy schematic.

I’m sure everybody could build an aquaponics unit just from that drawing, right?

So there’s um another man there that preaches at the church at Apopa as well.

His name is Rudy.

And Rudy is a brick mason and a very good one at that.

And so he is standing on some tanks that we had just built for our fish.

We can we have about four thousand gallons of water for our fish there.

Um what I’m working on there with that barrel is a filter system.

Um now mind you, when we’re in a place like this, we just have to use the resources that

are available.

You don’t go down to um tractor supply or

get on Amazon and just order parts, you kinda have to well, jerry rig everything.

And thankfully I’m good at scrounging and jerry rigging.

This is us crushing

Volcanic rock that we had to go dig out of a a volcanic flow.

Um which if you’ve never done that, that’s quite the experience as well.

But this is what we’re trying to do.

We’re trying to grow plants in this system.

here’s cucumbers growing in one of the raft systems.

Um there’s some of the cucumbers.

If you see them yellowing a little, um your eyes are not deceiving you.

They are, that’s because they are in an aquaponics unit there’s some minerals that are

often hard to get, and one of those is iron chelate, which makes the leaves yellow but the

stems stay really green.

but the they produce quite a bit of cucumbers for them and tomatoes we’ve got there.

Um we started with twenty-six fish and right now we have about four thousand fish in the

system.

we’ve had about five or six hatchings of fish um from our system.

We did not expect to have that.

We thought we were just gonna buy fish each round, fingerlings and start them.

We haven’t had to do that at all.

We’ve actually we did such a good job finally on something that it just overwhelmed us

with

fish.

It was it’s just tremendous.

Matter of fact, Victor called me one morning and he’s a very excitable person.

And he calls me and he says, Gage, and I said, yeah man.

And he speaks great English.

He says, watch this.

And he takes his phone and he shoves it down into the water.

And I said, What are you doing?

And and he gets it and he goes, Did you see that?

And I said, Well, I saw water.

And he said, Look and he shoves it back down there again.

I said, Well Victor, what is it?

And it was m just thousands of little baby fish.

And he was so excited and if you’re wondering, yes, it killed this phone.

Um but

So, but that’s how excited he was.

So, but right now I think we’ve got about four thousand fish in our system, which is

tremendous.

Matter of fact, he’s gonna be start selling fish as fingerlings to some local tilapia

farmers in the area, which is pretty cool.

Um one of the things we do is we have the School of Church Growth, and this is an a very

integral part of our work.

You can find this on our um mana farm.org website, and it’s under School of Church Growth

if you click it.

And it is

A school where we train people daily in the Bible.

And what it is is this is something any person, you could do this if you wanted it.

And and I get this question all the time.

I’ll do gospel meetings or preach somewhere, and some of them say, you know, I really want

to study the Bible more, but I don’t know where to start.

I don’t know what to do each day.

Where what do I do?

And so what we’ve done is we’ve broken our curriculum down into a twelve month program,

each month having a different subject.

So the first year is all about the church.

And the reason we did that is most of these congregations that we work with around the

world are new and they’re struggling to grow and they they’re struggling to have an

identity.

And as members of the Lord’s Church, brethren, we ought to have the most serious identity

understanding of anybody in the world.

When people ask us about the Lord’s church, you ought to be able to say, how much time do

you have?

Because we ought to be excited to tell them about God’s church that He built, that He sent

His Son to purchase with His blood.

That ought to be something that excites us.

We ought to be able to tell and take people back to some prophecies of the Old Testament

and show how God prophesies.

Every member of the church, listen, can do this.

So what we’ve done is every day there’s a memory verse, one memory verse.

And it’s all centered on it.

Like for example, on this one.

You’ve got the the Ephesians three and verse eleven verse.

It’s not very long, you know.

It according to his eternal purpose as he purchased in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Very short.

But

There’s some important facts there.

And then there’s a Bible reading there.

And then there’s each week there’s a section that you can go through and you can read all

about the Lord’s church.

And all of it pertains to those Bible verses you memorized and those Bible verses you

read.

And so the whole first month is just what is the New Testament church?

Month two, what is the work of the church?

Month three, what is, you know, the organization of the church.

You got the elders, month four is the deacons, month five is preachers.

You you think about month six.

Now you know we know who we are and how we’re to be organized.

What is

Our main goal.

Well, we’re to be evangelistic.

How do we do that?

Okay, month seven is going to be protecting against false teachers.

Month eight is going to be you got a group of people together.

Guess what’s going to happen?

Any group of people.

Yeah, you’re going to have disagreements and division.

How do you deal with that?

How do prepare for it?

And how do you handle it when it comes?

And so

You’re memorizing your way through this, you’re reading your way through this.

Are you going to be growing as a congregation?

Absolutely.

Um, month nine is going to be about growing godly homes.

Month ten is going to be about sacrificial giving.

Month eleven is going to be all about training up the next generation in the Lord’s church

to be faithful.

And then month twelve is going to be about replication.

There used to be a time when in the Lord’s church in America, we were very concerned with

getting the church to the next town.

That was going to be a big concern to us.

We’d go into a a town and we’d say, There’s not a Lord’s church here.

And so what we would do is we would take ten or fifteen people from a congregation and

we’d say, We’re gonna get you ready and we’re gonna go over there and we’re gonna rent a

room and we’re gonna plant the Lord’s church in.

I live in Moscow.

Anybody been to the Moscow Church of Christ?

You know why you haven’t?

Because it doesn’t exist.

Should it?

Absolutely.

See, we need to be thinking, how can we replicate to Moscow?

And so we do this all over the world.

Well, I don’t know why we’re not doing it here anymore.

We we need and it it’s because we become very inward focused in the Lord’s church.

You know, we’re just trying to keep our lights on.

Anybody heard that kind of statement?

Maybe we’re trying to keep our lights on because that’s all we’re trying to do.

See, God blesses us when we reach out, not when we reach in.

That that’s you d do you ever read about that in the New Testament?

See, the the Lord’s church always grew and multiplied when the word was spread and when

people spread out.

And so that’s kind of the last concept there.

And so uh you can click off, you know, and show each verse that you’ve read and memorized,

and so it keeps track of it.

There’s even a place, if you let’s see, look up at the top right, it’s kind of small on

the screen, but it says prayer.

You can click on that.

It’s going to give you an opportunity if once you’re signed into this that you can put in

a prayer request.

And it goes to everybody that’s

In the School of Church growth.

So when they sign in every day to do their Bible reading, their Bible memory verse, it’s

going to show them that you have a prayer request, maybe your wife’s sick.

And then that person can click that they’ve prayed for that.

There’s a little button right below that says, I prayed for this.

And that night you’re going to get a message that says, you know, 355 people prayed for

your wife.

How great would that be if we could get, I mean, more prayer, more Bible study, more

reading, and more growth.

So that’s a right now in El Salvador.

Door.

There’s a preacher there that we’re working with.

His name is William.

And he and I have been communicating the last day.

He’s got 275 preachers and congregations signed up for an evangelistic school of church

growth program in El Salvador over the next three months.

Where we’re getting this in over 200 congregations.

That’s tremendous, brethren.

Um, it’s a tremendous opportunity to help churches grow the way that the Bible says.

I I think it’s interesting.

Almost every time when you read the New Testament church.

Going in the book of Acts, it says and the Word of God spread.

It doesn’t say that that people were just tremendous evangelists.

It says when the word spread, then the then the church multiplied.

It tells me how many students we have.

This is old now, but how many congregations are enrolled, how many verses are memorized,

how many verses have been read, um, how many people have stopped doing it.

I like to know that so I can reach out to them and encourage them.

So it’s easy to find there on our website.

But I’ve got just a ten minutes, I guess.

Okay, that’s oh awesome.

Okay.

so for years we have and you’ve seen from the presentation tonight, we we travel all over

the world training men to preach and we train them how to be self-supporting.

Well we’ve had a dream, and it didn’t start but very long ago after I started doing this

work.

I thought, man, how great would it be if we had a place where we could bring people from

all over the world and train them, any missionary worker, whether they’re from Africa,

Asia, South America, or America, how great would it we if we could train them in one

place.

And over the last couple of years we’ve really prayed about this, talked about this, and

the elders in Forest Hill and I have met and talked about it.

And this year we decided we’re gonna make this a reality.

And so we began looking for property all

through Central America.

We wanted something close to America where we could fly back and forth quickly, easily,

and inexpensively.

And so we began looking in places that we were already working, Honduras, El Salvador,

Panama.

um We were looking in places people, you know, suggest, man, you ought to go look in Costa

Rica.

And we began looking around and we found very high prices in Central America.

Land is about what it is here in Collierville.

um We were looking at property that was very remote in Honduras that was $25,000

dollars an acre and it was on the side of a mountain like this.

And so man, I I thought, man, there’s just no way that we can feasibly buy what we need to

do what we want to do.

And then somebody recommended I need to look at Belize.

So I did and I began looking at land prices and I began looking for the church there.

And I found two things.

I found that land was readily available, inexpensive and tremendous, and the church was

almost non existent.

And those that fit really two of the things we wanted to do.

We wanted to go to a place, not because the church was there, but because the church

wasn’t there.

And so there are about seven congregations that are faithful in the Lord’s church in

Belize.

And Belize is not an enormous country.

It’s a country of about 450,000 people.

It’s about the size of New Hampshire.

uh But there is one whole side of that country that has never had the Lord’s Church in it.

And so we have found some property on that side of the country, and we’re in the process

of trying to buy 31 acres there.

There is a little place there called Spanish Lookout.

It’s about 30 minutes from Guatemala.

It’s about two hours from Mexico and it’s about an hour and a half from the coast.

uh The property has a year-round spring that produces beautiful clear water.

It’s kind of in the middle of the property there and it runs down through this valley on

the property.

It already has an existing cabana.

It has two already built tilapia ponds that are stocked on it.

It’s got over 150 coconut trees, it’s got 56 giant mango trees.

And I’m not saying that the trees are m are enormous, but they grow the big mangoes.

There’s if you if you travel the world, you know that there’s mangoes that are about that

big and they’re good, but they don’t produce much.

But then there’s giant mangoes.

And they’re really sweet and awesome.

There’s a bunch of those.

There’s sour sop trees.

There’s two acres of vanilla.

Anyone know what the most expensive spice on earth is right now?

Vanilla.

Two acres of vanilla at ground floor pricing right now, and if you just do a mediocre job

of curing it, is worth about eighty thousand dollars a year.

There’s already two acres of vanilla on the property.

There are um fen it’s completely fenced in and cross fenced for cattle.

There is a thirty-two by thirty-two pig barn with nine pig stalls, concrete floors,

everything in it.

tremendous, tremendous property.

It’s beautiful.

It’s in a it’s at the end of a dead end road, so it’s very safe for us.

It’s as the crow flies, it’s about nine miles from the capital city of Belmopan, but it

takes forty five minutes to get there because it’s well it’s police.

this is you can kind of see the property here all kind of

Be quiet as it goes through here.

But right I’ll show you here in a second when it pops up.

This is the cabana.

It’s never been finished.

So we’re gonna finish it and we’re gonna enlarge it for the first house there for people

that are working there to to stay.

It is up on a I did not realize that even had sound with it.

I’ve been to a lot of churches and given a lot of presentations and nobody ever has sound

capability, so I didn’t even realize this had sound.

That’s awesome.

It’s got cashews, it’s got chickens, there’s some of the tilapia ponds.

Matter of fact, the water table’s at seven foot.

When they hit seven foot when they were digging the tilapia ponds, they started filling

with water.

Um everything’s sub-arrigated on the property as well.

there you can kind of get a pretty good picture of what it looks like there.

Um

You might ask, what are we gonna do on this?

So our dream is that we can set up everything that we teach agriculturally and

vocationally and biblically.

All of our we’re gonna build a a Bible training school there that’ll at least be

part-time.

We’re gonna have a giant hacienda there that’s be a big U shaped house where any mission

worker that’s coming to down to train and work with us can stay.

Um all of our teachers can go down there and stay.

Anybody that’s going down there to do evangelism can stay and have a nice house.

There’ll be we’re hoping to build six bedrooms.

um on the wings and have one central living, kitchen, and dining area for everybody.

Then we’re going to build bungalows across the property.

And the reason we want to build some bungalows across the property is we want to do a soft

landing for missionaries.

A lot of people go on mission trips for two or three weeks and they decide, I want to go

and be a missionary.

This would be excellent.

And the husband comes home and he says, honey, I think we’re going to go do mission work.

And she’s a good wife and she says, okay.

And about three, four months

Into doing mission work, she comes to him and says, Take me home.

You know what she misses?

She misses Walmart.

She misses all of the conveniences.

Hot water.

She misses air conditioning.

She misses her car and good roads and people that speak her language.

Her kids miss that.

They miss mama and grandmama and they miss all the, you know, food wrapped in cellophane

at the grocery store.

They don’t like going to the market and and seeing meat hanging with flies buzzing and

it’s hard to do mission work.

And so they’re not

taught, especially in difficult places, how to adapt to that, overcome culture shock and

language shock, um, and just how to adapt to missing home even, how to do the work.

There’s a lot of t a lot of things you do in the mission field that you don’t do in local

work in America.

So a lot of guys will leave local work and go do mission work, but they don’t they don’t

know how to turn a wrench.

And if you don’t know how to turn a wrench in the mission field, you’re probably not going

to be very successful very long.

You’ve got to be able to fix your own car when the belt breaks and the tires give out on a

back road or a goat trail that you’re driving down trying to get somewhere.

You you’ve got to be pretty adept at at being able to handle those kind of situations.

And so we want to create a place where we can send our missionaries that are going into

the mission field so they can be trained for six months to a year and give them a soft

landing in the mission field to prepare them.

And here’s the other side of it.

If after a few months they say, you know what, this isn’t for us.

That’s a no-harm, no-foul moment.

Because they haven’t sold the dog and they haven’t sold the house and they haven’t sold

the car and they haven’t raised $200,000 so that they can so they can get moved and do

everything.

That’s that’s by the way, that’s the average cost to get somebody in the mission field.

Here’s another staggering statistic.

Across Christendom, I’m gonna use the broad term here.

The average missionary lasts two years.

Seventy percent of marriages in missionary homes end in divorce.

Ninety percent of kids from missionaries end up lost.

I think we need to do a better job preparing our missionaries.

So that’s our goal.

We want to build a facility where they can come down and they can learn everything that

we’ve had to learn the hard way over the last sixteen years.

Give them a place where they can do that.

And so um I’m gonna just fast forward to my final plea here.

So we’re trying to raise $200,000 right now.

That gives us the ability to buy the land, it gives us the ability to dig a water well for

the property, to put in a small solar farm because there’s no electricity um anywhere in

the bush in Belize.

And so we’re gonna have to build our own solar panel

farm there.

We’re gonna buy a couple vehicles for the facility, and we’re gonna buy a brick-building

machine that makes these giant bricks that look like Legos.

If you like Legos, they’re awesome.

And they stack like Legos.

They make building very efficient, cost effective.

It costs about ten thousand dollars to buy the machine.

um So we’re trying to get two hundred thousand dollars.

This is a one-time investment, but we believe it’s an investment in the Lord’s Church and

it’s an opportunity for all of us.

You know, we have invested

In missionaries for years, why don’t we invest in an opportunity to train those

missionaries better and equip them better?

And any mission worker in the world that wants to come there and learn what we teach and

how to do it, we’re going to help them come there.

We’ll let them stay as long as they need to learn as much as they want, and then they can

go back fully equipped and trained instead of us trying to do it two weeks at a time in

different places.

We can bring people from all over the world.

So instead of us trying to go to two people or three people at a time, we can bring 30 in

if we have the

if we have the housing and we have the funds and so what we’re trying to do is get forty

congregations to help us with five thousand dollars one time.

Um I know that’s a stretch for some congregations and but you know what I I’ve been

amazed.

Almost every congregation I’ve gone to so far has said we want to be a part of this.

And then two or three individuals have come and said we want to be a part in some way.

And so let me encourage you, if you have the the opportunity to help us, please do so.

If you can’t, pray for us.

Um we solicit your prayers that this is a success.

Several weeks ago I I had a conversation with a lady and she said, you know, she she was a

professional fundraiser, and she said, You need to be looking for some big fish to make

this.

Happened, and I thought, well, yeah, that’s great.

No, but I don’t know any big fish.

And but I told my wife on the way home I was gonna pray for that, and I did, and I started

praying for that.

And in the last week, several big fish have ended up in our net that are helping us in a

big way.

And uh I believe prayer works, brethren.

I I beseech you, pray for us in the field.

we we need it.

Um, Lord willing, next year Walker’s gonna be and Aurora’s gonna be there with us, being

able to help us set this up and get it

going and be able to be trained themselves so when they they come there.

thank you for letting me present this to you, this opportunity to you tonight.

If you want to come see me afterwards, I’d be glad to to talk with you more about it if

you have any questions.

There’s a lot of people that support us by $50 a month.

We’re trying to get a thousand supporters for our mission work at fifty dollars a month.

You can scan that QR code there or come see me.

I’ve got some cards.

I’ve got some flyers in the back as well.

if you want to see those that tell all about the the Belize project.

But once again, thank you for the the support that you helped us with in 2015 and 16 with

the the Nepal work.

But we solicit your prayers and your help is this as well.

So thank you.