Pitman Post

Child Evangelism Fellowship Edition

Volume 4, Issue 4 Summer 2011 Newsletter

Morgans CEF Update

www.cefonline.com www.cef-sc.org

Children all over the world need to be reached with the Gospel, and that includes my home state of South Carolina. So what will we do to reach these children? Someone has to tell them. This is my fourth summer being a missionary with Child Evangelism Fellowship, and I am incredibly thankful for this opportunity that God has given me once again. Our Greenville CEF director, B.J. Bateman, gives many new opportunities for returning students to continue being challenged and pushed to the next level. While during previous summers I have been a part of the Leadership Team, this summer I am on Student Staff. Being on Student Staff has taught me many valuable lessons that will not only help me in CEF, but also in every day aspects of life. I have learned to be a better communicator, organizer, manager, leader, encourager, and teacher, to name just a few. I am eternally grateful for these life skills and pray that they will continue to be instilled in my life. Another exciting and new part about this summer is that my brother, Graham, has joined our CEF team! I have loved being able to work along side him as we minister to children and grow in our relationship with God. After an exciting, growing, encouraging, and tiring week at camp we came home to begin our summer Good News Clubs. The Greenville team this year has twenty four summer missionaries. For those of you who do not know, we are divided into teams of three or four (a different team every week). Each team has three locations at which they conduct a Good News Club that week (YMCAs, apartments, daycares, homes, etc.). We have a club at 10:30, 1:00, and 3:00. A team goes to their same three locations each day for one week. The next week each summer missionary is assigned a new team and new places to go. During my second week of Good News Clubs, Graham and I got to be on a team together, along with another girl named Grace. We were on the road a lot traveling to and from clubs, but had a very fruitful week, seeing several children receive Christ. One of our Good News Clubs that week was at a lower income apartment complex. It was eye opening to see how much the children needed to be loved. One little girl, probably four years old, followed me around wherever I went. She always wanted me to put my arm around her, hold her hand, or scratch her back. So often I take simple things like that for granted. As you can hopefully see, I have learned many new things this summer. Thank you very much to all of you who have supported me both financially and through your prayers. I appreciate it very much. Please continue to pray for me and my team as we share the Gospel with these children.

Training Camp by Morgan

As in previous years, our summer with CEF begins with training camp at Columbia International University. This year I attended leadership classes that covered topics from public speaking to teaching preschoolers to becoming involved in the CEF ministry full time. Our chapel speaker this year at camp was Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown, a passionate speaker from California, speaks to students and parents all around the country in many different settings. I would encourage you to visit his website (www.proclaimministries.com) to listen to his podcasts, read his blog, or have him speak at an area near you. During Mr. Browns talks at camp he emphasized the awesomeness of God. This verse stuck in my mind at camp as one that proclaims the awesomeness of God: 2 Corinthians 5:15 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. Isnt that awesome that Jesus would die for us? We owe our entire lives to Him. This year at camp we had a challenging, but exciting, change. Every day at camp we hold demo club, where four or five returning students perform an actual Good News Club on stage in the auditorium like we do during the summers, but with the other summer missionaries acting as the children instead of actual kids. This gives the first year summer missionaries an opportunity to see what a Good News Club looks like if they have never seen a real one before. Instead of doing these demo clubs in the auditorium this year, we held them off campus at a park in an underprivileged area with real kids. At times it seemed a little chaotic, but it was a neat experience. Leadership team members rotated each day arriving early to set up inflatables and food and spend time playing with the children. About an hour later the rest of the summer missionaries arrived for the hour long demo club, which included songs, a memory verse, Bible lesson, and missionary story. Summer missionaries sat among the children during the club and the first year students observed during the first few days. It ended up being a great way for the first year students to see a real Good News Club take place with interaction from real kids. The community where it was held was greatly impacted, and many children received Christ. I had the awesome opportunity to counsel one twelve year old girl who gave her life to the Lord. The neatest part for me was explaining to her that when she becomes a child of God, she will always be a child of God. He will never leave her. When I told her those promises, and she understood, a beautiful smile came across her face. Many lives were eternally impacted.

Grahams CEF Update

This summer, I have had the opportunity to participate in a program called Child Evangelism Fellowship, or CEF, for short. For the past three years, Morgan has been able to work with CEF, and this has been the first year I had the chance to apply. CEF is a national organization that arranges Good News Clubs around the country, and the chapter that Morgan and I work with deals with the Greenville / Pickens / Anderson area during the summer. At these Good News Clubs, high school and college students share the gospel with kids

anywhere from four to fourteen. We present the gospel in a wordless book format; that is, with colors representing the points of salvation: gold represents Gods love, black represents our sin, red represents Jesus dying on the cross, white represents the forgiveness of sin, and green represents growing in Christ. Through Bible story lessons, we present these wordless book points and give an invitation for kids to receive Christ as their savior, and then counsel them through their salvation if God is working in their heart. That may seem pretty easy, but let me tell you, it is not. After conducting three of these one-hour clubs each day, each CEF student has a responsibility for the next day they have to study for at night, and after three more clubs, more studying. Even though our schedules are packed full, it has been awesome to see God work through me and through my teammates this summer. After hearing my sister talk about the work it took to prepare for these lessons and other activities we have in Good News Clubs, CEF was the last thing I wanted to participate in during my summer. But, last year, I began to see how God was working through all the students in CEF, and I started to have a burden on my heart to reach children with the gospel. My eyes were opened during training week, when CEF teams from all throughout the state held block parties in a low-income section of Columbia. The kids there were thirsting for love, and their eyes lit up when we told them how God loved them, and he would never leave them. That week God led a child, Marques, to Himself through me for the first time. That is when I realized what we were doing we were not just singing with kids and teaching them Bible stories; we were making an eternal impact on someones life! Throughout the following weeks, I have seen God work in amazing ways, and I am looking excitedly forward to what the rest of the summer holds!

The Kids by Graham

During CEF camp in Columbia, all the South Carolina teams as a whole held daily block parties. While we were hosting these parties, I realized a unique characteristic about the inner-city kids to whom we were ministering. These kids were starving for love. As I walked into the park for the first time, I saw many relationships that were anything but loving: mothers yelling at children, siblings fighting, and uninterested fathers. When I began to talk to the kids and interact with them, I saw how desperate they were for attention. I also saw there were basically two groups of kids the ones who were aloof and unresponsive, and the ones who hugged, jumped on, and just crawled all over us. But sadly, all these kids went back to the basically the same environment one likely filled with drugs, alcohol, and sometimes even abuse. I realized how important it was to provide love to the kids, and during my second week of clubs (in Greer, SC), I saw the same characteristics. The kids we dealt with in Greer were in nowhere near the situation of those in Columbia, but the same characteristics were there. There was the same want for love, the same responses to our interaction. Many of the children we work with have either few or no male role models, and as a guy teaching the kids, many of them look up to me. Through the kids coming to the Good News Clubs, God has been teaching me how to love. It is so easy to love the kids, no matter if they are sweet little angels or totally disrespectful. But, for some reason, I have trouble loving my peers as Jesus loves them. So, as God works on my heart this summer, teaching me to love others like I love the kids, I hope you will take what you can from this and realize that God calls us to love others, young or old, as he does!