The United Nations at BSBC
Many know that head office of the United Nations can be found in New York city. BUT, did you know that there is a mini-UN meeting weekdays on the second floor of the Family Life Center? Yes, it’s quite something! Let me tell you the story…
Gospel on the Web
Ragnar Oborn, from Grace Memorial Baptist Church, operates a ministry called “Gospel on the Web” where he uses the free “Google Credits” that churches like ours sign over to him to host websites which offer a presentation of the gospel in a variety of languages, targeted at people groups from nations closed to missionary presence. For our part, we’ve entrust these free “Google Credits” to Ragnar and, for four years now, these credits have hosted a Gospel on the Web website in Mandarin.
As of January 2021, Ragnar is operating websites in 50 languages, including: Punjabi, Hindi, Mandarin, Farsi, Arabic, Tamil, Telugu, Vietnamese, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, German, Nepali, Marathi, Russian, Ukrainian, etc.
Expanding the ministry
Now, enter Deacon Charlie Ritchie, who was seeking to develop an outreach video in support of ministry to the Vietnamese. So, Charlie and Ragnar prayed about how to improve/enlarge this ministry and “came up” with the idea of partnering with local churches in applying for provincial and federal summer student grants. These grants called for students with language and website skills. Amazingly, they were awarded a total of 17 grants!
Did you catch that? Summer student grant programs are funding the expanding presence of the gospel…on the web! The churches partnering in this project along with BSBC are: Grace Memorial, Hanwell Community Church, The Drive, Jemseg Baptist, Millville Baptist, and Mactaquac Baptist.
How do we come into this partnership?
Twelve of these summer students, including our own Tina Franca (Portuguese), are working, Monday to Friday in KidzTown, observing all Covid protocols. It is a great blessing to offer these students a place to work. The individual students represent the following languages: Portuguese, Hebrew, Punjabi, Vietnamese, Mandarin, French, and Farsi and it is interesting to note that only one of the students is a professing Christian. What a remarkable situation!
How you can help
On Wednesday morning, May 12, I had the privilege of Charlie introducing me to the team assembled that day. Bright and engaging students who seem genuinely happy in this important work. This leads me to consider how to pray over this ministry this summer. So, I invite you to pray for the students working through the summer at BSBC:
please pray for their safety during this time of pandemic;
pray that, when we have contact, the BSBC family will be amazingly loving to them;
for the gospel to be powerful in their lives and for their work to be anointed for powerful ministry in the world.
I’d like to say thanks to the members of our Board of Management for agreeing to share what would be, largely unused space, for gospel purposes this summer.
As we seek to “join God in our neighbourhood” – here’s a new way for us to serve a neighbourhood of international proportions!
To God be the glory,
Pastor Greg
