Inspire, Winter 2002

22 Winter 2003 50s Sam ’56 and Ellen Smith Hornbrook ’56 are excited about God’s work in Veracruz, Mexico. Sam keeps busy by preaching on Sundays and teaching two classes for the Bible Institute of Emmanuel Baptist on Saturdays. They praise the Lord for the more than 250 people who are attending on Sunday mornings. Ruth Yost ’59 was involved with many ministries this past summer in Haiti. The first-ever evangelistic sports camp was held with several neighborhood soccer teams. Pray for the spiritual growth of those who have given their lives to Christ. 60s John ’63 and Sharon Marks Ingram ’65 praise God that their needs were met while Sharon battled cancer. They celebrate that she is now cancer-free. John is a controls engineer for a company in St. Louis, Missouri. They are pictured here with their daughter, Lynne, and their son, Rob, his wife, Jennifer, and their two girls, Kelcie and Rylie. Norm ’64 and Evelyn Thoms Nicklas ’64 share that there are 65 new ABWE candidates for career missionary service. Pray as these candidates seek to raise their prayer and financial support teams. Marv ’65 and Joan Carter Stephens ’65 praise God for the continued success of the pastor’s library project. The number of libraries sent to pastors in Latin America is approaching 400. A new project that they are working on is the junior age Sunday school materials. They report that the first quarter of materials is completed. Norm ’67 and Louise Stutesman Barnard ’67 celebrated their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary on June 3, 2002. They are pleased with the possibility that all the degrees for the Grand Rapids Baptist Seminary Extension Program (Singapore) will be accredited. Joe ’68 and Sharon Tallman Hollaway ’68 have seen thousands of immigrants come into Ireland within the past year. Their presence has had many positive influences on the Hollaway’s ministry. The immigrants are more open to outreach attempts, are looking for alternatives to the Catholic Church, and are providing a diverse culture. Dan Lacey ’68 and his wife, Betty, are greatly encouraged by the enrollment at the school in Algrange, France. Again this year they had 14 students enrolled, which is the maximum for their facilities. Dan enjoys traveling to teach classes at a pastoral training school in Tchad. Dan ’69 and Carol Beerer Kinniburgh ’69 reside in Marion, Tennessee, where Dan recently semi-retired from working at Kinniburgh Brother’s, Inc., a small logging company. The first ten years after graduation, Dan was a B-52 pilot in the United States Air Force. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross for missions flown during the Christmas of 1972. The Kinniburghs have two children, Jason ’96 and Heather. Jason is a registered nurse in Rochester, Minnesota, and Heather is serving with ABWE in Portugal as a teacher in the Greater Lisbon Christian Academy. Bruce ’69 and Bev Hare McDonald ’72 had a profitable furlough in that Bruce has almost completed writing his third book, The Search for God, and they used their time to pray and think about how they can expand their ministry. Part of the proposed expansion will include recruiting others to join ABWE in sports evangelism, assisting ABWE missionaries in using sports evangelism on the field, helping coordinate college sport teams to help, seeking to enlist pro athletes for short-term opportunities, and allowing Bruce to continue writing. 70s Edie Phillips Sartor ’70 and her husband, Tom, have been encouraged by the overwhelming financial support for the trade school in Bangladesh. Tom really enjoys the trade work as well as instructing in the classroom. The Sartors feel blessed to be a part of the team in Chittagong. Alumnotes Sue Farley ’71 teaches at China Baptist Theological College in Hong Kong. She thoroughly enjoyed her mini- furlough this summer and was pleased that the basketball camps that went on while she was gone had a positive impact. Barb Cooper Klumpp ’74 and her husband, Phil, serve in the Philippines and rejoice that the summer retreat of missionary kids (MKs) called “The Return” was a huge success. Many MKs were reunited with people they had not seen in years. Others were encouraged because they felt they were a part of the larger ABWE family. Jim ’75 and Rachel Mayo Chambers ’78 are thrilled with the work teams from the States who have come to help them with the construction of their house and the Bible Institute building in Zambia. These are exciting provisions from the Lord. Evandro Batista ’77 and his wife, Elina, have been pleased with the remarkable growth of Ericeira Baptist Church in Portugal. This growth has forced them to look for a larger place to buy or rent, but in Ericeira it is hard to find an adequate facility for a reasonable price. Pray that God would direct them in their search. John Thomas ’77 and his wife, Sharon, and their six children reside in Columbus, Ohio. John and his brother, Ron, minister together in song and preaching. John has had five albums produced. He desires to have a full-time stewardship ministry. Writing up a Storm If you or your children use Christian educational materials, you may be using curriculum developed by a Cedarville grad! Since 1988, Connie Averitt Williams ’71 has been involved in three major curriculum writing projects for the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) and LifeWay Publishers. A teacher at a Christian school in Bakersfield, California since 1986, Connie has worked through ACSI to develop spelling and Bible curriculum for fourth graders. The spelling and Bible materials are used by Christian schools around the world and are still in print. Connie also helped create Bible/science middle school curriculum for LifeWay Publishers. She is excited about the creative freedom LifeWay gave her to “inject drama and humor” into the materials. Even with so much going on, Connie finds time to write smaller curriculum project units as well as fiction. Her juvenile chapter book, called Right Hand Man, received the Noteworthy Book Award at the C.S. Lewis Contest and was placed on the Christian Education Commission recommended reading list for children in 1996-1997. Connie’s next fiction book, currently in progress, will highlight the problems of bright children who have learning disabilities. “I am in awe when I think that the ‘I AM’ God who provided manna in the wilderness is the same One who chose me, a person who battles attention deficit disorder, for these grueling marathon writing projects, which I know I am totally incapable of doing on my own,” Connie remarked. “When God gives you an opportunity to serve Him, and it looks totally out of your range, raise your hand and say, ‘OK.’ Then, just show up for work. He will do the rest. He is faithful.” Connie and her husband, Jim ’71 , reside in Bakersfield. They have three children: Joe ’97 , married to Gena (Lamoreaux) ’98 , Christie, and Abby. Connie may be reached at willwrite4@juno.com or 661-871-3319. Inspire 23 Memoirs from Alaska More than 20 years ago, newlyweds Duncan ’78 and Leslie Leyland Fields ’79 set out for a new life together in the remote wilderness of Alaska. The harsh yet beautiful extremes of island life and the commercial salmon fishing business in which Leslie and Duncan diligently worked soon drew Leslie to write essays about their experiences. As these essays were published in books and magazines, Leslie’s editors and agents encouraged her to tell her full story of fishing life in a memoir format. After careful contemplation, Leslie began doing just that, and now her newest book, Surviving the Island of Grace: A Memoir of Alaska, has been released by St. Martin’s Press. The book shares portions of Leslie’s life leading up to 1991. Perhaps the book’s jacket describes the memoir best: “In brilliant prose, Leslie Fields tells her story of adapting to life on a wilderness island without running water, telephones, or other twentieth-century conveniences. … With an unflinching gaze, she explores the extremes that define her new life: the beauty and brutality of commercial fishing, the startling land and seascape around her, the isolation, the physical labor, the intensity of communal island life. Among these extremes, she must find her way from a young woman to wife, commercial fisherwoman, and mother.” This latest book joins Leslie’s three previous releases, titled Out on the Deep Blue; The Entangling Net: Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Lives; and The Water Under Fish. Although the Fields and their six children reside at a remote fishcamp during the summer salmon fishing season, they spend the winter on Kodiak Island. There Leslie teaches English at Kodiak College and runs The Northern Pen, a professional writing business. To contact Leslie, e-mail her at northernpen@alaska.com . Dr. Gary ’75 and Anita Schneider Gordon ’73 currently live in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Gary is chair of the Bible department at Colorado Springs Christian High School and Anita is a math editor for the Association of Christian Schools International Curriculum Department. In 1996 the Gordons began to lead student missions trips through Colorado Springs Christian Schools, going first to Jamaica. Since then they have taken biannual trips to Israel/Palestine to work at Hope Secondary School in West Bank. Gary shares the following reflections concerning a recent trip to the Holy Land. A s I sit in my second story room in the dorm wing of Hope Secondary School in Beit Jala, West Bank, I have plenty of time to think. From my window, I look down the valley of Elah toward the Mediterranean and watch the night fall. I reflect on how very different this visit is from my previous mission trips to the place of Christ’s birth and ministry. The stillness of the night, instead of being disturbed by the happy, excited sounds of a group of teenagers, is punctuated by sometimes not-so-distant gun battles and the sounds of tanks and armored personnel carriers on patrol. These are the streets of a Palestinian village which has perhaps the highest percentage of Christian population in the area. The believers here are caught in the middle of a conflict which they did not start and with which they have nothing to do. Their story is untold in the Western media reports of the conflict in such places as Jenin, Nabulus, Tulkarem, Ramallah, Beit Jala, and Bethlehem. In all these places, Christians live in the midst of someone else’s conflict and attempt to find some normalcy to life. Children continue to play, even if it is under the shadow of a soldier standing guard. They go to school, though they may have to find their way over the rubble, through checkpoints, and past tanks. Adults do what they can to provide for their families in a devastated economy that has close to 85 percent unemployment. Young couples still marry, although wedding celebrations are often cut short by the imposition of curfew. Although our family had prayed since the beginning of the second uprising (October 2000) that the Lord would encourage our Christian friends in this region, we had no idea what He was about to do. Seeing the hand of God as He is working is a fantastic experience. I had been searching for an Israeli Christian couple who had lost a daughter in a recent suicide bombing. God used my search to introduce me to a new friend—a young Palestinian businessman who greatly desired to help the Palestinian believers. This young man has a passion to share the love of Christ in the refugee camps and towns of northern West Bank, places where Westerners are no longer found. I had packed Arabic Bibles in my suitcase—little did I know that through this young man these Bibles would find their way into places I could not go. I am reminded that changes in our plans are just vehicles for God’s victories. Later on I walked in the darkened hallway of the school past an area prepared for an elevator for disabled students. I was reminded that this elevator, along with the dental and optometric care we desire to provide for the students of Hope School, has become secondary to meeting more basic needs. The missionary project here, which began as a wonderful opportunity to introduce American young people to a service and educational experience beyond what most have found elsewhere, seems to be developing into a small part of God’s much larger program of encouraging believers and bringing others to Himself. Days later, I left Israel for home. As the plane became airborne, I sensed the tension of living under curfew lift, but another strange feeling settled over me. Other missionaries who have served in tension-charged environments describe this as a feeling of guilt. My American passport and ticket home allow me to leave, while friends must stay behind and live in the midst of conflict. Our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Christ are indeed caught between Zionist extremism on the one hand and radical Islamic militancy on the other. We might all benefit from their example of faithfulness in the midst of trials and hope for a resolution in a humanly hopeless situation. Let us join with the believers of this trouble-torn region as they pray for the peace of Jerusalem that will only come as Jews and Moslems find faith in the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ. The Gordons have three children: Johanna, a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan; Isaac, a third class cadet at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy; and Samuel, a high school student. Gary may be reached at Gary.Gordon@cscslions.org. Ministering in the West Bank D r . G a r y G o r d o n ’ 7 5