One of Epiphany’s traditions is a year-end gift for a specific mission or outreach ministry taken from our Christmas Eve offering. This year, the Missions Committee found two projects equally compelling.
The first is helping to provide a car for Ezra, a disciple of Pastor Ahmet in Turkey. You may remember Pastor Ahmet from his time with us last summer. Ezra needs a car not only for his growing family, but also to further his ministry in Turkey. In the past few years, Ezra helped tend to Syrian refugees who were traumatized by the brutal civil war. He now has been assigned to minister to a church in an overwhelmingly Muslim area in Turkey that receives an average of 1500-2000 visitors per month. Ezra’s tasks include sharing the faith with those visitors and believers, meeting with inquirers in the surrounding districts and provinces, and journeying to Kurdish areas as he works on a translation of the New Testament in their mother tongue.
We also want to help get SAT-7’s Social Media Viewer Engagement Initiative off the ground. With 1.9 million Facebook followers and over 2 million SAT-7 Arabic YouTube downloads a month, SAT-7 has designed and implemented social media resources to help people with parenting and life questions. Helping people become better parents is a worthy goal in itself, but more than that, it enables SAT-7 to lead people into a discussion about faith and ultimately into a relationship with God. The strategy recognizes that many people are initially not ready to engage with matters of faith – but rather that they are interested in the things that are issues for them. Therefore, SAT-7 creates engaging social media content that addresses life issues like parenting, marriage, employment, trauma, and addiction and to slowly introduce a faith perspective.
During our evening services on Christmas Eve (5 and 11pm), the first $4,000 of our offering as a congregation will be designated to fund these projects ($2,000 for each). If for anyreason you want to make sure your gift on Christmas Eve goes to Epiphany’s operatingbudget, please just indicate that in the memo line of your check.