Child Evangelism Fellowship Chicago

Pastor Mabins, wife Gina, put together an amazing Youth Conference at the Mario Parente Theatre in Villa Park. Pastor Mabins asked me to be the MC of the program and how excited I was for this honor. God’s spirit was all over the place and in all who attended. There was praise worship, song and dance, preaching and skits pertaining to God’s amazing love. The show was put on by the Youth, between the ages of 9-18. There were approximately 60 youth in attendance and about 120 total attendees. The youth were taught such things as purity, and you can achieve all things through Christ who strengthens us. It was encouraging to be part of their first annual Youth Conference and I look forward to partnering with them again. I met several individuals who have an interest in partnering with CEF to reach children through the public school system and I was also able to share my testimony of how CEF has impacted my life and what wonderful things it can bring for children who accept Christ as their savior.

Hello friends,

Jordyn and I are back home. We had a tremendous time studying God’s word over the past three months while in Warrenton, Missouri at the Children’s Ministry Institute, we both learned so much.

Let me start by sharing how dedicated our Instructors were to getting the message to us of how important it is to be a Teacher that touches lives for eternity. They demonstrated their committment and it showed as the majority of Instructors with CEF have been serving for over 15+ years and they have a wealth of Biblical knowledge, information and committed hearts for the Lord. How exciting. That says to me that this is a solid organization committed to our future…the children.

You may wonder…what now? Well, I am ready. I want to be used in service for the Lord. Sharing the gospel message with as many children as God will allow. Since my return two weeks ago, I have been busy planning and preparing. We finished up our GNC’s last week and are now preparing for summer 5-day clubs, during national Prayer day, I was asked to share an important message on Prayer to children of a local Church. There were 15 children and about 15 adults who listened in as I taught a method of praying. I’ve also been meeting with perspective donors and setting up training for new clubs for the next school season, and much more. If you or if you know of anyone that may be interested in partneriing with us to start a club at a school, daycare, community center, or home, please contact me or pass along my information. I need your help and the time is now!

During my time at the Children’s Ministry Institute, they taught us how to look up critical information relative to our mission work and I found that there are approximately 994 public schools in cook county alone and we are not even in a third of them, so I need your help. Please PRAY for doors to open, churches to come along and partner with us, as our communities are in need of committed Christians to come along side the teachers and parents and do all that we can to encourage our children to be actively applying Biblical characteristics in their lives.

Plese feel free to call me, email me if you need more information, I would be honored to meet with you to explain these life changing benefits.

Love and blessings as always,

Angela Bailey, Missionary
Area Ministry Coordinator
(636) 297-6673

Please stay tuned for more updates.

I think God took my two small fish and turned them into a lunch fit for thousands.  No, there are not thousands attending the youth group where I teach–”just” 12 of the most curious, intelligent, polite people I’ve ever taught. I was overwhelmed when I started, terrified of my lack of ability.  Three weeks later, however, I’ve never had more fun in my life than when I’m reading three or four different versions of a Bible passage, trying to understand the main points, break them down to present to the teens, and come up with personal, sometimes self-incriminating stories to illustrate. Well, actually, it IS more fun to then take those Bible lessons and teach them to the teens, attempt to answer–or research–their really tough questions, and just get to know them better!

Two weeks ago I donned my bathrobe, which usually gets used whenever I teach Bible stories, and performed a dramatic monologue about the woman with the bleeding disorder in Mark 6. It got the kids thinking, but it also convicted me, as I taught about how His perfect love heals us and overcomes our fears just like He did for the woman and Jairus.

Last week I accompanied the youth group on a retreat to a camp in Michigan–where we sang “the campfire song song” around a campfire, played “carnage duck duck goose,” and had a contest to see who could stuff the most marshmallows into our mouths and still speak intelligibly. During the afternoon we split into teams. The rival team was asked, “What’s the most awesome part of God’s creation you’ve seen so far during this weekend?” The team responded, “Oceans! [never mind that there aren't any in Michigan...] because they’re full of species of fish that God created that we haven’t even discovered yet! Because He’s so creative and so awesome!” My team started yelling in outrage, “Cheaters! Cheaters! You’re quoting what Anna Beth said last Sunday about how awesome God is. Cheaters!” That team got the point in the contest… but they also showed that they got the point of my talk about God’s awesomeness. Oceans full of fish… and He makes my two small fish go much farther than they should reach…

That evening, we sat around a campfire while an amazing guitarist played, and we sang, praise songs. Suddenly a beaver surfaced in the lake 25 feet away–so we ran over there to go see God’s amazing creation. When we regrouped around the campfire, I talked about Peter–Jesus’ prediction of Peter’s denial, Peter’s denial, and then Peter’s reinstatement on the beach with Jesus over a breakfast of fish He had just helped the disciples catch. As I told the teens the story, I mentioned some of my sins, and asked them to think of some of theirs. What are we supposed to do with these sins? Take them to the One Who fills oceans with countless, colorful fish, and ask Him to take away our sins. At the end of the Bible lesson, we wrote down lists of our sins on pieces of paper, confessing them to God, and then put the papers into the fire. As I watched my lengthy list burn and disintegrate within seconds, I was amazed all over again that He has taken our sins away from us “as far as the East is from the West” (Ps 103:3).

I would love prayer as I continue teaching these teens–

1. that God will continue making my two small fish… *ahem* I mean, my time and effort… stretch so much farther than I could ever have hoped!
2. that God will give me wisdom as I interact with my co-planners and the teens, making me able to show them how much I care about them.
3. that God will use every incident in these teens’ lives to draw them each one step closer to a personal relationship with Him–salvation for some of them, and a constant relationship with Him for others.

Thank you for your prayers!

Hello My Friends,

It’s been a little bit since I’ve been able to bring you up to speed with what’s going on in the mission field. I’m still training in Missouri, being equipped to go out into all the world and preach the gospel. The Holy Spirit is working overtime as I am challenged daily with following God’s commands so that not even one of these little ones should be lost. Here is the 150th class of future graduates of the Children’s Ministry Institute…only five (5) more weeks left. ,

Here is Jordyn with a little girl named (Leela) who accepted Christ as her Savior during our Good News Club. She is still so excited and told me last week that she places her salvation track under her pillow every night and prays with it. She is working at growing in Christ, each week at club, she wants to PRAY for her mom out loud and it is touching to see how she is learning that PRAYER is essential. At club we go over ACTS with the children a method of prayer. A = adoration for the Lord, C = confess your sins to him, T= thankgiving to him for what he has done for you, S = supplicaton for the things you need. They hear and the understand.

Thank you for your continued PRAYERS. Prayer is vital to all we do. Thank you all for your support and thank you GNC leaders and Children’s Church leaders for your committment to teach God’s word with love. Please continue to pray for recollection of what I’m being taught, and for endurance. Many nights I go into the wee hours of the morning reading and preparing lessons and practicums for the next morning. 2 Tim 2:10 “Therefore I endure all things for the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.

I leave you with this…Each child is a sheet of paper and many will write on that paper…parents, teachers, peers. I ask you, will you be one to write on that paper? Will it be something positive or something negative?

May God Bless and Keep you,
Love and blessings

Angela

During last week’s Bible club at the Choi home, I got to teach the Bible lesson, about the end of John 4–the nobleman’s son was sick and dying, so the father walked 20 miles to find Jesus and bring Him back to Capernaum to heal his son. But when he asked Jesus, Jesus just said, “You people will never believe until you see mioracles!” The desperate man kept begging until Jesus said, “Go. Your son will live.” And here’s the amazing part–the Bible says the man “took Jesus at His word and left.” Twenty miles is a five hour walk or a couple-hour horse-back ride–if Jesus didn’t heal the boy, it would be too late by the time the father got home. But he believed Jesus and left. When he got home, his servants met him on the road and told him his son had recovered “at the seventh hour”–the exact moment Jesus had said, “Your son will live.”

Obviously, BELIEF was the key concept when I taught this story to the kids, and since many of them had heard the story before, I had to take dramatic measures to make the story come alive. I wrapped myself up in my big fuzzy white bathrobe, threw a shawl over my head, and told the kids about the amazing miracle that had happened to my family who lives in Capernaum and how we met Yeshua. The kids–who are sometimes bouncing off the walls, picking their noses, or trying to snitch candy–listened with rapt attention as I “galloped” on my imaginary horse for three hours between Capernaum and Cana (where Yeshua was at the time). The conversation derailed slightly when the kids realized I’d never seen a cell phone before and tried to show me theirs, but we got back on track quickly when I knelt before Yeshua, begging Him, “Come save my son!” The kids and I deliberated at length about if I should BELIEVE Yeshua, and why. All on their own, the kids brought up all the points I was going to make sure they thought of–Yeshua is God’s Son. Yeshua keeps His promises. Yeshua can do anything He wants. Yeshua is good.

We talked about problems the kids have these days: betrayal by “BFF’s” (“Best Friend Forever”), dry skin, homework. “What can we do with these problems?” I asked. The response was unanimous–”Ask Jesus for help!” But what does that do? “You keep praying and praying and praying, and He always does what’s best!” the kids explained. To drive home the point about BELIEVING God’s goodness to us, I asked for a volunteer, and then began bragging about my extraordinary powers of egg juggling. However, in the process of demonstrating these powers, I dropped an egg, which broke all over my coworkers’ floor. (The kids yelled, “Oooooooooh! You’re gonna get it!” Fortunately, my gracious coworkers had already given me permission to do this.) “All you have to do,” I continued, “is stand there while someone throws an egg at you and I catch it! I promise–oops! [I dropped another egg on the floor] not to let the egg make a mess on your clothes.” My volunteer took a step back, but bravely waited–until I put a blindfold over my eyes. “I promise not to let any egg make a mess on your clothes. Do you BELIEVE me?” He didn’t answer. As I stumbled over to stand between my volunteer and Jong Dae Choi (his father, who was going to throw the egg), I heard the other kids yelling, “I want to throw it!” They must have figured they had a defenseless target, especially when I ended up facing the wrong direction, away from Jong Dae. After that was all sorted out, I proclaimed myself ready–Jong Dae cocked back his arm–I jumped up and down, clawing the air and shrieking–he threw the egg–it bounced off my volunteer’s chest and rolled along the floor. HARD BOILED!!! After the kids had stopped arguing about who got to eat the hard boiled egg, I turned to my volunteer. “Thank you for BELIEVING me even when it didn’t look like I could keep my promise,” I told him.

As hilariously fun as all this was, it made me stop and think–how often do I as an adult believe God and stand still, waiting for Him to intervene, even when it looks like I’m going to get plastered by raw, even rotten, egg situations?  Maybe the kids weren’t the only ones who needed that lesson in belief.

Thursday my coworkers (Jong Dae and Mi Hyoung Choi and Kara Lancaster) and I taught our weekly Good News Bible Club about John 2, Jesus first miracle (turning water to wine). As we studied the passage the week before teaching it, my coworkers and I brainstormed about impossibilities in our lives, and God’s sometimes unexpected ways of meeting these needs. We talked about health problems, we talked about betrayals of friendship, we talked about financial struggles. As we looked deeper into the passage, we realized that without the groomsman’s humiliating miscalculation in wine, without the complete impossibility of the situation, there could never have been a miracle! We thought about the storms on the Sea of Galilee, the lack of food for thousands of people, the devastating deaths of loved ones–and realized that in Jesus’ eyes,

IMPOSSIBILITY IS THE FERTILE GROUND FOR MIRACLES.

During that Thursday club, we asked the kids about some of their problems. We tried to get a three-year-old little boy  to stop burrowing under the couch cushions, rubbing his socks under peoples’ noses, and jumping on peoples’ laps. We tried to teach the Bible verse despite the constant interruptions of kids who wanted to be in the spotlight. I tried to tell the kids the missionary kid story (about a Moroccan, Muslim boy named Hamed who runs away from home and eventually meets Jesus), but I included too much review from the previous chapters, which frustrated the kids. Somewhere in the middle of the mayhem, I looked up at the ceiling and wondered, “God, You used 12 mottley disciples to change the world. If impossibility is Your fertile ground for miracles, can You use me to change these kids’ worlds?” We taught the kids the Bible story of turning water to wine. At the end of the story, we brought out a pitcher which had, unknown to the kids, grape Kool-Aid powder in the bottom. As a kid poured water into the pitcher–voila!–”wine!” Their eyes bugged out; they really grasped the wonder of an impossibility becoming a miracle (until they figured out our secret at the end of the club). The kids insisted on tasting the “wine,” and were intrigued by the flavor. “It almost tastes like grape, but it’s really sour… kinda yucky.” “Why would anyone ever drink this stuff?” “Nasty!”

I may be inept, but I know when there’s something that wrong. “Lemme taste it, guys,” I said, taking the glass.

“It’s nasty–don’t drink it,” the boy next to me whispered warningly.

“I know–that’s why I have to try it,” I muttered, and took a sip. *blech* We forgot to add sugar! “So that’s what wine tastes like,” one of the kids mused.

Despite the sugarless setback (which the kids temporarily blamed on the “wine”), the kids got the point! “My old BFF [best friend forever] just picked a new best friend, and now she’s mean to me in recess,” one girl mentioned. “I have way too much homework,” someone else contributed. We asked the kids how they could take these seeming impossibilities to Jesus, encouraging the kids to expect Him to respond. Sometimes His miracles are as obvious as turning water into wine. Other times, He helps us cope with the situation–or uses natural methods to resolve it. Either way, our impossibilities are the fertile ground for God’s miracles.

Good evening and blessing to you all,

Pastor Mike and Theresa, thank you for your prayer on Saturday, it is a blessing to have this wonderful support system, I thank God for you everyday. You all have made this journey positively joyous, and I can’t express how grateful I am to have the Lord place me with my Birth family who Prays with and for us constantly, my Crossroads family, and my CEF family. After we spoke, we did have a situation that required God’s grace.

Please pray for Jordyn. Late Saturday evening she was having trouble breathing and I had to take her to the emergency room. It was a scary time for both of us as the hospital was 18 miles away and it was dark and raining. The Lord gave us the strength to make it and get the care she needed. We do not know what brought it on. The Doctor diagnosed her as having musclespasm as her lungs swelled making it almost impossible to breathe. They had her on a breathing machine and it opened her passages within 10 minutes. The Doctor also gave her an inhaler, and antibiotics for the inflamation or infection that resulted from this incident. We are to follow up with her primary care doctor for further evaluation. Since we will be down here for three months, we found a Pediatrician in the area. The Doctor indicated that this may be a temporary illnes and the prescriptions may clear up what ever caused the inflamation, or if there are reoccurences, it may be that she has asthma. Perhaps climate, perhaps something she ate, perhaps environmental changes with our new living quarters…it is unknown but she is feeling better.

On Sunday, Praise God, we were able to attend Church and give thanks for his grace and mercy. Everyone down here is reaching out and praying for us and we are grateful. Jordyn is getting more and more comfortable with school and making new acquaintances. We had a wonderful surprise today, Ken and Sharon (Chicago’s Local Directors) came down and stopped in for lunch, it was beautiful to see loving faces from home. We are so blessed and so excited at this opportunity to grow in Christ. We are learning so much and looking forward to sharing all that we learn with all who will hear.

Today in class, we had 6 children come in for the Teaching Little Children class, and they took part in a full GNC lesson for ages 2-8, this was much different from the GNC we normally teach, the language was totally different, but the message was the same. This class involved more activities due to the attention span for this age group. It was awesome, and challenging. All that you do for older children had to be changed so that the younger group received and understood the message. WOW!!!!!!!

Attached are some fun photos Jordyn on her first day of school waiting for the bus to go to her new/temporary school Warrior Ridge Elementary, she misses her Teacher and friends back home. Also, see two photos of the children and the Instructors. See the children as they lay on cots experiencing what it would feel like to be like the lame man, Lazarous. How about that for teaching.

We Love You all and Miss You,

Angela and Jordyn
636-297-6673

P.S. Theresa, here are our five verses for the week.

Matthew 18:6, Matthew 18:14, John 3:15, Acts 16:31, 2 Peter 3:18, 1 Cor 15:3 and 4, Romans 3:23, John 3:16, Eph 2:8. Wow, just sending these verses to you gets me all excited remembering what they mean.

Jordyn and I are doing just that! Taking deep breathes as we start this wonderful journey at CMI – Children’s Ministry Institute. Please continue to PRAY for us, it is challenging to be away from what we know as home, our family and friends. The good news is that we have been welcomed and we are making new friends and making this our home for the next three months. God knows what he is doing and I don’t question Him. Just looking forward to the wonderful work he is doing in me.

It’s the weekend and guess what, I have lots of homework. Today in class we went over how to deliver the wordless book to preschoolers. If you think it should be easier than delivering to the older children, I’m here to tell you, it isn’t. It takes a lot of thought and preparation, you have to speak in a language that they understand, which also involves so many other factors to create a package so that when the invitation is given they know what has been presented to them. What an awesome experience. One that I look forward to sharing with our younger children.

I am also excited to share that on Wednesday, I will be teaming up with other CMI Instructors and students, for the GNC at Warrior Ridge Elementary School here in Warrenton, Missouri. So to my team of Leaders back in Illinois, I won’t be out of practice.

Love ya and I’ll check in soon.

Hello and Greetings to you all! I just want to say a quick “Thank you” for being so kind and welcoming me into the CEF team of Chicago!!! You all are a great and wonderful team and I am privileged to be a part!!! The meetings have been so helpful lately and I really appreciate all you do for the children’s souls of Chicago!

I am looking forward to all the TCE classes, 5-Day Clubs, GNCs, workshops, etc…with ya’ll !!!!! God bless everyone!!!and GO TEAM!!!!! YEAH!!!!

Blessings in the Lord,

Kara Lancaster

Two days ago I got the privilege of teaching adults how to conduct a party club, a Good News Club program designed to help the kids celebrate Valentine’s Day.  I had a blast teaching adults (to teach kids) a synced-up version of “Jesus Loves Me,” and teaching the “Valentine’s Day verse” (Mark 12:30:  “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”)  The theme of the workshop was teaching children how to love God with “all your heart;” to illustrate this phrase, I showed a picture of a runner whose expression denoted concentration and struggle; then I advised the teachers to imitate the runner as if he were only putting part of his heart into the race–by “running” around the room like a lame duck!  The teachers were incredible learners and it was exciting to see how gifted they are.  It was a privilege to introduce them to a new Bible lesson they can teach about three Bible characters who loved with all THEIR hearts (Hannah, who gave God Samuel; Abraham, who gave God Isaac; and GOD, Who gave US Jesus).  This Bible lesson explained the reason behind Jesus’ death and resurrection (to take the punishment for our sin so we can be adopted into God’s family).  The lesson ends with Jesus’ resurrection and breakfast conversation with Peter beside the Sea of Galilee: “Do you love Me, Peter?”  At this point, the teachers will ask the kids, “Do YOU love Him?”  The teachers will challenge saved and unsaved kids to find specific ways to love God with all THEIR hearts.  And all this is done in an easy-to-understand, captivating way!