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Churches of the Nazarene in the Middle East have a long tradition of helping those in need. The present turmoil engulfing the Middle East is no exception. In recent years, millions of refugees have flooded into neighboring countries from Syria. Local Churches of the Nazarene throughout the Middle East have distributed literally thousands upon thousands of food packets, provided clothes, mattresses, and blankets for refugee families and have opened churches for meals, safe activities for children, and a place of refuge for adults.
No preconditions have been set for receiving any aid from the church. People from all faith backgrounds are welcomed to the church when they come to pick up food parcels and visit other church activities.
Several months ago, one particular lady, Fadia (not her real name), from another faith background, was visiting one such church in the Middle East. Pastor Yusef (not his real name) and church members warmly welcomed Fadia to their service. This church was preparing for some special services. On that Sunday morning, Pastor Yusef called on the members to gather in small groups to pray.
The leader of the prayer group asked Fadia if she would like to pray. Fadia explained that she was not a believer and did not even know how to pray. The leader told her it was no problem, that the group would pray in her place. The leader asked Fadia if she had a prayer request. Fadia answered that she had lost her husband and four sons in the conflict in Syria and it had been quite a period of time since she had heard from her two daughters. She wanted to hear from them. The group prayed for that.
In the afternoon, while at home, Fadia started thinking about the prayers she had heard earlier at church. She then prayed herself, “God, if my coming to church has found favor with you, let me hear from my girls.”
 Later that evening, she received two phone calls – one from each of her two daughters. They were both in the area of northern Syria, and were safe. Fadia was overjoyed. She immediately called Pastor Yusef to let him know about her daughters. The church service had already started. Pastor Yusef announced this to the church. There was much rejoicing and thanksgiving as those in the service heard the good news. Fadia began attending the mid-week prayer meetings at the church.
The church has put no pressure on Fadia that she must become a believer. The members have simply loved her, cared for her, and welcomed her into their lives and fellowship.
Many things have happened to Fadia in the course of the last few months. People have marveled at how God is revealing himself to her.
In one, on a Saturday night (very early Sunday morning), at 1:45 a.m., there was a knock at Fadia’s door. She asked who was there and the person answered “Isa” (Jesus). She invited him in but he politely declined and said he had something for her. He gave her $100 USD! Then he left. Fadia watched him as he departed. He did not use the usual path that people use to get to the steps up and down the hill. He climbed down the hill (where there is no path/road). At church the next morning, Fadia approached a young man she assumed had been the one to knock on her door and give her the money. She asked him why he offended her by not coming in and visiting when he came to her apartment. The young man was confused. He told her he had not visited her but was asleep in his own bed at 1:45 a.m.
Fadia showed the money to a lady in the church. The lady pointed out the phrase printed on all US currency: “In God we trust.” Fadia started to shake and bowed down in humility and worship. She realized that God was at work in her life.
Isa showed up a second time to Fadia and told her that the Bible which had been given to her “is your friend.” Fadia spends much time now every day reading her Bible.
Several weeks ago, Fadia showed up at the church two hours prior to the start of the service. She spoke with one of the other staff pastors. She wanted to pray specifically for her grandson, Abed (not his real name), the son of one of her daughters still in Syria. Extremist religious militants had kidnapped a large group of teenagers and had them blindfolded and detained in a secret location. Abed was in this group. Fadia had had a dream in which Abraham (a revered prophet in the three largest faith traditions) appeared. She saw this congregation of people and a figure she recognized as Abraham in the middle of the group. Abraham told her to pray in the name of Jesus. Fadia was at the church early to do exactly this!
The militants quizzed each teenager about his faith and scripture, testing their knowledge. Those that did not answer correctly were executed. Abed had not yet been questioned. He was sitting next to two boys who had answered questions correctly. At that moment, one of the senior militant leaders entered the room. He selected three boys, the two who had answered questions correctly, and, inexplicably, the leader chose Abed as well. Abed thought they were about to be executed. They were taken outside of the camp and released. The rest of the teenagers were executed. Abed walked six hours to get home.
At 7 p.m. on Sunday night, Abed's mother called Fadia. She told her the story how Abed had been released earlier that day. Fadia asked her what time he had been released. It was at the exact moment they were praying for Abed earlier in the day!
There have been other events in Fadia’s life as God continues to reveal himself to her. She has been accepted by a loving Christian community that is living out their faith in God. She faithfully attends the church now every Sunday, she daily reads her “friend” (her Bible), and is active in the mid-week prayer meetings.
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My little slips of paper were huddled together, folded and shivering for a turn to reveal their message. Outside that warm cabin up on Bulgaria’s Vitosha mountain, there was a sunny crispness to the air and the satisfying crunch of iced snow. It was the sort of winter new that leads you to believe that there is hope for this broken world.
Those slips of paper? They were holy revelation – a declaration of truth.
We were 10 friends meeting together to plan for a new year of ministry in the Sofia Church. While the world seemed to hold its January breath outside, everyone in the circle had been tasked with writing down what gifts the others contributed. If we were going to take the 1.8 million populace of Sofia for Jesus, we needed clarity about our significant roles in the coup d’etat against Satan’s dark forces.
"T" was beside me, with her golden smile and her startling blue eyes. She breathlessly unfolded her slips of revelation: “Musical genius. Beautiful voice. Able to move people with your songs. Worship leader.” There it was; the money maker — Worship leader. T had concrete contributions to church-growth ministry.
Jay was next: “Leadership. Strategic thinker. Preaching. Diplomatic. Bible knowledge.” Of course. Of course. The man who leads, who has half the Bible memorized, who helps us all move forward while staying strategically grounded in the Word.
Then it was "P’s" turn. “Language gifts. Internet/website guru. Theological thinker. Pastoral.”
"A" was the teacher. "J" and "R" were the uber-organizers: the ‘go-to girls’ when you need it done right. "J2" was tech and enthusiasm and networking. "G" was musician, teens, worship.
Everyone had a role. A niche. A gift.
 Finally, it was my golden moment on that crisp morning. What did I, a girl from Kansas rooting herself into the rich, Bulgarian soil have to offer this group?
Into the stillness, I read out:
Hospitality.
Encouragement.
Word-crafter.
Gulp. Double blink.
Really? That’s it? That’s my package? My potential contribution? It would have been much more humane to have simply written, "Go home and don’t bother us again."
In a world where significance is drafted on the table of leadership, productivity, strategy, diplomacy, I was crushed by the utter insignificance of what others saw as my contribution. Because, as I believed deep down, hospitality doesn’t get one very far in the battle against good and evil.
I cried to Jay in an aside. I complained. I moped. And to my absolute astonishment, I heard T communicating to the group my very thoughts. “Worship? Really? I don’t want to just be defined by my gift of music. I want to contribute something more … more … I don’t know, theological, academic, ummm, significant.” My words exactly!
The tenor of T’s voice could move mountains of emotion, birth tidal waves of euphoria, strum your core way down in the depth of your soul, but by virtue of its familiarity, worship leadership seemed insignificant to her.
 Likewise, because hospitality comes easily to me, it seemed inconsequential. It does not take effort to open our home, to welcome, to throw the doors wide and say, “Come on in – what we have is yours.”
I think it is human nature to wish that God would have had the good sense to design us differently.
A few years later, we had moved from our home in Bulgaria to a new life in Hungary. A Bulgarian friend emailed one day, "I miss your hospitality." It was then that I began to understand what Jay had been trying to chip into my concrete head since that mopey Vitosha moment.
We are God-intentionally gifted for contributing to the community. There is no waste. No mistake. No inconsequential gift. What I have, you need.
It is one of Satan’s most artistic lies to devalue the gifts with which God has equipped us.
We are at our most beautiful, most revolutionary, and most dangerous to the darkness when we are giving our gifts away. You see, we fit together in community like a puzzle. Like a body. Everybody has something that creates an unstoppable Jesus force when we work together in unity.
I have the gift of hospitality.
Somewhere on the journey, I began to be challenged to see this role in a new, theological light. I began to replace the domesticated definition of the magazine-perfected, catered, interior decorated, wealthy, Western-defined understanding of hospitality for its authentic, ancient, Old Testament definition.
Hospitality – the welcoming of the stranger within our midst. The undeterred defense of the helpless, the hopeless, the voiceless of our generation.
Our world may not need catered meals, but it does need fearsome protection. In an era where the question of immigration tears at the fabric of society, where wars have created a generation of homelessness, and the lust for money and sex have enslaved and trafficked millions, God could use a home that harbors the hunted.
And the crazy, topsy-turvy, unrealistic truth, is that when I give that gift away, it becomes life giving for ME. If you want to gain your life, lose it. Give it away. Hmmm, ancient wisdom for a new year.
There is a holy hush in the house this Budapest morning and I am greeting the first, shimmering lights of 2015 with a candle and the words of Mary: "I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled."
In a war-torn world of broken promises and soon-to-be-broken resolutions, of broken bodies, and broken families, and broken minds, and broken dreams, and broken pasts, and broken systems, does anybody want to believe with me that anything is possible?
What do you have to give away?
Not, "What do you wish you could give?"
Not, "What can you resolve to do differently, or better, or not at all so that you can give."
No. What has God equipped you to give?
Take a moment here on the threshold of 2015, when the world is new and shivering with anticipation.
What is God asking you to do? How has he gifted you to serve?
Give it away.
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| Slogans that awakened the church: Pay it forward by Howard Culbertson
We are debtors to every man to give him the gospel in the same measure in which we have received it"[P.F. Bresee, founder of the Church of the Nazarene]
 Debtors? How can we be indebted to someone from whom we’ve never received anything and with whom we have no contractual agreement whatsoever? To be sure, Bresee wasn’t the first person to make a statement like that. To the church in Rome, Paul wrote: “I owe something to all men, from cultured Greek to ignorant savage” (Romans 1:14, Phillips)
To understand how Bresee could feel indebted to people in terms of evangelizing them, think about Catherine Hyde’s phrase “pay it forward.” That was the title of her book that promoted the idea we should repay good deeds not to the ones who did them but rather to other people. By paying good deeds “forward” rather than “paying them back,” we keep the cycle of good deeds going.
The relevance of “pay it forward” to statements by Bresee and Paul is clear. Paying it forward is exactly what God expects of us. We have received the Gospel. Biblically, that puts us under obligation to pass it on to everyone else in the world.
Bresee, a founding father of the Church of the Nazarene, did not say we were indebted to “our near neighbors.” He did not say “people like us.” He said, “every man” (or in wording more common today, “every person”).
Because we embrace God’s great grace, we have become debtors on a global scale. Let’s follow Bresee’s admonition. Let’s “pay it forward” by doing whatever we can to see that everyone on earth clearly hears the Good News that God has come in Jesus Christ to reconcile the world to Himself.[Howard Culbertson was professor of missions and world evangelism at Southern Nazarene University, in Bethany, Oklahoma, U.S for 25 years. Culbertson, who formerly served as a missionary in Italy and Haiti, has published numerous articles, books, and chapters in books on missions.]
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El 31 de diciembre, Jim y Kathy Radcliffe, así como su hija Lydia, regresaron de su asignación en los Estados Unidos al hospital nazareno en Kudjip, Papúa Nueva Guinea (PNG).
La familia Radcliffe partió este año de PNG rumbo a su asignación temporal antes de lo esperado, como resultado de la salud del Dr. Jim.
Luego de regresar a los Estados Unidos, ellos se enteraron de que una de las válvulas del corazón de Jim tenía un defecto, así como una aorta agrandada que requería de cirugía. Durante su preparación para la cirugía, se le encontró un tumor en su glándula adrenal.
Cuando los habitantes de las tierras altas de PNG se enteraron de la delicada situación de salud del Dr. Jim, ellos le demostraron muy claramente su apoyo mediante oración y en forma financiera. Se recolectó dinero para cubrir todos los gastos que su seguro médico no cubriera. Esta idea fue una iniciativa de las personas locales, e involucró a varias comunidades.
 Las noticias acerca del éxito de la cirugía de Jim, así como el informe de que el tumor adrenal era benigno, trajeron mucha alegría a los habitantes de las tierras altas. Las noticias de que él habría de regresar produjeron aun más. Pero la gran celebración fue reservada para el 31 de diciembre, el día en que él y su familia regresaron al Hospital Nazareno de Kudjip.
Mientras que el vehículo que transportaba a la familia Radcliffe se acercaba al hospital nazareno, era más que evidente el amor de esta comunidad hacia esta familia que ha servido como las manos y los pies de Cristo durante tantos años.
El camino campestre se vio repleto de personas que les deseaban lo mejor. Algunos de ellos se unieron a lo que se convirtió en un desfile improvisado de vehículos. Otros habían pedido prestado una motoniveladora y se dedicaron a nivelar el camino hacia el hospital, el cual normalmente es muy difícil de transitar. Se estima que aproximadamente 800 personas se presentaron para darle la bienvenida a la familia Radcliffe en su retorno "a casa".
A pesar de estar cansados debido a su largo viaje, la familia Radcliffe pasó mucho tiempo saludando y expresando amor hacia estos queridos amigos de las tierras altas, quienes oraron y sacrificaron tanto por ellos.
 Jim Radcliffe, junto con Kathy y su familia, ha estado sirviendo como cirujano misionero en el Hospital Nazareno de Kudjip desde 1985 (para más información acerca de la familia Radcliffe usted puede visitar su perfil a través del siguiente enlace).
Kudjip Nazarene Hospital, en las tierras altas de Papúa Nueva Guinea, es un hospital misionero operado por la Iglesia del Nazareno sirviendo al pueblo de PNG desde 1967. Éste tiene aproximadamente 200 trabajadores de todas las áreas de PNG, quienes sirven como misioneros junto a los 7 doctores misioneros y otros misioneros que se encuentran involucrados en varios aspectos del trabajo que se realiza en las tierras altas. Como promedio, el hospital atiende a más de 52 mil pacientes cada año, y todos los años se realizan más 600 cirujías de alta complejidad, sin incluír la muchas cesáreas que se llevan a cabo. Para obtener más información acerca del Hospital Nazareno de Kudjip, visite este enlace.
Por favor continúe orando por los habitantes y misioneros que continúan compartiendo el amor de Cristo con los pobladores de las tierras altas de Papúa Nueva Guinea.[ Impreso con permiso del departamento de comunicaciones de la Región Asia-Pacífico].
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On December 31st, Jim and Kathy Radcliffe and their daughter Lydia, returned from their home assignment in the U.S. to Nazarene Hospital in Kudjip, Papua New Guinea (PNG).
The Radcliffes left PNG for their home assignment earlier than scheduled this year, as a result of Dr. Jim’s health.
After returning to the US, they learned that Jim had a defective heart valve, and an enlarged aorta that required surgery. In the course of getting ready for the heart surgery, a tumor was found on his adrenal gland.
When the people of the Highlands of PNG heard about Dr. Jim’s serious health concerns, there was a great outpouring of support, through prayer and finances. Money was raised to cover all the expenses not covered by insurance. This was entirely the idea of the local people, and involved several communities.
The news of the success of Jim’s heart surgery, and the report that the adrenal tumor was benign, brought great rejoicing to the Highlands. The news that he would return brought more. But the really big celebration was reserved for December 31, the day that they actually arrived back at Kudjip Nazarene Hospital.
As the hospital van carrying the Radcliffes approached Nazarene Hospital, there was absolutely no doubt about the love of this community for a family who has served as the hands and feet of Christ for so many years.The rural road was lined with well wishers. Some joined in and made an impromptu parade of vehicles. Others had borrowed the local road grader and graded the normally “challenging” road that approaches the hospital. It was estimated that around 800 people showed up to welcome the Radcliffes back “home.
Although tired from the long trip, the Radcliffes spent much time greeting and loving on these dear friends from the Highlands who had prayed and sacrificed on their behalf.Jim and Kathy Radcliffe and family have been serving as missionary surgeon at Kudjip Nazarene Hospital since 1985. (For more on the Radcliffes you can visit their profile by following this link.)
Kudjip Nazarene Hospital, in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, is a mission hospital operated by the Church of the Nazarene, serving the people of PNG since 1967. They have nearly 200 staff from all areas of PNG serving as missionaries along side the 7 missionary doctors and other missionaries involved in various aspects of the work there in the Highlands. The hospital on average sees more than 52,000 outpatients each year, and yearly completes more than 600 major surgeries, not including the many c-sections. For more information on Kudjip Nazarene Hospital, visit this link.
Please continue to pray for all of those, nationals and missionaries alike, who minister and continue to share the love of Christ to those in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.[ Reprinted with permission from the Asia-Pacific Region communications].
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Thanks to sponsors who gave extra funds for Christmas through the Nazarene Compassionate Ministries child sponsorship program, street kids in Madagascar celebrated a two-day Christmas feast 17 to 18 December.
The children are fed every day at the Madagascar Street Kids Center (locally known as AMI-4), but the special two-day feast includes additional food: meat (chicken or pork) and larger quantities of food, as well as some special Christmas treats (desserts and some sweets).
Each age group does something special on the first day of the feast. It is a time when they sing special songs, perform traditional dance and also have a bell choir. Many years ago, the bells were donated by a volunteer family and the kids continue to play them. (In fact, our little bell choir is asked to perform every year for a big government Ministry of Population.) The parents attend the first day of the feast and watch as the kids perform songs, dances, recite Scripture, poems, etc. Also, during that time, we honour the top-scoring children in each grade or the child who has shown the greatest improvement.
Every year, Therese Ravelo, the director, and her team put a lot of effort into the program. They construct a stage and they work to decorate it, have a sound system, a Christmas tree, and so on. Although many of our workers come from home situations similar to what the children at the center deal with, they try to make the day special for the kids and the parents who have come to watch their children in a Christmas program. Therese is also very careful to use this Christmas program as a time to share the gospel with the parents who are in the audience. Some of the parents have become Christians through the work of the center, but because of the turn-over within the center, there are also parents who have not heard the saving news of Jesus Christ or who have turned their backs on Him. So, Therese and her team take every opportunity they can to share God’s love with the parents.
The reason they are able to do such a large celebration is because of the sponsors who often send in extra money prior to Christmas for the children that are sponsored. Their generosity is enough to have a feast. AMI-4 is completely funded through Nazarene Compassionate Ministries Child Sponsorship program, including the salaries of the teachers and workers and the daily cost of running a large center that takes care of 380 children every day of the week.
After the feast is complete, the center then wraps up for the year and closes for about two weeks. This is the longest the center will ever be closed at one time. It was discovered that if the center closed for longer, the kids who came back were extremely dirty, sick, lacking food and also had lost all the discipline that the center worked to instil in the kids. Also, if the center closes for much longer, some children return to the streets and do not return to the center to get their education and Bible training.
The Madagascar Street Kids Center, called AMI-4, gives children an alternative to days on the street by providing meals, quality education, basic health care, and a message of God’s love. AMI-4 represents four characteristics the center encourages children to develop. The “A” stands for ankizy, the Malagasy word for child, and the four characteristics all begin with “MI”: mino (believe), mianatra (learn), mitombo (grow), and mikajy ny sony (respect his or her rights).
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