Would you HELP supply clean Water to impoverished people?

Walk over to the kitchen sink, turn on the facet and fill your glass with filtered and purified clean water. Add some ice, let it chill.... take a refreshing cool drink. You take that experience for granted don’t you? That’s the experience in America. Clean water is considered a right that everyone is entitled to enjoy. No one should be deprived of clean drinkable water.

That experience doesn’t exist in much of the developing world. People do not have clean drinkable water. Water can make people very sick and even kill! Think about these statistics the next time you casually, easily and conveniently fill your glass with clean drinking water.

More than one billion people, one sixth of the world’s population, are without access to a clean, safe water supply. At any given moment, about half of the world's poor are suffering from waterborne diseases, of which over 6,000, mostly children, die each day by consuming unsafe drinking water.

One of the world’s most prolific killers is diarrhoeal diseases from bacteria like typhoid, cholera, e. coli, salmonella and many others... all waterborne.

As Christians, concerned about spreading the Gospel to the millions of people who need to hear of Jesus, we must be aware that “hearing the message of salvation” can only effectively happen if the most basic needs of people are being met. Our mission to preach Christ today, is concentrated in many countries where clean consumable water is not available to the majority of the population. If you have traveled on short-term mission trips to the countries of southeast Asia, you have seen ample supplies of bottled water readily available in urban areas. But in remote and rural parts of Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia and many other places all around the globe, bottle water is not available. Even if it is, many people are simply too poor to afford to purchase it. So, they live each day with the high risk of drinking unclean dangerous water... just to continue living.

Safe water interventions have vast potential to transform the lives of millions, especially in the countries of the 10-40 Window. You can help spread the Gospel by providing a way for poverty stricken peoples to get clean water.

LifeStraw may be the answer. LifeStraw is a point-of-use water filtering straw-like device designed by a Swiss-based company (Vestergaard Frandsen) for people living in developing nations. It comes in two capacity formats... Personal and Family. LifeStraw was developed as a practical response to the billions of people who are still without access to the most basic of basic of human rights... clean water.

The aptly-named LifeStraw is an invention that could become one of the greatest lifesavers in history. It is a 25 cm long, 29 mm diameter, plastic pipe filter and costs just a few dollars, about $5.00 US. LifeStraw Personal filters a minimum of 700 litres of water, enough for one person for about one year. LifeStraw Family filters a minimum of 18,000 litres of water, providing safe drinking water for a family for more than two years. LifeStraw removes 99.9999% of waterborne bacteria, such as Shigella, Salmonella, Enterrococus, Staphylococcus Aureus and E.Coli,
99.99% of viruses, and 99.9% of parasites.

LifeStraw is currently in use in Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan and Uganda. Many more people need to be helped by this lifesaving invention.

Is this a project for your Church? I invite you to prayerfully consider becoming a provider of LifeStraws to an area of the world where people are in desperate need of clean safe drinking water. If you support missionaries in developing and impoverished countries, they can be your resource for distribution of this lifesaving
invention. Think of the possibilities LifeStraw could open for missionaries to proclaim the love of Christ, through this lifesaving way.

Presently, there is an initiative to raise funds to provide LifeStraws for the people of the delta region in Myanmar who are still suffering from the effects of Cyclone Nargis. Clean water is there most pressing need. Burmese adults and children are dying everyday without access to this most basic right of humanity.... clean water.

For further information about the Myanmar LifeStraw Initiative, please send your inquiry to the following e-mail addresses:

wayneford@myanmarchristianmission.com or gmnintl@comcast.net

If your church Mission Group has other countries where you would like to organize a LifeStraw Initiative, please send your request to gmnintl@comcast.net and information will be provided, enabling you to make your own direct arrangements.

Bridge Building for Christ... requires a Break-Through Attitude

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Imagine receiving a phone call informing you that you'd been chosen to become the American Ambassador to China. You'd consider that quite an honor! How would you prepare for your task? You'd want to do a thorough study of Chinese culture and customs. If you simply said, "No problem, I'm an American!" and neglected this study, you'd find yourself very ineffective as an ambassador.

Now imagine if Christ were to call you, as an American, to be His ambassador to America. How would you prepare for that? Well, in fact this is what Christ has called us to (2 Cor. 5:20). But what if we were to say, "No problem, I'm a Christian!" but neglected any attempt to understand our own culture? Just because you are a native born American, you cannot assume you truly understand the culture even though you are living surrounded by it and probably even immersed in it.

Surprisingly this is what many people in the church today have done. Some believers have actually managed to construct lives that avoid any connection with the world. Christians leave their safe surroundings, go to work, scurry home to their families and then off to their Churches and Bible studies, and finally end the day praying for the unbelievers they safely avoid interacting with in the normal course of a day-to-day living.

In early America, Christians enjoyed discussing philosophy and theology with believers and nonbelievers alike. America was a collection of diverse communities that fostered intellectual pursuit and understanding. Today's Christians however, are often viewed by the world as anti-intellectuals, as people who have neglected their minds in order to become "spiritual." But with this mentality, we are unable to address the critical issues of our day, and so our culture begins to look elsewhere for answers... to secular humanism, for example.

What is the root of this separation mindset? Well, many believers today hold to a pietistic view of the Christian life. Pietism is essentially 'platonic' in that it makes a sharp division between the 'spiritual' world and the 'material' world. The realities of human experiences are not afforded a proper balance.

This pietistic view of Christian living, has sapped the real life out of the Christian experience for many people. That's because one's spirituality never quite comes "down" far enough to integrate with the real world. We still end up trying to be nice Christians, but too many areas of our humanity get left out of the experience. Being Christian no longer looks very attractive to those first investigating the faith. In fact, some nonbelievers are scared away because of the disconnect from the realities of the world!

How can we change this pattern? We must remove this "sharp division" by finding out how our spiritual life works in the physical world, by developing a practical biblical world view.

As we learn to apply the Christian faith in our own life and world we become able to tell nonbelievers how it applies to theirs also, and this opens doors for the gospel. But without a well-thought-out faith we don't feel comfortable taking our message into the middle of the marketplace of modern ideas, and so we stay insulated and isolated.

What we actually need is a model for building bridges within the complexity of today's culture, one that makes Christianity relevant to the lives of real people. Christ Himself has provided this model in a absolutely amazing way.

Christ's Model is simple
The model is based on the character of God. The Bible presents to us a God who continually seeks man by interacting within man's cultural environments. In the New Testament we first find God seeking man by becoming a flesh and blood human. Adapting to the environment means becoming identified with the opposing party. It requires breaking through cultural barriers in order to establish useful and effective communication.

Through the incarnation of Christ, God crossed a rather large "cultural gap" to adapt to and identify with humanity, by actually becoming a man. In doing so, he broke through two important barriers that kept man from having a relationship with Him. What were these?

First Christ broke through our humanity barrier. Christ took on the flesh, cultural patterns, thought patterns, practices, and frailties associated with humanity. He left His world and entered into our world. Secondly, Christ broke through the sin barrier. He went to the cross and became sin on our behalf so we could be forgiven of our sins and come to know God personally and have intimate fellowship with Him.

Not only did Christ make it possible for us to seek him by “becoming a man and living among us”, His death and resurrection established another form for communication. His communication model, is accomplished through us... through His people.

In 2 Corinthians 5:20 tells us that God has called every believer to be an ambassador for Christ. How do we go about this task? By following Christ's model, and breaking through the same two barriers He did. First, we need to break through the humanity barrier. Motivated by His love, we also need to enter into the world of nonbelievers, seeking to understand their environment, and finding areas of common ground. This means that, without compromising, we are to get involved with real people and their needs, struggles, and intellectual doubts. Second, we need to help people overcome the sin barrier. We do this by sharing the gospel in a way that relates to their worldview, in a way that "makes sense" within another person's cultural and intellectual makeup.

The Church Christ built must be perceived as culturally relevant to the nonbelievers we seek to share the gospel with. Our responsibility is not only to hold to the basic, scriptural principles of the Christian faith, but to communicate these unchanging truths to every generation until God says His work is finished. If we can see ourselves in this essential and vital role then we can become effective at building bridges for the gospel that Christ has given us.