great momentum
Monday, February 9, 2009
Dear Praying Friends,
2009 started with great momentum for all the aspects of the ministry. Just a few highlight from the first 5 weeks of the year:
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1.January 7-21 - Each January we have a special emphases on staff development and biblical training for the staff of our ministry. Every staff has to go through a series of 12 Bible-course taught by certified teachers. This January we had two courses: one on New Testament and one on Communication.
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2.January 23 - YTL weekly meetings (both the high school and the university) started with great momentum. We had special phone-calling nights when the staff team called personally every student we had contact information from.
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3.January 19 - YTL high school assemblies are still very popular. This is when the school ask us to give one of the YTL talk, usually on Why wait? and they make it mandatory for all the students to listen to it at the gym. This creates a great opportunity for us to invite them to our weekly meetings, ask their contact information or invite them to our up-coming evangelistic event. You can see the recent assembly’s picture here.
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4.January 24 - YTL “New Life Training” day. For about 20 students we organized a special discipleship training for one day where we concentrate some of the knowledge and practice on the biblical basics. These students are already involved in discipleship relationships and groups, but they needed some deeper knowledge. These days always end by going out in pairs to park and McDonalds and we share Christ with other students. Great faith-steps to these new-Christians!
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5.February 7 - Girl-guy day. Each year we have a special day for those new-Christian students who came to the Lord in the past year or two where we talk about the biblical perspective on dating, sex, marriage, relationships. Last Saturday over 50 students came to this day. They had great questions. Most of the information for them was extremely new, since they are coming from such a secular background and God’s perspective on opposite sex relationship is so different that it was very enlightening for most of them to discover that.
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6.January 25-31 - Leadership Retreat. The Eastern Europe / Russia leadership of our ministry organized a special retreat for National Leadership Teams. We’ve traveled to Austria for this special training with our Leadership Team to participate at this training. It gave our team a great opportunity to spend more time with other leadership teams. Our leadership team is made up by 3 (Dan and Kelly Butts, Laci and Eni Baczynski and Edina and I) couples to lead a group of 24 national staff and 6 American staff who are serving with us full time.
Special need for your prayers:
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1.We are working on writing a 3rd book for YTL that we could use in schools and with educators. Also, we are working on redesigning the YTL symposium for October when we’ll celebrate the 15th anniversary of YTL. This writing project is extremely difficult and takes tons of my energy and time. Pray that God would give me creativity and productivity. We also create some videos and some new tools. The two YTL books we have are very popular, and we hope that this 3rd one will be a great asset to create further momentum.
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2.There is another writing-project that I’m involved in, too. With my good friend, Dave Robinsons we want to write the YTL story this year and publish it in English.
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3.Pray for health so that we could keep up with our busy schedule and demanding responsibilities.
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4.Rahel started to participate in the weekly YTL high school meeting. Pray that she would found some good friends there at her age who would help her grow in her faith. She really works hard in her school which takes lot of her time, but she has a desire to share Christ with her classmates. All of her classmates are lost. She has a growing concern and desire to involve them in one of our YTL activities.
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5.The doctor increased Renato’s medication for epilepsy. He had some seizures still, that’s why they had to do that. Thank you for your prayers on that.
We want you to know that our kids and us are regularly giving thanks for you during our family devotions. We are so thankful for your prayers and your help for us to reach the lost.
Advancing the Kingdom of God together,
Gabor for the family
