Special Building Fund Service- White Dove Outreach Ministries

White Dove has started their new agricultural project, which is located near Gbarnga in Bong county. We will be sharing pictures of their new project soon!
They recently had a special service to raise money for their building project. They need to put permanent walls up on their church structure. Spirit Liberia was honored to be invited to provide the guest speaker which was Brother Bestman Todawiah. Most of the staff was able to attend the service and it was a blessing for all! Unfortunately the congregation thought that I was coming to the service also, so they were disappointed when they realized that I was back in the States! I had just visited with them a week or so prior to the service but it was the same day I was leaving Liberia.




Pastor Melvin Mappy- notice how beautifully they decorated the church for the service! I am always impressed with the formality that Liberia conducts itself with. From their dress to their respect of elders and processes they conduct themselves with much more formality than we do here in the U.S. We have become so casual about everything. I find this formality quite refreshing!




Brother Bestman- he has been pinned! The pinning is done out of love and respect. The individuals purchase different flowers and ribbons and pin them on each other. This was only the beginning of Bestman's pins for the day!




The Congregation




Brother Bestman preaching and looking quite handsome in his Zoot suit!


Shad was pinned too!

Mark was pinned!

Brother Bestman was the king of pins for the day! As the speaker he was honored with all of those pins! I had to laugh when I first saw this picture! Too funny!

The service was wonderful and they were able to raise some funds for their building. All in all it was a success!

While we are making introductions........

Our Spirit Liberia family in Liberia!

Left to right: Pastor Richards, Shad, Mark, Paye and Bestman
While we are making introductions, I thought this would be a good time to re-introduce our staff! These guys are a part of our family, and they are much more than just employees. We love them dearly and they are and will continue to be a big part of our lives. They have a heart for the ministry and we have been truly blessed in getting to know and work with them! A while back, I did some individual posts on them which I will provide links to. Paye is new, hired in January, so I have not yet done a formal introductory post about him.

Pastor Joseph Richards
Shad Flumo
Mark Koffa
Bestman Todawiah

For Pastor Richards and Shad, after you have clicked the link, to view the pictures you will have to scroll down and click older post.

Meet Jacob, Eli, Judah and Maxwell!

I have been receiving requests recently to see pictures of the kids. So...... here are a few introductions! I will spread them out over a few posts, probably with some Liberia posts in the mix. For those of you who don't know this, we have 10 kids, with number 11 due in June!



These are my twins :-) They are twins not by birth, but by adoption! Elijah is our biological son who is 9 years old. Jacob is our Liberian son who is also 9 years old. They are great friends and just sweet little men! They are hard workers, kind and caring, most importantly they love God and want to serve Him!
Jacob

Eli and Jacob trying to wrangle 2 year old Judah into the picture with them!

Elijah

These 2 are the youngest of the bunch! Maxwell is our adopted son from Liberia and he is 1. Judah is our biological son and he is 2. This is the face Judah makes when we ask him to smile for the camera. Maxwell seems to think it is pretty interesting!
Maxwell

Judah

This is the start! We have 7 boys......so far! We will have a new little boy in June, and we have 3 girls. I hope you enjoy getting to know our family! I hope it will help you remember to pray for each of us as we take this journey to Africa. You will now have names and faces to put with your prayers.

Off to port!

Wednesday afternoon, just over half way full! We were wondering if we would really make it for Friday's pick-up!

With the help of some friends, including Brother James coming back with more BIG boxes, we got it finished in the early hours of Friday morning! It's full, and we were able to throw in the kids Little Tykes play gym to solidify the last open space! They will be very happy to have this in our yard in Liberia!

Everything is in the container, labeled, weighed........all documents are in order. Time to close up! The truck is waiting!

A local towing company pulled the container out of the warehouse to be transferred onto the flatbed.
Boy, it was hard to lift this onto the truck! It totaled out at over 13,000 pounds!!!!

It is a good thing we had a crane on the tow truck to lift it :-)

Smooth landing, right where it needed to be.

It has been an interesting journey and quite the learning experience getting this all put together. Kind of like an adoption???? This time Greg got to do all of the drudging through paperwork and processing!

Big sigh of relief as we wave goodbye to our 13,000 pound baby!

Please pray with us as our staff in Liberia are working on all of the documentaion on that end to get this container out of port.......Duty Free. This can be a very difficult and tedious process. The container will be in Liberia in early June, so there is no time to waste. They have been faithfully going to the various government branches daily trying to work through the process. We need God to grant us favor in the eyes of the officials who will be processing our Duty Free voucher. Thank you all so much for being an integral part of putting this together. You are a blessing!

Packing the Container

Packing the container was a BIG job, but it was an amazing blessing!


Greg and I started the process! I had the best job, which was logging the weight and description of each item placed inside the container. Greg did all of the hard work, arranging everything in a way that it would be secure and the best use of space. He said, "Now I know why I always played Tetris as a kid - it was preparing me to fill this container!"

We found that we had more than enough room for the items we had on hand so we invited Brother James Neymah to bring some items to put in our shipment. Brother James is the pastor of Africa Faith Expressions, a church which consists primarily of Liberian refugees now residing here in the Phoenix area. We have been so blessed to get to know Brother James, his wife Lucy and the congregation at AFE. We attend there every other week.

Left to right: Greg, Vanessa, Brother James, Joshua

As a congregation AFE is reaching back out to local churches and communities in Liberia. They are doing some great work, so we were happy to be able to provide room for them to ship bibles, backpacks and soccer gear in our container.

Brother James wanted to weigh himself.....

Would you like me to tell you his weight???? Just kidding. We had a great time together. It was wonderful having them helping with the packing!

This is one of their boxes, labeled for pick-up in Paynesville. They won the prize for the BIGGEST boxes in the container! They had one single box that was over 220 pounds!

Don't be fooled by the box, this was NOT a TV, it was soccer uniforms :-)

This is our oldest daughter Macey. She went on a trip to Liberia with us in March of 2008. She is very ready to go back. Her nickname in Liberia is "Missionary". Macey has felt called to the mission field since she was a small child. This is going to be wonderful training ground for her! In this photo she is holding samples of some of the Bibles, New Testaments, and John and Romans booklets that are going to Liberia.

The New Gospel Tract!

We are so pleased to be able to announce the completion of the Liberian English Gospel tract produced by Spirit Liberia! We were able to get 5,000 copies printed in black and white.


These first 2 pictures were taken in the print shop. Can you tell Mark is happy????


Hitting the prisons and the streets with the new tracts for the first time!
left to right: Bestman, Mark, Shad and Paye

This is the tract outside. It is 2 sided and folds in the middle.

This is the tract inside.

We will be providing these tracts to churches for their use in evangelism. The one shown here has an open box for them to fill in their individual church contact information. The ones that we use for our evangelism have Spirit Liberia contact information.

Please pray with us that God would use these tracts in a mighty way for His glory! It was only possible to get these tracts printed because of your faithful support. We thank you all so much! You are having an impact and joining with us in spreading the good news of the gospel to desperate lost and dying souls in Liberia.

If anyone would like to have a printable copy of the full color tract email your request to us at: bogdans@spiritliberia.org and we will be happy send it to you!

Fresh Start Fellowship

We had a wonderful visit with a church in Fairview, Oklahoma this past weekend. This is a group of people who have a big place in their hearts for Liberia. They have a wonderful diverse congregation and multiple families have adopted children from Liberia. Unfortunately we did not have Mark there to take all of the pictures for us, so we only have a few, but I will post what I have!

Hanging out at Garen's house, talking and having a great time!

Pastor- Kris Ewbank and his sweet wife!

Me relaxing after the service, and Garen Ewbank in the orange. Garen is a blast, and always a source of fun and laughs!

Sorry this is so dark. This is Dax Ewbank, Garen's son. He has an amazing heart for evangelism and is a gifted speaker.

The kids came up to get a closer view of the baptism.

Garen and the congregation waiting for the baptism to begin.

Kris speaking on Sunday morning.

Thank you everyone at Fresh Start Fellowship for the wonderful hospitality and fellowship! We are so excited to see how the Lord will grow this friendship.