The Ministries of Urban Hope

The Rigors of Home Assignment

Home Assignment (Furlough) is a strange thing. It dawned on me as we entered into Sheri’s parents place, that neither they nor my parents probably are going to get back up to our house (my mom hasn’t seen it yet) which is 3.5 hours north of where they live. The reason – we are constantly coming down to where they are! We have been doing quite a bit of traveling the last little while, at least it feels that way!

Moving forward, each weekend till December is booked with various speaking engagements or conferences. It can begin to take a toll on family. As I walked into Sheri’s parents’ house last night, I realized that most people don’t live this way. Most of them stay put generally. It is nice however, that we are allowed flexibility in that Sheri and the kids don’t always have to come with me as I travel to different churches from Regina to Langley BC. I hope I am not coming across as whining……………………….. many missionaries I know have to travel from the east coast, to the west coast……………………………of both Canada and the US! So by comparison, we have it pretty easy.

The picture of the kids is just them getting back to their Canadian roots! It was during a stop this summer while camping in the Rocky Mountains!

Well, just thought I would let you all know what has been happening in our lives lately. We are working on a new prayer card and will get that out soon. The next few weeks look like this. Saskatoon, Didsbury, Regina, Langley BC. Pray for us! Thankful to have you on our team.

Lane and Sheri and the kids

Happy to be Settled

It has been a while since I have updated the blog so I thought it would be a good idea to do so. We are finally settled in a house just 3 kms south of our church in the evergreen studded pristine wilderness west of Sundre Alberta! That sounded good didn’t it? It looks good too! We are loving the peace and tranquility that this setting offers. Often Sheri will just step outside and take a minute to smell the pines and drink it in. I think it is medicine to her!

The kids love this area as well. There is enough grass out here for a full size football field! Lots of room for them to run and for our Maltese Poodle to run as well! This really is a nice change for us after the rigors of life in Hermosillo. We love the ministry there and look forward to going back, but we are also looking forward to our remaining time here too! We are not taking for granted the quietness that surrounds us!

I have updated our picture website with new pictures of our trip back from Mexico and some camping and catching up time with family etc. It is a joy to see family and friends again, we have many to see still! Just click on the slideshows at the top of the blog to go to our picture website to see the larger version of the pictures.

The Picture is of our front yard as the moon is rising.

back from Chihuahua and leaving again!

It was a real good week in Chihuahua, thank you to all of you who prayed for us! I think we blessed the little church that we partnered with and I know they blessed us! At the height of the Kids club, there were 62 kids! Some Mom's came on the last day and indicated they were going to keep coming to church so please pray that it happens! That is the kind of fruit that God loves to see!
As for our family, we are in the throws of packing up and preparing to leave Hermosillo. We hope to leave tomorrow or Thursday and then arrive in Alberta a week later (hoping to take a night or 2 in Yellowstone National Park).
Please pray for saftey and a good trip back to Alberta. Sheri and the kids and I are excited to get going but sad to be leaving as well. We need your prayers, transition is never an easy time for a family!
God bless you and thank you for your prayers! We will be in touch once we get back to Alberta!

Off to Chihuahua City

Today I (Lane) am packing up for a trip out to Chihuahua City tomorrow with some of the Church Youth group. We are heading out for a missions trip (partnering with another Church in Chihuahua City to put on a kids club and be an encouragement to this new Church). The plan is to leave tomorrow morning bright and early (6am) Pacific Time and arrive there by about 6pm. We will be coming back on the 8th. Please pray for safety on the highways and that we would be a blessing to this fairly new church that we are going to be partnering with. We will be praying for a good number of kids to come to the VBS we will be doing there.

Pray also for Sheri and the kids. Sheri has a big task in front of her as she is packing up for our Home Assignment that we will be taking once I get back from Chihuahua. Her health still isn't wonderful and with this extra stress of me leaving she could sure use your prayers!

Thank you for standing with us! We covet your prayers!

Harvest Time!

(Some of the 250 Migrant Workers from Southern Mexico
exploring Gods word in their new Bibles)

God is at work! We are excited to be able to be involved with what He is doing here in Nothern Mexico, and in the South as well! What do I mean? Read on!

It was about a year ago that God put the plight of the unreached indiginous tribes of the world on our hearts. We prayed and did some investigating. It turns out that in this part of the world, and in Mexico specifically, many of the unreached groups live south of Mexico City. We found this info on the Joshua Project Website - to have a look yourself go to http://www.joshuaproject.net/ There is a really cool application that reads "Download KMZ file" on their website. It loads Google Earth and shows the reached and unreached people groups of the world by little different colored dots. Get the program free by clicking here http://www.joshuaproject.net/great-commision-maps.php If the link doesn't work just copy it and paste it into your internet browser.

Ok, fast forward to about a month ago. I got an invite to a local vineyard by a Christian friend from church who caters food to many different vineyards in the area. He provides food for the workers in the vineyard. These are private vineyards but since they contract him to provide the food, he knows the owners personally and therefore I was able to go in and see the operation.

It turns out that right now there are about 700 workers harvesting the grapes and the majority of them come from south of Mexico City! Many of them speak different tribal languages as well as Spanish. If you listen you can hear other languages being spoken. We didn't realize it but the "unreached tribal groups" are right here in our backyard! So we have been out to this one vineyard 3 times so far and last night we gave away 200 bibles! Some of the men and youth from our church came along with me and did a great job at handing out the bibles and explaining basic things about the bibles. As well one of the leaders in our church who is gifted in evangelism presented the gospel message and many people responded!
It is amazing to have 250 people who perhaps have never been in a Christian church and never had the gospel message explained to them sit there attentively for over 2 hours! One of the things that I am very excited about is the enthusiasm that the church people are showing for this ministry!
I mentioned that my friend caters to many different vineyards in the area. I just got off the phone with him and he wants to know how we can plan to reach the other vineyards as well! One of the vineyards has about 1200 workers!
Please pray for us! We are going to be praying and planning as we consider how to reach these people who are hungry for God's word! We will be returning from Canada in December and at that time we hope to begin at some of these different vineyards.
All of this is for God's glory, we want to get His word out into the hands of the people who need it trusting that "It will not return to me empty" Isaiah 55:11 There are 2 harvests happening. One is of grapes, and one is much more important that grapes! The human heart!

Training for Missions Trips

As a youth group, we are currently preparing for 2 missions trips (Chihuahua City and Cuba) this summer. I tasked the youth with completing the "Experiencing God" Bible Study workbook and memorizing the 12 accompanying scriptures as part of the prerequisites to going on the trips. They also need to attend 2 weekends of team training.
Churches in Chihuahua City and Cuba have asked our church to send teams to them to partner in doing children's ministry this summer. It is a privilege to be asked to go! So we are busy training our youth and raising money here in order to go. If you would like to participate in sending a Mexican church to spread the gospel in another part of Mexico and in Cuba, please go to
https://www.efccm.ca/donate
Under "Project Designation" choose "Missionary" then in the box to the right put "Elliott #2102-Summer Ministry Trips"
It is a difficult task to raise the needed money although we are trying as a church! It would be wonderful to partner with you in bringing the gospel message to kids in needy places, so would you consider sending a child to one of these summer camps for $10? Or how bout sending one of our youth on the trip in order to help run the summer camps for $80?

If you have any questions, just email me at lane.elliott@yahoo.ca

The picture above is one of the group dynamics we did as a youth group a few weekends ago. The idea was to have all team members stay on the chairs and off of the ground while moving from one end of the field to the other and crossing over a rope that was about 3 feet off of the ground. This took a lot of communication and team work! We all failed many times but it certainly did show us the need to communicate well and work together!




This group activity had to do with staying as a group and not leaving anyone behind as we walked through the desert just outside of the city. Notice the beautiful Sonora desert!



This last activity had to do with what we as Christians will do (jump into a muddy pit) in order for a little "Sinful pleasure" - A buried chocolate bar! Once we realized how muddy we were, everyone wanted to shower off and not stay dirty because the Bible calls us sheep, we want to be clean, not stay dirty like pigs!

Dusty outing with our teammates and Director

This is what our day outside of the city looked like. We went out with our teammates Greg and Shelli Neufeld and our Director Steve and his wife Myra Neufeld. We had to drive about an hour to find a creek (the kids loved it), however it was a windy day and in the desert, even in a "nice spot" in the desert, well the video shows what we got!

Olds Koinonia Christian School comes to Arbol de Vida Church in Hermosillo!

It has been a blessing (as always) to have OKCS with us again this year. Their trip will wrap up on Tuesday the 5th. Much ministry has taken place, from orphanage work, to a kids camp especially for the young victims and their families of the daycare fire that happened over a year ago, to ministry with kids from a poor neighborhood, to the construction of a temporary tent structure where our future sactuary will be located (we are meeting under the new structure in the video- for the first time)!
The group did a great job on "Jesus Messiah" in Spanish! Thank you Olds Koinonia!

A Calm in the Storm

These last few weeks have been trying ones. I (Lane) have been really stressed about various things. You know how sometimes it seems like everything falls at once? Like when it rains, it pours? Well it hardly ever rains here in the Sonoran Desert, but these last few weeks have seemed like a steady downpour in some ways.
There have been a number of things come up that need my attention and it just sometimes seems overwhelming. On top of that it, I feel like I am getting stretched thin in regard to dealing with people. That is me being brutally honest. Dealing with imaturity over and over again just plain ol gets tiring sometimes. Also Sheri continues to struggle with her health. She has been doing alright (no more pain associated to the stone they removed from her bile duct) but she still deals with frequent bouts of muscle ache in her shoulders, arms and legs and a heavy tiredness. These bouts last for a day or 2 and happen every week or so. The doctors are trying to get to the bottom of it. We are off to a new doctor this coming Monday.
This blog entry is not a whining session, although it may seem like it so far. You might be wondering what the picture above has to do with everything I have been saying so far!
Well this past week God gave us a break in the "storm". We escaped for a day to San Carlos (a beach town about an hour and a half from where we live). I had to pay my car insurance there and it was a good reason to take the family, take a break from home schooling and just rest on the beach! So the picture of the kids above is them playing on a sand dune right beside the ocean (the water is behind me when I took the pic). We just layed on a blanket and ate some munchies and the kids had a blast building sand castles! We then went out for lunch at a taco stand and then back to a different beach for family devotions. It was so good to read His word and just breath in His emensity looking out over the ocean! The kids finished our time by throwing rocks at jelly fish!

Psalm 23:1-3 The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake.

This verse truly came alive to us this week! God is good and He knows just when we need a "calm in the storm".

Pray for Miguel

This past Sunday our friend Miguel Angel moved out into his own place. He had been staying with us for the last 3 months. Miguel is a New Believer in Jesus and Lane has been discipling him. It is wonderful to see the steps of faith that Miguel is taking and seeing his new faith grow.
Those of you who follow our news letters may recognize the picture of Miguel, perhaps you have been praying for him as well. Miguel is waiting for a kidney transplant as neither of his kidneys are functioning. He is in a tough spot being unable to work any job that comes along due to his health condition. He can work, but it needs to be the right job, and not a physical job.

Miguel has been making good decisions lately and we pray that those good decisions continue now that he is on his own. His house is on the other side of the city so we won't see him as often now that is for sure. The enemy will certainly take every opportunity to tempt him and there will be more opportunities now that he is living on his own. We pray that his new found faith would continue to grow and that he would be able to continue to have wisdom to leave behind the negative influences that have impacted him in the past.

Please join us in praying for a job for Miguel, for a kidney transplant, but most of all that God would continue to grow Miguel into a wise and passionate follower of Jesus!

Current Goings On

It has been a hard few days. It can be a roller coaster when you are ministering to broken people with difficult pasts. Just yesterday one of the men we have been helping out as a church decided to leave town. He struggles with alcoholism and had recently come out of a rehab centre. Well he fell off the wagon again, lost his job because of it and decided that he was getting on the bus and leaving town. So he did. I am not sure where he went or if or when he is going to come back. Please pray for him!

On another front, the Tuesday and Thursday bible studies are going well. Tuesday nights I (Lane) get together with a young married couple who I met at the gym, they both work at that gym. They approached me and started asking questions etc and so one thing led another and now each Tuesday night we go through a basic discipleship book. They have many questions and it is fun to see them discover truths in the bible, especially as those truths relate to their marriage – they have been married for one year.

The Thursday night bible study consists of University students from our church. There are about 8-9 each Thursday night and we are studying “Experiencing God” Henry Blackaby. The study has been really good. I knew they would benefit from it greatly as I did the study some 10 years ago or so, but this is my first time leading this study, in Spanish none the less! Their eyes are being opened to how God leads in their lives and how they are to respond to him.

Please pray for the things mentioned above and one more as well. I am in the process of turning the leadership of the Youth Drop In Centre we run over to the University students. Last Friday was the first time that they were in charge of it and there were some rough spots. I guess that is to be assumed. Please pray that they would “own” this ministry and not wait for someone else to do what needs to be done, but rather take it upon themselves to do it as for the Lord. There are 6 of them on the leadership committee.

Thanks so much for your prayers! We are grateful!