Grace Ministries Mission evangelical church has a new leader with a big heart, and big plans, for the poor.

Bishop Stanley Simunyola praying over a poor Zambian family in their home.

Recently, Cross staff met up with Bishop Stanley Simunyola in Lusaka, Zambia, where he told us about the roots of his passion: a Christian teacher from his childhood. As a boy growing up in poverty, Stanley was on the verge of dropping out of school because his parents could not afford the fees and supplies. But his teacher believed in him enough to intervene and pay for his education.

As a result of that act of kindness, Stanley finished school, went to college, became and ordained minister, and earned a masters degree in pastoral studies from an American university. Now he is reaching out to a new generation of children in Zambia to give them the same opportunities.

“When I see street kids, I see potential pastors. I see potential doctors, lawyers,” he says. “I know that what is being done into the lives of those children is not in vain.”

Bishop Stanley’s ministry seeks out children who have lost one or both parents and provides food, school expenses, and Christ-centered counseling. Rather than create an atmosphere of dependency and entitlement, the program is helping the poor to see what they can accomplish through their own diligence and hard work, encouraged by the prayers, love, and support of the local Christian community. For instance, a widow whose four children are being put through school by Grace Ministries was inspired to begin volunteering at her church, and now she provides home-based care to other needy families in her village.

“They don’t want to just be recipients,” Bishop Stanley says. “They want to also pass on help to other people.”

Click here to learn about how Cross International is supporting this powerful ministry.

This past Sunday, many of us took time to honor that special someone who taught us how to ride our first bicycle, change our first tire, catch our first baseball, and get through life without calling a plumber or asking for directions. Father’s Day was celebrated in 52 countries around the world, from Cuba to Greece to Afghanistan.

Arms of Love provides safe shelter for orphans and vulnerable children in Nicaragua.

The Bible has some important things to say about the value of godly fathers. “A righteous man who walks in his integrity – How blessed are his sons after him.” (Prov. 20:7) Even the Trinity itself is described in terms of a Father-Son relationship.

Sadly, many children have never known a father’s love. Some are orphans, others abandoned, others imprisoned in a home life wrecked by drug and alcohol abuse. The absence of a father figure helps to perpetuate the cycle of poverty in countries where even healthy, intact families struggle to get by. That includes Nicaragua, where Cross International is working with a local Christian ministry called Arms of Love to provide shelter for children who have been permanently separated from their parents due to death, abandonment, or abuse.

Nine-year-old Luisa came to Arms of Love after government authorities found her alone on a street selling candies. Both her parents were alcoholics and her uncle had been molesting her. Arms of Love took Luisa in, provided food, shelter, and health care, and raised her in a safe, nurturing environment with opportunities to make new friends, receive counseling, and get a quality Christian education. Now she knows she has a Father in heaven who is always watching over her and will never abandon her. Because of Arms of Love, Luisa is able to say, “Finally, I have a family.”

Click here to learn more about the great work that Arms of Love is doing for fatherless and vulnerable children in Nicaragua.

Ask a boy who his hero is, and chances are good he’ll name an athlete, rock star, actor, or even a comic book character. But 10-year-old Joshua, who lives at the Cross-sponsored Kondanani Village in Malawi, is no ordinary boy. His hero is a charismatic Zambian preacher he watches on TV, and he’s already started to emulate him.

Joshua, 10, weighed only 2 lbs. when he came to Kondanani as an infant.

When Joshua first came to Kondanani as an orphaned infant, he weighed only two pounds. Today he is a healthy, outspoken boy who loves telling other children about Jesus and inviting them to receive him into their heart. Once a week, he also helps out with evangelistic outreaches in the local village, where they do drama presentations, music, teaching, and prayer.

Joshua’s zeal for ministry shows. He took the initiative, without any suggestion from the adults, to organize a group of friends to sing worship songs. Despite their young age, the boys are as polished as a church choir. They sing loud and joyfully, with perfectly coordinated dance moves and harmonies.

Without hesitation, Joshua will tell you what he wants to be when he grows up: a preacher! He is just one example of the many lives saved and nurtured at Kondanani, a Christian orphanage where children are rescued out of squalor, rehabilitated from malnutrition, given a quality education unlike anything else in the country, and best of all touched with the love of Christ.

Click here to learn how you can be a blessing to Joshua and all the other precious children at Kondanani.

It can be humiliating to be treated as a charity case—the object of someone else’s pity and justification for their pride. Not being able to feed your family can be enough of a blow to your self esteem; but having food (or a house, or other basic need) provided in the wrong spirit can be almost as crushing.

Poor Filipino families participate in the solution to their housing problem by helping construct the homes provided to them.

That is why Cross International takes care to maintain the dignity of the poor. Rather than take a “Santa Claus” approach, we lend behind-the-scenes support to local churches and ministries already serving poor communities. A needy family is helped by a pastor in their own neighborhood, for example. This not only builds up a family’s self worth and sense of community, it builds up the local church as well.

Whenever possible, we also require the poor to be part of their own solution. For instance:

• Side-by-side with local Filipino Christians, poor families in Manila help build and paint the homes they receive through Gawad Kalinga.
• Villagers in Zambia collect rocks and sand to make cement for much-needed wells and latrines through the Chikankata Water Project.
• And disenfranchised Haitian families living in the Dominican Republic are asked to pay a token amount toward their children’s education at Light Community School.

As Christians, we are instructed to treat others—including the very poor—as we would want to be treated (Luke 6:31). More than that, in humility we are to consider them better than ourselves. (Philippians 2:3). It is with such humility that Cross International strives to honor the poor by helping them in Jesus’ name, and with his love.

Earlier this week, the U.N. and other international groups observed World Water Day as a time to raise awareness about the plight of those who lack access to clean water. It’s hard to believe that in this day and age, many families in developing nations still don’t have plumbing in their homes and must resort to traveling long distances to fetch water from parasite-infested streams and other questionable sources.

Waterborne illnesses are one of the world’s leading causes of disease and death, because so many families have no choice but to risk the dangers of using contaminated water.

Unsafe water has far-reaching consequences. In fact, waterborne illnesses are one of the world’s leading causes of disease and death, because so many families have no choice but to risk the dangers of using contaminated water. One result is that an estimated 2 million people, most of them young children, die each year from severe diarrhea. Other common waterborne illnesses include malaria, cholera, and typhoid.

Here at Cross, we’re doing our part to improve clean water access in developing nations by building wells for poor villagers. These wells offer a safe alternative to polluted rivers and open cisterns, and their convenient location spares children from having to spend hours each day fetching water in large plastic buckets instead of going to school.

Clean water is a basic necessity that no one should have to do without. It is needed for drinking, bathing, farming, and for maintaining even a tolerable standard of living. Click here to find out how you can bring radical transformation to a poor community by providing a simple well.

This week, Cross staff met with Haitian mission partner Gladys Mecklembourg, who runs the Togetherness in Christ orphanage, to learn how her ministry is coping with the earthquake crisis. Cross supplies the orphanage with weekly deliveries of rice, beans, oil, and other food, and has provided addition funds to help Gladys meet emergency needs.

Togetherness in Christ orphanage is providing space for earthquake victims to stay while receiving post-operative care.

By God’s grace, all the children and staff at the orphanage were unharmed. But Gladys says the kids are afraid to sleep at night because of the aftershocks, and they are worried about relatives they haven’t heard from since the quake. The children will need a lot of counseling to recover emotionally from what has happened.

Gladys told us that four nurses are currently staying at the orphanage to provide post-operative care for medical patients who are being brought in from an overcrowded hospital. Gladys has an on-site clinic, and she has turned the boys’ dormitory into a temporary hospital where amputees and other wounded and ill patients can recover in safety and comfort. The boys have been relocated to other facilities on the 93-acre property. Gladys said there is also possibility of setting up a tent camp on the grounds for the many refugees who have no place to go.

Despite the challenges facing Haiti and our Cross mission partners in the aftermath of the quake, Gladys expressed a positive vision for the future, applying the words of Isaiah 61:3.

“We trust in our heavenly father to raise up a new Haiti, to bestow on us a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. We will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the lord for the displaying of his splendor. This is the word the Lord had given us at Togetherness for Christ, and we believe in this, and we know there will be a change in Haiti. Not only in the structure, but in the heart – the heart of the people…. There is solidarity among us.”

For the latest news on how we are supporting our Cross mission partners in Haiti, visit www.crossinternational.org/relief

For many years we have supported the ministry work of Gladys Thomas, a Haiti-born, U.S.-trained nurse who runs several programs for poor children in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. One of those programs is Hope Home, an orphanage for children with severe physical and mental disabilities. Strapped with caring for 150 handicapped children each day, we asked Gladys to explain her motivation for taking on such a daunting task. She sent this reply regarding her continuing labor of love. And, as it turns out, it all began with one little boy named Michel.

Gladys Thomas, founder of ‘Hope Home,’ with Michel, the boy who inspired it.

In 1993, I went to the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince to see how I could help more children and found a room full of abandoned, severely handicapped children. A group of women had started helping them weekly by bathing them, changing their beds, and feeding them — so I joined them. Michel was there.

One day, one of the ladies called me to see if I could find a dentist to clean Michel’s mouth because she had noticed a bunch of clustered patches in there. When the dentist went in, he found fly eggs. At the moment, I was very angry and frustrated. I could no longer stand to see these precious children living in such horrible conditions. I had to do something. I asked hospital officials if I could take the children, and they said yes. So I took 17 children out and began what is now the Hope Home.

Bishop John M Ng’andu of the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia has seen firsthand the devastating consequences of HIV/AIDS for children in Africa. He recently sent his sincere thanks to Cross International and our benefactors for supporting orphaned and vulnerable children in his Grace Ministries program. Click on the video below to see what he had to say:

More video footage from Zambia to come later this week!

What was the attitude of the earliest Christians toward the sick and poor? Some people may be surprised by the findings in a new book by Oregon State University history professor Gary Ferngren. But what he discovered doesn’t surprise us at all.

Contrary to popular belief, ancient Christians didn’t just assume that everyone with a medical problem was demon-possessed or being punished for their sins. Their belief that human beings are created in the image of God led them to care for the needy within their congregations, while also reaching out to the pagan world, where the weak were more often ignored than helped.

Cross provides surgeries for physically disabled and disfigured children

During a horrible 3rd century plague, Christians were the only people willing to care for the dying. Ferngren writes:

…presbyters, deacons, and laymen took charge of the treatment of the sick, ignoring the danger to their own lives…. Their activity contrasted with that of the pagans, who deserted the sick or threw the bodies of the dead out into the streets….

The experience gained by the congregation-centered care of the sick over several centuries gave early Christians the ability to create rapidly in the late fourth century a network of efficiently functioning institutions that offered charitable medical care, first in monastic infirmaries and later in the hospital.

That same spirit of Christian compassion for the sick and dying continues today through many of the great programs we sponsor at Cross International. Our commitment to the Gospel is what compels us to provide free surgeries for children suffering from birth defects and disfigurements in Afghanistan, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic; and to feed children around the world who are suffering from the painful symptoms of malnutrition.

We’ve got lots of exciting opportunities for reaching out to “the least of these,” and we need your help to make it happen! Click here to learn how you can provide life-changing surgery for a disabled child.

Carlos Vargas is no ordinary businessman, to say the least. He owns a successful jewelry company that supplies thousands of major retail stores in the U.S., but he spends most of his time in Guatemala, serving the poorest of the poor.

Cross International President Jim Cavnar and several staff members had a chance to get to know Carlos during a recent trip to Guatemala, where his Esperanza de Vida ministry is providing food, medical care, shelter, education, and other services to destitute families in garbage dumps and rural mountainous areas. Everyone who met Carlos was impressed by his work and by his love for the Guatemalan people. His ministry is one among many that we support with shipments of medicines, medical supplies, and nutritional supplements.

Pastor Vargas Praying With Two Girls

Carlos admits that when he first committed his life to Christ at the age of 25, his heart wasn’t totally in it. “I was a church person, but not too close to God,” he said, adding with a laugh, “I think I only caused problems in church.” But God had plans for Carlos.

Years later, he contracted a severe case of gout. He lost fingernails and toenails, his limbs started to curl up, he couldn’t walk, and his doctors didn’t know what to do. Carlos feared he was going to die.

While bedridden, a blind beggar came to his door. “I had so much money, but I was too cheap to help this poor man. All I gave him was $5,” Carlos said. “As he was walking away, this strong idea came into my head. I was supposed to take care of people like this blind man.”

Carlos made a “business deal” with God. He promised that if God healed him, he would devote his life to the poor.

After several days of fervent prayer, Carlos sat up in bed and began walking again. His health was completely restored!

True to his promise, Carlos moved to his native country of Guatemala and used his business know-how to start Esperanza de Vida, which means “Hope of Life.”

“It’s not easy to be a missionary,” Carlos said to a church group of volunteers. “Sometimes we cry alone at night when we wonder how we’re going to meet our budget or we cry over the babies we lose…. Why do I do this? There will come a day when I’m going to close my eyes on this earth and I’m going to open them somewhere else. I want God to say, I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you invited me in.”