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May Newsletter
We finally finished our last audit of the Gospel study course we’ve been working on. It’s been almost 2 years in the making, but finally – we’re in the printing stage now! We are really proud of this work and are looking forward to beta-testing it. It looks as though we will run it first at Mule Creek State Prison here in California, but we also have a couple of people that are considering rolling it out in their home Churches. It lends itself easily to either environment so, we’ll see. To remind everyone, it’s an intense study of the Gospels called “Written in Red”. If it’s run as we suggest, i.e; one session a week for 2 hours, it will take about a year to work through, roughly 13 weeks per book.
This course will be fully sponsored by and funded by our ministry – ‘Bibles 4 Change’. We will supply all of the books and materials needed. We may even know of someone that can supply Study Bibles if needed. If any of you that follow us might be interested in conducting it in your church small group Bible study, contact us for further details. Also, you can learn a little more about it on our website, shown below.
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We currently have 2 Christian Anger Management Project courses under way at Folsom and Mule Creek. Folsom is at week 21 of 30 and Mule Creek is at week 11 of 30. Of course, these prisons go up and down for programming when Covid numbers grow, but we’re just taking things as they come. We also seem to be hitting a snag in distributing this course in Texas as we’ve been reporting. It’s a little unclear why things are held up, but it’s likely that Covid restrictions are playing a roll. We happen to know who’s really in charge, so we’ll wait as necessary on His timing.
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We are already in discussion about the subject of our next course development project. We’re looking at a Christian Leadership course, probably centered on a book by Charles Swindoll “Hand Me Another Brick’. It’s a pretty intense study of the Profit Nehemiah and his leadership in reconstructing the battered wall around Jerusalem in just 52 days! It’s a remarkable story about a man’s capabilities to do the impossible when he fully trusts in God to lead the work. More to come on this new effort in the near future.
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We are also gearing up for what will undoubtedly be a serious Forest Fire season. As you all know, our draught conditions here in California are looking very bad. This year we’re going to work even harder to be more anticipative of where evacuation centers will be set up. We’ve learned that if we wait too long, conditions can be so bad in those areas that we’ll be restricted entrance to them. We’re in our 3rd season of this work, so we’re striving to be more responsive, with God directing us of course. It’s nearly impossible for us to distribute single Bibles to these centers, so if you’re interested in helping us with this work, please just send us a check and mark in its notes “Fire Bibles” and we’ll be sure to use all of the funds in that work, buying them by the case, when necessary.
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Overall, God continues to bless us with all of these projects in our Ministry. But we couldn’t do them without the support that all of you give us, both in thoughtful prayer and with your pocketbooks. Thank you all for trusting us with your hard-earned charity dollars.
Once again, if you believe God is telling you to get involved in Prison Ministry, or in conducting one of our courses in your church, come back to us through email or call me. We understand that it is quite a commitment to sign up for this work, so we know you’ll thoroughly pray it through first. Once you have and you are ready start, you can count on Bibles 4 Change for 3 things –
We’re here to support you in any way we can, which includes some guidance and counselling on getting involved in prison work.
We’ll supply all the books and materials you’ll need to make this work in either a prison or a church environment.
You’ll have our never-ending prayers for your success.
Thank you again and God bless you for your interest and support of Bibles 4 Change.
Bob
I know that it’s been awhile since my last letter, but as all of you can imagine the Covid-19 debacle has really slammed on the brakes for programming inside prisons across the country. By virtue of this, we’ve shifted gears in our ministry to begin cleaning up our media
presence/tools along with refining the Christian Anger Management Project (CAMP) package.
Our Website – If any of you have looked at our website of late you may have found it a little messy. We’re making significant changes on nearly every page and in the course of doing this we published it so that it wouldn’t be missing completely. But now we are about done with the upgrades. Naturally, a website should always be dynamic, a work in progress, so that you all see something new every time you visit. We’re hoping you’ll find it more interesting and informative as time goes by. Please take a look at our site when you can, and as always, we are open to constructive criticism – what you think matters to us!
Our Facebook page – Not only have we changed our image on our Facebook page, we have also begun to link our page to our website. Our goal is to inspire interest in others to get involved in prison ministries. We want to encourage Churches to begin prison ministries if they are not already involved. It’s important that people know that they can get involved in prison ministry without ever having to go inside a prison. We’ve developed a tab on the website giving them ideas as to how they can do this.
We believe all Christians should be taking advantage of all this isolation down time to prepare for getting back to God’s work. This not only includes prison ministry but also to our church work. A simple but great question for you to ask your pastor-
“What can I do, right now, to help the church hit-the-ground-running once we do open back up?”
Awhile back I mentioned in a Newsletter that we sent some Bibles up to a Pastor in Paradise to distribute to his congregants and to anyone else that wanted one. He distributed all 80 Bibles in a little over 2 hours. The Lord has placed on my heart that we do that again for these big fires we experiencing now. So that is what we will be doing. Tomorrow, Aug 22, I’ll be headed down to Vacaville to meet up with a Pastor down there to distribute what we can there and then see where we are called to go from there. Probably either Loyalton or Santa Cruz. Please keep this work in your prayers. Take a look in the ‘Projects’ tab on our website for more information on this work.
We thank you all for hanging in there with us during these crazy times. Your gifts to us are simply helping us to be ready when God calls an end to all of this political absurdity and to the fires! Please keep us in your prayers.
Bob
You may recall that in my last newsletter I expressed concern over the fact that our requests for Bibles over the last couple of months had really dropped off.
In fact, the whole first quarter of this year has been near zero. As you might imagine, I’ve been pretty frustrated with all of this.
I also mentioned a reminder as to our submitting our Christian Anger Management course to a group in South Texas for use in the 5 prisons around Houston.
Then, this Coronavirus craziness began so all of our prison work ground to a halt. To be honest, I began to question God in all of this. But in His own, miraculous way He reminded me that He was in charge and that His timing would always prevail, not mine. He’s also helped me to understand that this pandemic is a “Shot across the bow” to America. We’ve systematically taken God out of most everything in America. We take being the most powerful and richest country in the world as something that we accomplished and that He had no part in it. God has shown us with this fiasco that in the blink of an eye He can bring mighty America and all the world to its knees without a fight! GOD IS TRULY IN CHARGE AND ALWAYS WILL BE!! And all of us Christians need to step up and be counted. It’s time to get back to church! We as a nation need to recognize that without Him we will fail! We’re not as big as we think we are.
Enough preaching. I know all of you understand this for what it really is.
Back to Bibles 4 Change – I mentioned earlier my frustration with not hearing anything back on the informational packages I sent to various places regarding our Christian Anger Management Project, what we call CAMP. Last week I got a call from my guy in Houston. He apologized for taking so long for getting back to me on this program but his reasons were pretty powerful. Back in February he submitted our program to the Department of Corrections for the State of Texas in Austin. He was calling me to say that we have just been approved for distribution of the course for every prison in Texas! WOW!
God was working all along for us! He got our course approved in record time because He wants it to grow in other places! He dramatically slowed the demand for Bibles because he wanted us to build our coffers for all of the expenses we would encounter with this new demand for CAMP! Once again, He has humbled impatient Bob about who is in charge and who’s timing is the best.
Please, please, please keep us in your prayers for all of this, folks. This is really a big deal for B4C! We’re going to need your support in every way, more than ever now.
We sincerely thank you for all of your undying support!
Bob