Sunday, March 22, 2009

Once every three years more than 20,000 college-aged Christians from the United States and Canada who have a particular interest in serving as missionaries gather at Urbana – a conference sponsored by InterVarsity. We were thankful to have been invited to attend in December 2006 and we are looking forward to participating again this year. We want to ask you as our partners in this work to consider when you think about it in the coming months to pray with us about this conference. Jesus told his disciples in Matthew 9:7 that the harvest is great but the workers are few, and then he told them to pray therefore unto the Lord of the Harvest that He might call workers into His harvest field. When I talk with my students about that verse I am honest with them that in some sense I do not know why Jesus told His disciples to do this, because after all, God is surely well aware that the harvest is great, and that the workers are few, and He is certainly not ignorant that workers are needed for His harvest field. And yet I cannot fathom that Jesus would have told His disciples to do something that is meaningless and without effect. Somehow in the way that God has ordered His world and the way that it works, it matters if God’s people pray! And so I am coming to you and asking you to pray. God has opened doors for us here in Tanzania – we now have 16 schools open and another 3 we are building, and the opportunities to place missionary teachers in these schools is full of tremendous potential. We’re looking for people who will be willing to live in these villages, who will be willing to intertwine their lives with the lives of their students, who will give of themselves in service to God and to these communities, and who will in the end get so involved in the lives of their students that they will love them, and they will want to help them when they are sick, they will want to share the gospel with them, they will want to encourage them to dream big dreams and make plans for the future.

I will go and speak anywhere. I’m coming back to the US in April and I am open and willing to speak anywhere at any time – and I will. And there are many of our other former teachers who are out there speaking in churches and at gatherings on campuses. And we have people who have never been here who are showing the DVD of the story of VSI and encouraging people to get involved. And all of that together is having great effect. But there is something wonderfully unique about this huge gathering of Christian young people which will take place December 27-31 of this year. Would you pray with us that God will use our efforts there as we speak and meet with students to call some of them into service here with us? We would be grateful for your help.

In His service,

Steve & Susan Vinton