Displaying items by tag: Barnabas Aid

‘Our efforts have been fruitless,’ said a Christian farmer in northern Kenya. ‘Wild animals are invading our farms and eating everything - hippos, elephants, buffaloes. Families have been struggling with nothing to eat.’ This is another problem added to the prolonged drought biting ever deeper. Crops fail, livestock perish, and the all-important water source, the Tana River, dwindles and dries up. Children in northern Kenya have already begun to die of hunger. Barnabas Aid is continuing to feed Christians in that area, where our fellow-believers are a minority and do not get help from the main aid agencies in the area. The rainy season, October to December, is forecast to be short and light across most of the country.

Barnabas Aid invited people to join them for their Suffering Church Action and Awareness Week launch on 22 October at their new UK offices in Swindon. It also launched its new medical.gives project. The meeting provided an overview of the increasing suffering endured by Christians, and how we can understand the times we are living in. There were also updates on recent projects supported by Barnabas Aid, under God’s guidance. If people were unable to get to Swindon, Barnabas Aid were livestreaming the event.

A recent Barnabas Aid editorial reads: ‘CH Spurgeon often said that before God could use someone He had to first break that person into pieces. Jeremiah knew the truth of this. From his youth (Jeremiah 1:6), he was called to do an impossible task that involved grief, suffering, abuse and rejection. He is known as the weeping prophet. The Lord reminded Jeremiah, as he watched the potter at work, that it was His sovereign choice to destroy and remake His people, as the potter reworked the soft clay from one shape into another (Jeremiah 18:6). He also used the image of a pot, shattered to pieces and impossible to repair, as a warning to the people of Jerusalem in their iniquity (Jeremiah 19). And yet God did restore His repentant people and, in the end, brought them back to Jerusalem out of their Babylonian captivity. God took the broken fragments and restored them into something useful. So brokenness does not have to be the end. It can be the prelude to glory. God can restore even the broken cup and use it for His purposes.’