Special Service & Missionary Update

Maundy Thursday Fellowship with RHCC:

We’ve got a special opportunity in April to fellowship with another local church as a way of sending us into Easter weekend properly focused on Christ. Rural Hall Christian Church has an annual Maundy Thursday fellowship service that we’ve been invited to participate in. The service centers on a fellowship meal with Communion incorporated into it.

If you aren’t familiar with Maundy Thursday as part of the Church Calendar, it is the Thursday before Good Friday, and it marks the night during Passion Week when the Lord Jesus gathered with his disciples in the Upper Room to observe the Passover. This gathering became known as the Last Supper. It was during this final supper with his disciples that Jesus washed their feet and instituted the Lord’s Supper (Communion, the Eucharist, etc…). The observance of “Maundy Thursday” appears to date back to the early church. There were certainly special services developed by the fourth century. During the Middle Ages, the day became more significant to the Christian Calendar.

Maundy is from the Latin word mandatum from which we get words like mandate or command. This is based on Christ’s “new command,” delivered in the Upper Room on the night of the Last Supper. John 13:34, records Jesus’ words: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” Maundy Thursday is a time to remember the events of the Lord’s last evening with his disciples in the Upper Room and Jesus’ fulfillment of Old Testament types and shadows, like the Passover. 

So this Maundy Thursday (April 17th), we’ll reenact in order to remember. We’ll share a meal with other believers as Jesus shared a meal with his disciples on the night before he died for our sins, and before the meal concludes, we’ll take the communion elements together and remember what the Lord has done for us. This meal and fellowship is designed to send us into Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday thoughtful and thankful.

Details

When: April 17th from 7:00p-8:30p

Where: Rural Hall Christian Church 

What to Bring: Dessert (BBQ pork and chicken will be provided) 

Please RSVP by 4/7 

Cook Family Update

Our missionary family, the Cooks, who serve in Southeast Asia, have some exciting news and a prayer request that they wanted us to share. On the exciting front, they have the opportunity to move to their target country in April. They’ve been in the region doing language learning (Bahasa Malay), prep, and continued education, but now they are staring down arrival at their long term ministry post. 

The prayer request has to do with their kids. The Cooks are a committed homeschooling family (that was one of the clear points of alignment with our church’s value system and culture that made the Cooks a good fit for our congregational support). Raymond reached out the other day with a heavy heart as he explained that in order to secure the most affordable visa and get in country, they would have to put Anna and Asher, their 4 and 5 year olds into the international school in their area. That would get the kids student visas and it would get Raymond and LeAnn guardian visas. This is not what they want, but it is what they can afford. 

What they want is called a retirement visa, a long term visa that grants them a lot of freedom in country. That visa costs $135,000 (government-shakedown much?). They’ve got about half of that. Raymond asked for our prayers as they work and pray through these possible scenarios: 1) going ahead and moving to their target location in April and letting the kids attend the international school for nine months on those temporary visas, then after that period come back stateside for a few months to raise the rest of the money to get the long term visa, or 2) go ahead and enter the fundraising phase and push back their arrival date significantly. 

Just so you know what kind of guy Raymond is, he said that they are in conversation with and under the spiritual authority of the elders from their sending/home church and are receiving their counsel, but he said that he knew that one of our big connection points with their family was on the educational values front, so he wanted to make sure to be really candid and transparent about their thought process and give us the opportunity to pray, pushback, and provide insight. That’s a stand-up guy for ya. So let’s be praying for the Cooks as they have a difficult and time-sensitive decision to make. I’ll keep you posted on the Cooks in the coming weeks.