Dear Lifelight friends:
Our dinner party on October 11 was a successful one. There were around 80 friends who attended our party and highly enjoyed the good food and programs.
On top of visiting the Zheng Zhou Blind School, we also included Beijing Blind School in our Summer Short Term Mission trip this year. We started to offer scholarships to a new school in Beijing which is run by the government. The facility and faculties in this school are first class, but students have to pay tuition and living expenses. We think some highly intelligent blind youth from poor families should also have the same opportunity to get the best education possible. This portion of the trip in Beijing brought new challenges for us. It is a government own and run school so we needed to be more careful with the things we said. They invited us to teach English massage terms and introduce American history/culture. Before we arrived, we understood that we should not share the good news to students unless we were absolutely sure it was safe to do so. At the end, the school president gave an invitation and asked us to go back again next year. We think we must have done a satisfactory job for them. It was completely different in Zheng Zhou, where we were able to spread the gospel more freely. And in the end, 15 students accepted Christ. Including students from last year, there are around 40 believers out of 60 students at the school now.
Right after the short term mission, we went to join the National summer retreat for blind Christians in Xin Xiang. This special event catered to our seminary students and fellowship group leaders. Along with the great music, messages and worship, two theology courses were provided in those 3 days. Around 75 blind people joined this retreat and one more fellowship group in the East Coast of china was established.
The program that we started together with a Seminary school in Taiwan is going very well. Thanks to modern technology, we currently have around 50 students who are taking classes by computer online. We expect to have some students complete their study as early as the end of 2014.
After 18 months of searching and training the right members, the Lifelight Worship team is finally set with four blind Chinese early this year. They have completed three short music worship trips so far. One was in the East Coast of China and the other two were in Hong Kong/Macau and Singapore/Malaysia. The congregations were overwhelmingly touched when they heard the worship team singing hymns, playing musical instruments and sharing about our ministry to the visually impaired Chinese. Because of that warm acceptance experience, they plan to visit Taiwan and the U.S. on top of several short worship tours in China Next year. Let us hope all their next year plans can be materialized.
You may go to the links below to enjoy some photos/videos from our events this year. Please pray for us that we can continue to have many more blessed years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioam3D4cAaE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkUXt1JsujU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bob3iYEr03o
https://www.dropbox.com/s/71pcro2nmvmhp4x/2014%20%E5%88%86%E4%BA%AB%E9%A4%90%E6%9C%83.pdf?dl=0
With blessing,
William Lei
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