The Shumaker Family's Blog

I will be traveling to Ghana tomorrow.  I will be with missionary Steve Volonte and a bunch of other African pastors.  We are going to makes plans for the conference that I will be hosting in September.  We are expecting to have a bunch of African pastors come in.  They will be from all over West Africa.  We want to inspire and challenge them to do more and do all that is possible to evangelize West Africa and beyond.

We are advancing with the Construction at our church in Cissin. We have been working for about 2 months now. God has really blessed and we are going to finish with the foundation this week. We want to thank everybody for their sacrifice to see this project advance. Last night, while I preached, God dealt with my heart. It is hard when you preach yourself under conviction. I have to admit that I have sometimes doubted and worried about having the money sufficient to finish this job. We have never attempted to do a building project this big but we know that it is necessary to accomplish the work of God here in West Africa. I believe with all of my heart that this is going to be the start of a major revival throughout the region. I am going to try to calculate what we will need to finish the bottom floor of the building this week. We are thinking that it should be at least $20,000-$25,000. Most likely a little more than that. Thanks again for all those who have prayed and all those who have given. Please pray for this great need.

We just finished with VBS at Tingandogo. God truly blessed us with a great crowd. We had about 380 kids Wednesday morning. We had a good rain on Wednesday afternoon so our crowd was a little done but we still had about 220. Bro. David Lundy did a wonderful job teaching for us. We had a good number of kids that prayed and trusted Jesus as their Lord. We had a great time and the kids did also. My favorite part is playing dodge ball with the kids. It is a blast watching them go crazy and hitting them with the ball. I know, I am carnal.

We finished our church building at Roungo and because of that we felt it would be good to have a church dedication. We have met under tress and grass hangars for two years. I felt it was the right time to help them build a building. They did lots of the work by getting all the water, sand and rock necessary for the construction. We were privileged to have David Lundy and David Velke here. Bro. Lundy is a faithful member of Vision Baptist Church where Bro. Austin Gardner is the pastor. He is in charge of the children’s ministry and also is very faithful with Businessmen Committed to World Evangelism (www.bcwe.net). He and BCWE has helped greatly with our construction needs.You can also check out their blog at: www.bcwe.wordpress.com

Bro. Velke is a 19yr old that is being trained by Bro. Gardner. He preached for us 4 different times and God used him greatly. Our people said that they were amazed to see a young man with a love for God and a great vision.

We arrived in Roungou on Friday afternoon. We built benches and painted the inside of the building, the doors and the windows. We also put our church logo on the outside of the building. We had well over 300 in attendance for the church dedication. We had many of the old men and chiefs from the area. I was also able to baptize 16 people.

At the end of last month(June 2007) I took a trip to visit a friend in Morocco. God truly blessed my time. We also had a conference with a number of different missionaries and Pastor Austin Gardner (Vision Baptist Church). It was a time to reflect on the direction of where the ministry is going and to make plans for the future.