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Covenant Counseling Center
Covenant
Counseling Center, a ministry of the First Presbyterian
Church, offers counseling and psychological testing services
to a wide variety of clientele. People can seek services
for a range of issues, including marital problems,
child-rearing difficulties, depression, anxiety, dealing
with the effects of abuse, and other emotional problems,.
Services are available for individual adults, children,
couples and families. Seminars on special topics, such as
Stress Management and Relationship Enhancement, are offered
periodically. Therapy is provided by board certified,
licensed clinical psychologists. In order to provide
services to a wide range of people, reduced fees are
available and are set according to family size and income.
For further information, please call (229) 890-2280.
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| Missions and Missionaries
Committee meets on the 3rd Sunday of the
Month, 6:00 p.m., Vereen Parlor.
International
Mission
First Presbyterian Church has long
helped support 2 missionary families and in 2010 added a
third and in 2011 hopes to add a fourth. We are the
major support of a program in Bangladesh and also support a
program in Bihar, India and the Christian Veterinary
Association.
Since
anything published on the internet is available to anyone
worldwide, our descriptions of some of the missionaries and
evangelistic work we support will need to be cryptic to not
jeopardize them due to the nations where they work.
Bangladesh – Fellowship for Disadvantaged Peoples (FDP)
FDP works
with the poor village women and children of Rajbari
District, Bangladesh, in a holistic ministry that as of
April 2011 includes a credit program, community health
workers and lay midwifes, 2 elementary schools and 18
village libraries. The credit program offers loans of about
$50-100 to 1200 poor women which they repay (plus 12.5%
service charge) weekly over a year. They use these loans
for leasing land, fertilizer, seeds, livestock, and cottage
industries. Since the loans are limited to women, they now
are seen by society to have economic value and this has
increased their status in society as well as the standard of
living of their families and allowed their children to stay
in school. Four community health workers teach 100 families
each annually the basics of sanitation, treating common
diseases like diarrhea, etc., and 14 lay midwives have been
taught how to give basic prenatal care, perform safe, clean
deliveries, and when to refer to a physician, with a
resulting lower maternal and infant death rates. The
libraries in a box are open every afternoon and literate
village women can read books on gardening, childcare,
history, religion, and literature, etc. First grade
students are tutored (school is only 2 hours a day), and
illiterate women are taught basic literacy by the
librarians. The two elementary schools have now been
expanded to classes 1-5, and weekly tests have markedly
improved pass rates.
For many years FDP was supported solely by the offerings of
Moultrie First Presbyterian, but a second donor agency has also
helped since 2008.
Cody and Tallulah Watson
Cody works
for the Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship, an organization
associated with the Presbyterian Church that seeks to take
the gospel to groups where there is not a strong
established church – whether they are immigrants in the US,
or around the globe. Cody speaks to churches, primarily in
the southeastern US and travels to the Near East, Central
Asia, and South Asia primarily. We have supported the
Watsons for nearly two decades and they have visited us many
times. Cody has led us to support the work in India and
Ethiopia.
P
(name and location withheld for her protection)
P is working in a country
with less than 0.01% Christians in the evangelism and
discipleship of college age students and assisting in the
discipleship of a young church. We look forward to her
visiting us again the next time she is in the US. We have
supported P for nearly a decade.
India
- BORN
Bihar, India’s
second largest state, has about 100 million people and is
around 2% Christian. It has ranked at the bottom of all
measurement scales in India: poverty, literacy, crime,
corruption, etc. The Bihar Outreach Network, BORN, is a
network of mission organizations that is doing holistic
church-planting work in Bihar. Churches are being
established, people are being trained in culturally
appropriate ways, leadership is being developed, and in the
last 8 years, the number of annual baptisms has grown from
1,250 to almost 50,000! Funds support all this work in the
following categories: Bible schools and training, indigenous
church planters, a new training center, and training and
sending evangelists to the Koshi area that was flooded in
2008.
Dr.
Urgessa - Ethiopia
Light of Hope
Ministries in Ethiopia is reaching out to the 8 million
Arssi Oromo people, who are Muslims. Light of Hope is
training and sending teams of teacher/evangelists to
villages that want schools to help with education and to
plant churches. Funds will help build schools in villages
and train the teachers whom Dr. Urgessa hand
selected and trained. There are now 22 elementary schools in
six Arssi regions, with 120 teachers teaching and serving
nearly 5,000 students and their families. The number is
growing rapidly every year. Though this is first through
fifth grade, second grade students may be in their teens.
Through becoming literate, these children have the
opportunity to help develop their villages and families in
ways that can help move them beyond the vagaries of
subsistence farming and its inherent risk of hunger if the
rains don’t fall. Dr. Urgessa is currently in the US
working with Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship to support
this program and is also working with pastor with immigrant
congregations on stewardship and evangelism. We began
supporting Dr. Urgessa in 2010.
D and A
(names and country withheld
for their protection)
D and A are the newest
missionaries we hope to support. Raised in Muslim and Hindu
families, they each came to Christ in their early twenties
when working in a mission hospital in their native country.
They needed to make a public profession of faith in order to
marry as Christians, and while her family merely disowned
her, his hired a hit man to kill him, and a missionary
helped them escape to the capital city. Soon thereafter
they were hired by a new project of the Presbyterian Church
where they worked in the clinic for 13 years until the
project was turned over to the national church. Fearing
persecution from some of the Muslim population, D emigrated
to the US in 1993, followed by his wife and sons in 1998. D
and A now hear a call to return to their native land to
spread the good news of Jesus Christ among Muslims. They
will work in conjunction with other evangelical work we are
currently supporting in this country as we share stories
from the “other Holy Books” (the Old and New Testaments)
with students, women, and now men. They have been approved
by a national missionary organization and plan to return as
soon as they can raise support. Although they first spoke
to our congregation in 2011, they have been known to some of
our congregation for over 30 years and have worked with our
church on occasion over the past decade.
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