Almighty God and yet our loving Heavenly Father, we come before Thee once again thanking Thee for another opportunity to gather together and to worship Thee and to consider the ongoing work of the mission. We thank thee, Lord, that thy gospel is not bound. We thank thee, Lord, that thy word is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword. And we pray, Lord, as we come to consider thy work that thou go on to do greater things than this. We pray that thou magnify thyself, make thy mighty arm bare, we pray, and advance thy kingdom even in our own land.

Do bless us as we sing thy praises, as we come to thee in prayer, and Lord, as we hear from Sam and Henry, we pray that they may be blessed with that liberty to speak. We pray that all of these things may be done decently and in order and that the technology may work for our benefit. Do forgive us, we pray, of our many sins, as we ask it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

The first hymn we will sing this evening is the one that you would have been handed on the bit of paper with far and near. It's a hymn that we used to sing in Kenya, in Swahili. Far and near the fields are teeming with the waves of ripened grain. Far and near their gold is gleaming over the sunny slopes and plain. Lord of harvest, send forth reapers. Hear us, Lord, to thee we cry. Send them now the sheaves to gather ere the harvest time pass by.

Daisy will play the first verse and then the refrain and then we will begin to sing. Thank you. Mmm. ? Where thy gold is gleaming o'er ? ? Black sun be stilled and plain ? ? For the gold of this land of peoples ? ? Ever adored to thee we sing ? Send them forth, they long to see me, Send them in the dunes, I pray, Where the stars of days are gleaming, Ever, ever, ever. God, your hallowed strength, God, bring us nearer, Lord. O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? of gold, Edward Bell, a deeply bending bow, When I walk free, Lord, still I look to Thee with high esteem.

to turn together in God's holy word to the book of Numbers and reading chapter 14. Numbers chapter 14. And all the congregation lifted up their voice and cried, and the people wept that night. And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron. And the whole congregation said unto them, Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt, or would God that we had died in this wilderness? And wherefore hath the Lord brought us up unto this land to fall by the sword, that our wives and our children should be a prey? Were it not better for us to return into Egypt, And they said one to another, let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt.

And Moses and Aaron fell on their faces before all the assembly of the congregation of the children of Israel. And Joshua the son of Nun, and Caleb the son of Jephuniel, which were of them that searched the land, rent their clothes. And they spake unto all the company, and the children of Israel, saying, The land which we pass through to search it is an exceeding good land. If the Lord delight in us, then he will bring us into this land and give it us, and a land which floweth with milk and honey. Only rebel not ye against the Lord, neither fear ye the people of the land, for they are bred for us. Their defence is departed from them, and the Lord is with us. Fear them not.

But all the congregation bade stone them with stones, and the glory of the Lord appeared in the tabernacle of the congregation before all the children of Israel. And the Lord said unto Moses, How long will this people provoke me, and how long will it be ere they believe me, for all the signs which I have showed among them? I will smite them with the pestilence, and disherit them, and I will make of thee a greater nation, and a mightier than they.

And Moses said unto the Lord, Then the Egyptians shall hear it, for thou broughtest up this people in thy might from among them. And they will tell it to the inhabitants of this land, for they will have heard that thou, Lord, art among this people. that thou, Lord, art seen face to face, and that thy cloud standeth over them, and that thou goest before them by daytime in a pillar of a cloud, and in a pillar of fire by night.

Now if thou shalt kill all this people as one man, then the nations which have heard the fame of thee will speak, saying, Because the Lord was not able to bring this people into the land which he sware unto them, therefore he hath slain them in the wilderness.

And now I beseech thee, let the power of my Lord be great, according as thou hast spoken, saying, The Lord is long-suffering and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty. visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.

Pardon, I beseech thee, the iniquity of this people, according unto the greatness of thy mercy, and as thou hast forgiven this people from Egypt even until now.

And the Lord said, I have pardoned according to thy word. But as truly as I live, all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord. Because all those men which have seen my glory, and my miracles, which I did in Egypt, and in the wilderness, and have tempted me now these ten times, and have not hearkened unto my voice, surely they shall not see the land which I swear unto their fathers, neither shall any of them that provoke me see it.

But my servant Caleb, because he had another spirit with him, and hath followed me fully, him will I bring into the land whereinto he went, and his seed shall possess it.

Now the Amalekites and the Canaanites dwelt in the valley. Tomorrow turn you and get you into the wilderness by the way of the Red Sea.

We will leave the reading of God's holy word there. What drew me to this chapter, not only is it the greatness and the long suffering and mercy of God and his ability to pardon sin, but also the way he speaks about Caleb.

but my servant Caleb, because he had another spirit with him and has followed me fully. Him will I bring into the land where into he went. And may the Lord give us that grace to, we like Caleb, to follow him fully.

One minute Isaac, just turn one of them on. Hello? Alright. I'll just wait for the projector to turn on and then I'll let you know. Okay. How are you all? Yeah, good, thanks. Yeah, we're good, thank you. Alright, you're on the wall now, so I'll hand over to you. Thank you. Thanks. Just a second, we'll screw you up. Is that working okay? Yeah, that's fine, thank you. Can you see that, James? Yeah, we can see that. Yeah? Yeah. Perfect.

Good to see you all again. I think it's probably nearly two years since I saw most of you, back when James became pastor. Probably seems like a long time ago now. Plenty has changed since that time. Some of you are probably more up to date. Any of you who follow social media will be perhaps more aware of what's been going on in the meantime. But I would like to just give a very brief overview of what's happened in the last few months. And yeah, there'll probably be a short period for questions if any of you have questions after that.

So obviously the most recent news, excited news, is Henry Billy's arrival and they join us today. They have been here for six or seven weeks already, it's flown by, and they're getting stuck into language learning and all the ins and outs of mission life. I'll perhaps hand over to him here, if you wouldn't mind.

Yeah, just going through your arrival, how you felt it. Thank you.

As Sam alluded to, we've been here now for seven weeks, isn't it? It feels like it's flown by really, but we are thankful to the Lord for his goodness and mercy to us. The flights all went well and we feel like we're slowly settling into life here. There's quite a lot to acclimatise to, the climate being one of them. It feels such a distant dream of three degrees in England compared to the 31, 32 degrees here in Kenya and it's been a bit of a curve really. It feels draining often by the midday and with that kind of temperature so but we're slowly getting there.

Likewise with the language and with the culture all of that is brand new and it feels like a bit of a mountain to climb really to learn the language and then to kind of understand the way of the Kenyans which I think even just from the glimpse and glimpses in the past is entirely different to how we view the world in the UK. But we're looking forward to unlocking that by language learning and hoping to come alongside those around us and be able to speak to them the things of God.

The children are settling in well as well. In fact, they seem to have acclimatised much quicker than we have. Oftentimes they'll complain that it's too cold after they come out of the bath, for example, which is mightily unusual when you're in a climate of 27, 28 degrees even in the evening. But we are thankful for their health.

Pregnancy is coming along nicely too and we are seeking to explore ways in which you'll deliver here in Kenya and we would covet your prayers for that. I'll stop there or else I'll continue rambling on and pass back on to Sam.

Invite you back in again? Headed a bit? I'll try and whip through as quickly as possible these sections.

So we've had strangely almost ideal weather for the whole year really. I don't think we've known anything like it since being here, where there's been just a virtual perfect mixture of rain and sun. And so whilst some days it is as you see it here, It doesn't remain like that for very long, so the crops are doing well, and the people are planting, getting harvests, and one or two people have even got the prospect of a third harvest in about a month's time.

I've got a good few showers like that and the water tanks are full and everything's growing well. We at The Lab haven't been growing crops but we have grown quite a lot of different kinds of trees. There in the background of the first picture you can see these building work. There's about 500 of those but they cram into a very small space. They're separated only by a meter. And then we've got various fruit trees going on and shade trees. You can see the orange tree at the right hand of that picture. It's got loads of flowers on it. And we've planted some passions and various vegetables in our garden. Obviously most people will have used their fields for maize, which is the staple crop, and sometimes a few other smaller crops as well. I just dug out quickly this last picture, which the last time I spoke to you was the Sunday school. There's actually still quite a lot of these children who still come, most of them I think. But that was the extent of the Sunday school just about two years ago. But the Sunday school has grown quite significantly. significantly in that time. And we now travel to all different areas to pick up children on a Sunday morning. So there's a couple of fans and two of us will go out around seven in the morning and begin picking up and we aim to start at 10.

The children go to Sunday school after a brief catechism and they do a bible story all together The number is about five to six hundred at the moment, and so they are all together in one class. There's a bit of a shortage of teachers, but after the Bible story, or the lesson, they split off into two groups, and the young ones do coloring, and the older ones answer questions.

After Sunday school is toileting, ready for the main service. We recently had to enlarge our toilet capacity, which is this block here, because of the sheer number trying to go through at once. And then we go to the main service. which is now quite different from a couple of years ago. The room is mostly for, at least it was in October, into November now, and lots of the children have gone away to their extended family in other parts, specifically Mombasa, mostly other areas so we are a bit down on numbers but usually this is mostly filled. Of course the congregation is probably 90% children so that does affect how you have to speak.

With the Sunday school We have been trying for a long time to get Carrie MacKenzie's book, 365 Bible Stories, ready to give to the children. It's taken a lot longer than we thought to edit and make ready for publishing, and because of the higher hardback book. We wanted to get it right but it is now with the printers and we're hoping to get two copies back anytime which we can then make sure they're okay in time for the final print run which the target is before Christmas.

I think here we have a video of some games So every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday we have children here in the evening after school. During holiday time, like now, we bring them a bit earlier. That's from about two o'clock in the afternoon. And they begin by playing games for a couple of hours, as you see. I've no idea what that is. We're playing. And Henry's kindly done us a whistle-stop tour of a game's day, which is sped up so that to sort of whip around the kind of things that are going on. Obviously most of these children are coming from quite boring, monotonous lives. This is all quite an excitement. We do tend to get on these evenings as well other children from Muslim backgrounds as well, which is a good opportunity to connect with others who wouldn't come on a Sunday.

Then after the games we meet together in the church building and we have a short bible message. We are currently going through Christ in the Old Testament. and before that we were going through the book of Mark. So we just go through it slowly, picking out simple themes and just a 10-15 minute talk for the children before they get something to eat. This is just maize and beans. Quite a cheap way of eating, but it's fun. Oops. Now after the food comes wounds. James will be well aware that the children are frequently found with various fungal infections, infected wounds, so we tend to deal with that after the food as they are waiting to be taken home on the bus. Depending on the village it could be four or five trips to get them all home.

This isn't ongoing at the moment because we are in their long holiday but during term time we go to take an assembly in the local school on a Friday morning and we've been going through the life of Joseph, then we've done the I Am Sayings of Jesus. Again, some of these children, quite a lot of these children, don't come to Sunday school, so it's another different opportunity to speak to them of the truth.

Medical's ongoing, up and down in terms of how many we might get in a day. They first see Dale and his wife, kind of triages them, deals with various things and then passes over things that she is not able to deal with. I think, oh yeah, if you are squeamish, now would be the time to look aside. This girl was bitten by a crocodile I think this boy slashed himself with a slasher as he was cutting grass. These are the kind of wounds that you get quite frequently and invariably get infected.

There are lots of creatures around at the moment with the good rains, good crops, good harvest, good habitat. I took this picture today of these two scorpions. We had another crocodile added to our resident crocodile in the dam. This one was washed down with the rains. They did come and take this one away. The locals were pelting him with stones and logs. Thankfully he was rescued in time. Lots of snakes at the moment. Not all of them are venomous. We are trying to brush up on our understanding of snakes. so that we can know best how to deal with them. These two here aren't actually venomous. Some are.

We thought we'd just speak a little bit about Mwena village. So out of the four villages that we currently go to, Wena is currently the largest portion of the Sunday School, so out of the 600 or so, full number we tend to get, 200 of those would be from this village of Wena, who two years ago, none of them came. So they started coming, about 20 of them came on foot with a lady who's come ever since. and the number just grew and grew. Whenever you go to Wenler, they pop out of all the nooks and crannies and are very excited to see anyone.

Wenler is a real mixed bag. There's a lot of encouragement with the children, but there's also a lot of witchcraft and Islam, although it's folk Islam, and a lot of opposition, therefore, to what we are doing. This is their school, Wena school. The village is about, I would say maybe four or five miles away from Kiranzi, where we are. So they have their own school there, a bigger school than Kiranzi. but some of these children are now sponsored through the mission. Sponsorship is about roughly five or six US dollars per child per term, although this does vary somewhat. So we help children who are regular in Sunday school who have been attending

Here is a video some time ago I took at a funeral. These are some of the challenges that we face day-to-day and everyone, although when Henry asked this question last week in the Bible acknowledge it, but everyone is absolutely petrified of death and will attend any funeral on the basis that if they don't, they will die themselves, or if they do die, people won't come to their funeral, which to them is a terrible thing. But here is how it can look at a funeral. You have the sort of strange blend of could be Christian or Islamic music drowning out the cries, the wails of those who have been bereaved, which is quite unsettling really to see.

It's not playing for me, is it playing for you? Yeah, it's playing. Is that playing for you? It's not playing anything. Yeah, it's playing, yeah. Is that playing for you, James? Yeah, it was. It was? Yeah, it was. Okay. I might have got the wrong video. Can you hear someone preaching? Yeah, someone preaching, yeah. Ah, then I've got the wrong video.

Anyway, this man preaching, maybe I should explain. He's asking Satan to leave with all of his angels. He's also commanding that God, in the name of Jesus, prevents all the witches who are around the grave from affecting the one who has died or the family of the one who has died. That's the kind of thing that he's saying. So that's the kind of darkness that you might see in a funeral.

Another case here from Wena. So this is a girl from San think she's about nine years old and she had some kind of maggot infestation of her leg which seemed to have perhaps ruptured a blood vessel and she lost a lot of blood and when she came to us she was sort of fainting from from blood loss and was in a bad state.

But her dad absolutely refused, point blank, for her to go to hospital on the basis that this kind of sickness, he said, was not a sickness that the hospital could deal with and it needed spiritual intervention. And so we did the best we could. And thankfully, the Lord did hear prayer and she recovered. And she's now back in Sunday school.

But that is the kind of thing where, which you see a lot, a lot of lack of knowledge, a lot of pagan ideas with respect to diseases. There's certain diseases which they believe just cannot be treated. they can and they see forces of darkness and evil around every corner.

This other picture here shows you something of the implements that they use for witchcraft. They're perhaps a bit difficult to see but just under that table thing in the background there's various potions and hit any number of things to ward off evil spirits. These people are sought after generally in a hidden way. Most people don't do it too publicly but this person was not ashamed to display all of his chosen instruments.

Another challenge that we've come across in the last few months is these discos over and and people go around and try to make money out of these discos, play incredibly loud music overnight, literally overnight until six or so in the morning. There can be every week held every week. The main issue that we have is really the children who are attending these events and many of our youths are attending and being abused and we're seeing the consequences of that.

And so we are trying to... We have arranged a meeting with the MP, hopefully this Saturday, to ask for his support in trying to put an end to these children and youths going... It's technically illegal, but it's one of those things that happens all the time. It is very difficult though in this kind of context because the children learn from the adults and their parents are also there. So it is a case of staying at home alone or going out with them.

Other challenges that we are facing at the moment with vehicles. Obviously having these vehicles running all the time brings its own problems. Yeah, there's various, as Hen has seen in the last few weeks, various problems that spring up with the constant need for these vehicles. I think here on the left, you've got tires being brought alongside various spares in that bag.

That is it from me. I am sorry if that has gone a little bit long. I do not know if anyone has any questions. We are both here, so do feel free to ask us if there is anything perhaps you wanted to know about, or has not been touched, or any questions at all.