Photoserver | photo 7 of 97 | Meece 50th Anniversary

Some folk are having trouble reaching the links. Try this one for our 50th celebration.

http://photoserver.zenfolio.com/p67913169/slideshow

Fifty Years Together

Sunday afternoon, July 20, Greta and I, along with family and friends, celebrated our 50th Wedding Anniversary. The actual date is July 18, but we had the party Sunday.
It all began like this (left) in Greta's home church in Pine Flats, Pennsylvania on July 18, 1958. We were both 20 years old, needing our parents permission to get married. At the time we were both students at Kentucky Christian College in Grayson, Kentucky. The school allowed wives of students to attend the college tuition free, so it was to our advantage to be married during school. I was the preacher for two small churches near Owingsville, Kentucky.
During our 50 years together we have three children and five grandchildren. Only Jackie Ralston, our oldest granddaughter was not able to attend the celebration as she and her husband Micah had only recently returned from their Honeymoon and were getting settled into married life. It was great to have the rest of our family (below) with us Sunday.
We have served churches in Kentucky, Illinois and Missouri and worked as missionaries for 23 years in Liberia and Ivory Coast, West Africa. After retiring from the mission field, we joined Team Expansion, a mission sending agency in Louisville, KY and serve as Field Coordinators and Member Care providers for mission teams in Europe and Africa.
In addition to our own immediate family, we were joined by Greta's brothers, sisters and nieces from Pennsylvania and Alabama and several of my extended family from around Kentucky.
I have put together the pictures that Mark took during the celebration. You can view the "slideshow" at this link.

http://photoserver.zenfolio.com/p67913169/slideshow

Pictures of Africa Trip

It has taken longer than I would like to arrange the pictures we took on our Africa trip so that people could view them. We would love for our friends to enjoy them. Click on the following link or copy and paste (the safest way) the link into your internet browser and enjoy. Click on the "slideshow link" and let your mouse pointer hover over the little dialogue box on the lower right to see the captions.

http://photoserver.zenfolio.com/p101537956/

Back To Africa

Friday, May 23, Greta and I returned from a three week trip back to West Africa. It was Greta's first trip back since we left in 2002 and my 4th. Our trip was divided into 3 parts.
First we actually drove in a pick-up truck with no AC from Accra, Ghana to Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire - 12 hours and about 600 kms. The drive was long, hot and challenging, but we drove by some beautiful country. In some areas, the road is along the coast with beautiful views of the Atlantic Ocean. Other parts of the road are less attractive and crowded with truck and "Tro-Tro" (busses) traffic. We found that the things have not changed much since we lived there except that there are a lot more people and many more vehicles on the roads. In Ghana, much of the road has actually been repaved and/or improved a lot since the last time we made this trip. If I remember correctly, we have made the same trip at least a dozen times over the past 10 to 12 years.
Abidjan has changed a lot. Since we left there has been a war and the country is still largely divided between the Muslim north and the Christian/Anamist (African religions) in the south. The French army, in conjunction with the United Nations has been keeping the peace. Most of the missionaries we knew have left the country and many others havemoved away as well. We visited our co-workers there, missionaries from Liberia, Roujee and Juliet Morris. Roujee actually continues to oversee the mission work Greta and I were doing during our 13 years in Côte d'Ivoire.
One day we visited church leadership training classes on the Island of Vridi. The island is in the harbor area and requires a 15 minute boat ride through the harbor. There are several churches and three leadership training classes on Vridi and another island, Boulay, which is near by. We were encouraged to see the churches still functioning well on their own and the leadership training classes still going on under local leadership. We were able to visit with the leaders and some students on Vridi. We did find that one of the pastors of the church on Vridi was very ill and had gone to Ghana to get medical treatment. Most of the people living on the islands are fishermen who come over from Ghana to fish the seas around Abidjan. Ivorian fishermen are afraid to go to sea, so they have a have made a mutually beneficially agreement - Ivorians fish the lagoons and the Ghanians go out to sea. The pastor's name is Baidoe and he would appreciate your prayers as he tries to deal with high blood pressure where medical treatment is less than the best to say the least.

Pictures:
Top left - The "Gold Coast of West Africa"
Center right - The Morrises and Meeces: Roujee, Juliet, Greta, Easton and Wayne
Center left - A fishing boat - made of a hollowed out log with boards added to the sides. The boats are usually powered by outboard motors mounted on the side.
Bottom right - Church leaders and students with Roujee Morris at the right

How much do you know about world missions?

I ran across these facts in a letter from the International Bulletin of Mission Research and through people might be interested in these not so trivial facts.

1. There is a total of 37,000 different church denominations worldwide.
2. Of the 6.6 million people currently living in the world about 31.4 % or 2.2 billion people call themselves "Christian".
3. About 44% of Christians are "white" and 56% are "non-white".
4. There are about 259 million evangelical Christians.
5. Some portion of the Bible has been translated into 2,238 of the worlds languages.
6. There are 4.4 million women in full-time Christian ministry serving around the world.
7. There 443,000 foreign Christian missionaries from 4340 agencies serving around the world.
8. The countries that receive the greatest number of foreign missionaries are: U.S.A. - 35,100, Brazil - 26,400, Russian - 20,100, France - 16,900, Britain - 15,800, D.R Congo - 15,800.
9. There are almost 19,000 Africans serving as foreign missionaries on other continents.

Most people think of the church being centered in Europe and America, but in reality there are more now Christians in Africa, India and Asia than Europe and America. As an example of how Christianity is growing in Africa, I recently received a report from Ghana that more that 1200 people attended the Easter Convention of the Fellowship of Christian Churches of Ghana in Salaga, Ghana, a small town in the north-eastern region of Ghana. It is so remote that many people traveled more than 16 hours to reach the site of the convention. Great things are happening in the church throughout the world.

An Era Passes in Liberia

This week I received the news of the passing of James W. Morgan in Buchanan, Liberia. James was one of the founding members of our mission to Liberia when Greta and I first went there in 1971. He was a co-founder of Liberia Christian High School, The Christian Education Foundation of Liberia and later one of the main leaders of the Christian Churches of Liberia. He came to the States in the late 1970s to study at Milligan College in Tennessee and returned to Liberia to continue his life work. He was one of the founders of the Liberia Evangelistic mission and has led in the start of several new churches as well as continued to work in Christian Education at many levels. During the Liberian civil war he became a target for attack and persecution by a group of rebels. He was held prisoner for some time and made to work as a slave on a rebel controlled farm. By God's grace he was set free and spent several months as a refugee in Ivory Coast.
James was also a member of the board of the Christian Leadership Training Institute, headquartered in Accra, Ghana. The Institute has Christian leadership training classes currently running in Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria. James was one of the Liberia representatives on the board. The picture above was taken in Accra, Ghana during an Institute meeting in 2005. It is the last time I saw him in person. James is standing between two of his daughters who were living in Ghana at the time. Danny Buegar is next to me and Freeman Wesseh on the right.
James was a true pioneer and faithful preacher of the gospel, but his heart was in teaching. He taught English and Math in Liberia Christian High School for almost 40 years. Before coming to Buchanan, he had been the principal of the school in his home village of Zondo, Grand Bassa County, Liberia. He liked to say, "I am a numbers man." But that was not totally true. He was a man of The Book. He loved to preach, and he had preached in the Buchanan Christian Church Sunday morning the day before he died suddenly on Monday, March 3, 2008. James did not know his true birthday or exactly how old he was. He told me that he had taken the day of his baptism into Christ as his birth date. From what I remember of what he told me, I believe he was about 75 years old.
James was also a good friend and a wise adviser for Greta and me as we worked in Liberia as young, green missionaries. We have lost a good friend and the people of Liberia have lost a great Christian leader. The following verse comes to mind, and for Liberia it is certainly true.
"Do you not realize that a prince and a great man has fallen in Israel this day?" 2 Samuel 3:38

Prayer

I received a note today from one of our missionaries in Ancona, Italy. The team is planning a two day (48 hour) prayer event where the team invites the local community (churches, missionaries, and even “irreligious” Catholics) to come to a prayer room for one hour during this 48 hour period give an hour of their cluttered lives to prayer. Josh admits that like many of us, that prayer to him is an “awkward” thing.

The thing that is awkward to us is accepting the Biblical doctrine of prayer. The Bible clearly teaches that there are things that God cannot/will not do unless we pray. As Jesus said, “You have not because you ask not.” Some of us think that in prayer we align ourselves with the will of God, “Thy will be done”. In other words we think that prayer changes us, not so much that prayer changes things.

However, in prayer, like in many other things, God is asking us to join Him as partners in his purposes. God,for example, offers salvation to the world and asks us to be partners with him in the “Ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18) and has sent us into the world to preach the gospel to every creature (Matt. 28:19).

E. Stanley Jones wrote, “For in prayer you align yourself to the purposes and power of God, and He is able to do things that though you He couldn’t otherwise do. For this is an open universe, where some things are left open, contingent upon our doing them. If we do not do them, they will never be done. So God has left certain things to prayer—things which will never be done except we pray.”