NEIGHBORHOOD KIDS CLUB -- SUMMER 2000
Summer with Neighborhood Ministries

Dear Partners in Prayer,

We deeply appreciate you and your standing alongside us.

Kids Club
This coming Monday begins Kids Club #14. For almost a decade and a half N.M. has watched this two-week summer day camp grow from 40 kids in a park, to hundreds each year. This summer's 375 kids will experience some of the greatest memories of their year: they will take awesome trips, hear fabulous Bible stories; they will learn woodworking skills, be taught to dance or cook, be entertained by funny skits every morning and the greatest hit of the day will be worshipping the Lord. They will memorize Bible verses, win prizes, go swimming, participate in Mall crawls, visit museums, and go to one of the Valleys most majestic lakes all day and have boat rides there. The last day is a blow out carnival, testimonies of changed lives, an end of the camp slide show and this year's Kids Club T-shirt for all.

The children
Remember that the children of N.M. come from the roughest neighborhoods in Phoenix. For veteran kids clubbers, they have waited all year for our summer together, and for the uninitiated they will leave knowing the love of God with an experience that cannot be forgotten.

The work crew
Sixty-five urban and suburban young people (ages 16-30) come away from home for two weeks, move in together to form family and team, with one goal: To love inner-city children to Christ, to be Jesus with skin on. They will work harder and longer than most of us can imagine, yet their work will bear fruit as they will grasp the ways in which God wants to use them to influence and impact the next generation. About ¼ of this year's team are young people who came to Christ through Kids Club or who have grown up in N.M. These articulate leaders can describe the power of this program having experienced it themselves, and the longing they have had for many years to be the next leaders. I hope to share some of their stories as this Kids Club unfolds.

Prayer
Imagine the spiritual warfare we come to expect, and then experience as the program begins. Many homes don't have the daily witness of the Holy Spirit, instead there is death and abuse. Children who come from these homes and become new found worshippers return home humming, shouting, and dancing to the tunes of the day. They tell mom and others about Jesus and his love. Some tell us the secrets of the darkness they privately know, looking for prayer and for help. What happens next is predictable, our buses break down, work crew gets the collective flu, tempers flare, fragile relationships take a beating and almost every conceivable machine stops functioning. We know all these things by experience and so would ask you to intercede for us for the next 14 or 15 days.

Please Pray for protection, for safety (especially at the lake, which is June 30 and especially for our vehicles), for wisdom to counsel broken children, for discernment in discipline and in reckoning with dark forces, for love to increase for the children and for each other, for peace to be present in the noise and fun. The thousands of daily details will be handled by an administration team, I know they would appreciate special prayer, as they are the glue that keeps things together. Pray for our funding - this program has become expensive over the years.

Will you especially pray for our precious friends, The New Beginnings Community Church and their pastor Eli Marez, as they are our hosts this summer. These dear people are not only enthusiastically welcoming us, they hope one day soon to launch their own kids outreach ministries. We are planning on leaving 30-50 kids with them from their neighborhood after this summer's ministry to become the core group for their future ministries. For those of you in Phoenix, we will be at 67th Ave, just south of Indian School if you would like to visit.

I will stop from time to time in the next two weeks and give you snap shots of this summer's Kids Club. God Bless you friends.

Love,
Kit