Josiah's Kids Clubs
The story of the child King Josiah can be found in II Kings 22 and 23. Josiah was only a boy when he was crowned king, but the bible says that he was raised to follow God just like David did, and so did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. When a teenager, he sent his people to go and repair the place of worship, the temple; and while doing that they found a forgotten copy of the laws of God, the bible. Josiah, when he read the bible, was horrified at what his people had done in disobedience to Gods law, and started reforming his country and sharing the book of the law so that his people would follow God's law.
We started The Josiahs Kids Clubs with a twofold purpose...
To reach the children at a young age, were the word of God can be grounded in their lives and help them to be an example in their communities, their homes and their churches, and grow up to be the future christian community that will reach Ecuador with the gospel.
The second purpose is our ministry mission: Our work is to be teaching and assisting the local churches and leadership so that they can do the teaching and evangelism, as well as teaching the churches on how to get involved in their communities...the big need here, as far as discipleship, evangelism, the orphans, the poverty, the prostitutes, and everything else, is that if the Christian church would get involved in being the hands and feet of Christ here, would be trained in how to go about that, we could really make some headway. Thats the goal that we are working towards, training the Ecuadorian church that they are supposed to do these things, and not depend on missionaries or organizations or the government to do it. Through children and youth ministry, they can not only reach the entire family, but also change their entire community and its future.
We are accomplishing this by starting the first club in our house on Fridays, were we have been gathering since the first week of September. Here in Shell, we have children that are our neighbors, and the children of a number of the workers at Casa de Fe. We also will be holding some of our Sunday School workshops here, so as to train and show the teachers how we work with the children.
There are also two more clubs about to be launched close by, and we will let you know how that goes!!
How the clubs are set up varies by community, church, or city; but we always have it split up into different age groups, so that the teaching can be on a level that everyone can understand.
In some places the kids clubs are on a Saturday afternoon, in other communities a couple of days during the week right after school, were the children are provided with a meal, and also assistance with their homework.
