Ping an! That's a Chinese greeting that means “peace.” We're back from Taiwan after a marathon 40 day outreach and have many stories to tell.
Our focus on this outreach was different from other years. We invested much more time in equipping the local church youth for ministry than doing large scale evangelism as we usually do. We saw this as a means of multiplying our efforts. Rather than our team ministering in one place at one time, the teams we trained were equipped go to many places at once.
Since school was out while we were there, we held many youth camps and seminars for teenagers. A two day seminar on youth in leadership brought together about 60 key kids from youth groups in the capital, and inspired many to attend the large Mega Camp, which brought together over 200 Malaysian, British, Australian, Singaporean, American and Japanese as well as Chinese kids and leaders. After this week long camp the kids went out with their youth groups on mission outreaches all over Taiwan and into mainland China. Then the key pastors in the city called a meeting with Dale Kauffman, founder and director of King's Kids International and the KK Taiwan leaders to ask how they could continue to work with King's Kids: they had seen the fruit and enthusiasm in the kids' lives. This is exactly the result the Taiwanese leaders were hoping to achieve.
The camps were an opportunity to impart our life to many kids. We also held English language training camps as a means of friendship evangelism and saw a great response. Numerous Taiwanese kids are emailing us with questions about the Lord in broken English and showing a desire to keep in touch. The El Paso kids taught their peers how to develop a genuine relationship with the Lord, have daily devotional time, what worship is all about, how to use music and drama in evangelism and other topics. Being leaders was a stretch for them and the schedule was exhausting, but the team worked together well and did a great job.
In 1993 we began working with Pastor Jose Padilla who lives out in the desert off the Casas Grandes Highway in Juarez. He believed God was leading him to begin Christian School in his area. At the time there was no electricity running water, churches or schools. The people were living in cardboard shacks.
Pastor Padilla's grown children helped develop and teach in the school. They began teaching 11 students in a small pallet shack. His first block building was a chapel where the children were taught to pray and worship God.
Outreach teams from King's Kids began helping with building projects during spring br