May 2020 Latvia, Australia, Belarus, Iran, Cuba, Apps
We strongly recommend you download the
"Bible Companion" app, from where you can access
Carelinks messages, daily Bible readings,
Bible Basics, commentary on every verse of the Bible and audio exhortations on every chapter of the Bible.
For Android / Google Play at
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.carelinks.bc and on the App Store for Apple / iOS at
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bible-companion/id1475914490 You can see the list of exhortations at
http://christadelphia.net/audio.htm We are continuing our online breaking of bread on Facebook on Sundays at 10:00 a.m. GMT, on our
Carelinks Ministries Facebook page. And there is an Australian online breaking of bread on Tuesday evenings Australian time using PalTalk.
APPS This week we released the
Bible Companion app in French, Spanish and Farsi (Persian). You can download them as follows; please share them around. And even if you don't speak those languages, you could download them, give us a 5 star rating, and then delete the app off your phone. This greatly helps our visibility in the stores:
In Spanish: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=es.carelinks.bc In French: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.carelinks.bc In Farsi (Persian): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fa.carelinks.bc
Already downloads in those languages are in total around 35,000. Worldwide. Including Hispanic workers in the province of Nunavut in Arctic Canada, French speakers in Northern Territories , Australia- and many other such scattered folks. Over 1,000 downloads of the French app from Quebec, Canada. This is in addition to nearly 200,000 downloads in English and Russian.
This is surely the greatest global expansion of the Truth's doctrines which there has ever been. And requests for literature, people answering
Bible Basics questions, asking questions... are coming in constantly.
A big thank you to all who worked and donated to enable this. Fine brothers like Phil Martin in Hereford, UK... slaving away under quarantine conditions, French dictionary in hand, to do the final French app audios... and so many others, who in the obscurity of their lives have stepped up to this great work under God's good hand:
We mentioned last week how the beta testers of the Spanish app observed that the
Bible Basics audios were read (by brother Pedro) with a strong Cuban accent. Just as well, under God's providential hand-
Cuba only allows Android apps, which don't offer anything for sale and are without ads.
We meet those requirements. And so we are now becoming one of the most popular Bible apps in Cuba, an area which only had limited access to the true Gospel until recent times. Interesting many of the downloads are in the middle of the night Cuba time, this apparently is when the internet is fastest in Cuba, internet speed is very low there apparently. Seems folks get online in the middle of the night if they want to download anything.
According to Wikipedia:
- Cuba is listed as "not free" in the Freedom on the Net 2018 report from Freedom House, with an overall score of 79 out of 100 where 100 is the least free.This is the fifth highest score out of the 65 countries ranked, below China, Iran, Syria, and Ethiopia. Cuba has been listed as "not free" each year since the reports started in 2009.
- Cuba has been listed as an "Internet Enemy" by Reporters Without Borders since the list was created in 2006.
Seems from what a Cuban brother in USA says that the availability of our app means it has been manually reviewed and passed by the Committee which regulates such things.
And Iran seeks to block access to Christian apps. There is a religious police whose job it is to stop folks downloading such material in Persian language. So far, we have been able to advertise the Persian app on Google in Iran.
We've given it what we can financially, as this may well be a very limited window of opportunity until the authorities clamp down on it. So far so good, and over 3,000 people within Iran have downloaded the app, along with several hundred in Afghanistan. There is no way we could otherwise have generated this interest in those difficult areas. We've had calls and contact from various underground believers there, which seemed genuine enough.
So we are open to your donations to enable all the advertising of the app to continue in these otherwise inaccessible areas. LATVIA We continue our feeding work, with continued high attendance at the soup kitchen.
We're also buying food for our growing number of Asian brothers and sisters, whose conversion arose from our English language church. They're all in similar situations- doing their degrees in Riga because it's the cheapest EU recognized place for foreign students, their parents are mainly shopkeepers or small business people, and the lockdown means they can't send funds to their student children, nor can the students get back home as transport is closed down.
Some of the sisters are really quite ill, having only eaten rice for weeks. This is a niche of need largely overlooked. We have had some wonderful sessions with them and are pleased to report the baptism of SONAM:
AUSTRALIA After a mammoth long Skype discussion, we were able to hear the good confession of DORIS and witness her self baptism in Queensland. She has truly come to understand the Lord and His ways in this world. We did it from our end at the hall in Riga, whilst the soup kitchen feeding was in session, so Doris was able to 'see' the work going on.
She later wrote:
"My heartfelt thanks to you for Baptizing me into Christ on Tuesday :) It was my greatest most profound experience in this life! I rested awhile afterwards basking in Peace slept a good few hours. You have blessed me greatly with your superb Pastoral Care.
A wonderful gift...Thank you for sharing the work you do with me - best soup kitchen I've ever seen" BELARUS As a direct result of Google ads advertising, SERGEJ contacted us and became very persuaded of the Truth. After many chats with Maxim and Duncan, we were delighted to witness his self baptism. He's a wonderful man, who has had a hard and unusual life, which resulted in him marrying a woman who is an invalid. For some years now he has cared for her constantly, and they have travelled internationally talking about the possibilities of invalids marrying non-invalids.
He is devoted to her and shows a great example of true self-sacrificial love. Through those experiences he became disillusioned with the 'health and wealth' gospel, as well as Judaism, and looked instead for simple, true Biblical Christianity based on true grace- and so the Lord led him to us.
Here are some photos of Sergej and his wife from when they were in Judaism to how they are now:
PRAYER POINTS: - For continued opportunity to advertise the apps in Cuba and Iran
- For those considering self baptism in difficult domestic circumstances
- For those recently baptized
- For us to be able to continue advertising the app, and for the huge numbers of people worldwide [well over 100,000] now seriously considering our teachings
With love from your brothers and sisters of Carelinks