James & Carolanne

What are the major hurdles, from your perspective, that will need God's divine enabling and overcoming in order for you to reach your ministry objectives? What are these objectives?

Our position within the Power to Change ministry is actually a fairly unique one.  What I mean is that as missionaries on the Internet, we are not working in a traditional missionary type of environment.  We are not somewhere far off overseas serving the Lord in a foreign country or spending months and years learning new languages.  We are not able to send back pictures of ourselves posing with the leaders of the local church we planted or show slideshows of our children playing with local natives or eating weird foreign foods.

In reality, we may actually shop at the same supermarket you do and stop at the same local restaurants you enjoy.  If we posed for pictures with our local church leaders, you might recognise them as your own pastors, and even though Chilliwack may seem distant to some, it's actually not that far.  Our children may even (one day) attend the same schools that yours do.

These are probably the cause of some of our biggest personal hurdles.  We feel that generally, it is very difficult for people to really come to an understanding of how we are "missionaries" and why we need financial support.  After all, we're in North America, the land of freedom and french fries.  Why doesn't James just "go get a job"?

The difficulty is, how do we explain to potential supporters and prayer partners that we help to reach people around the world with the message of God's love for them.  How do we communicate that some of our sites are able to reach people in lands that traditional missionaries have a really hard time getting to?  How do we share all the stories of teens and youth pouring their hearts out to us with things they might never share even with their own families.  How do we help people visualise what the numbers look like?  Just this last August, we were able to share the gospel with around 44,000 people and we saw 1008 people tell us that they had accepted Christ.  That's 32 people every day of the month!

So how can you pray for us?  Please pray for all of us at TruthMedia that we would have the opportunity and ability to share the impact of this ministry effectively with those who need to hear it.  Many of the staff who serve with us (as well as the ministry itself) are quite low on funding or support.  Pray that God would lay the need on the right people's hearts.  Pray also for the new believers as we try to help them grow in their faith.  Pray for the 700+ email mentors who generously volunteer their time to serve on the front lines helping us in this work.  And finally, please pray for Carolanne and I, that God would continue to guide us in the decisions we make regarding the ministry and that He would provide for our needs.

Thank you very much,

James & Carolanne Warkentin