I (James) have recently updated our ministry site to use a fresh new theme and software platform. Also the newsletter layout has been adjusted for easier reading.

I'd love to know your thoughts on the new layout. Contact us if you'd like to get in touch.

Dear Friends,

Thank you for continuing to lift us up in prayer throughout this past year. Your partnership with us through financial support and prayer is a great encouragement and allows us to continue in this ministry. I thought you might be encouraged to hear how God has been using your gifts.

In 2022 your partnership helped 1491 people make decisions to follow Jesus through our mentoring program. Additionally, 243 new mentors were trained and began ministry responding to people who came to us looking for help.

Thank you for being a part of this amazing work that God is doing through P2C Digital Strategies. To learn more about the ministry visit p2cdigital.com

This is just a quick note today to let you know that the Power to Change head office location has officially moved from Langley to Abbotsford. If you have been sending donations by mail, please be sure to update your address book. The new address is:

Power to Change Ministries
30439 Great Northern Ave
Abbotsford, BC
Canada V2T 0J6

Thank you for remembering us in your prayer and giving!

Thank you for continuing to pray for and support our family in our work with Power to Change. These past few months James has been working quite a lot with several of our overseas partnerships including China and Poland. Please pray for open doors in both of these countries as teams on the ground are seeking to build evangelistic online ministries through a variety of strategies.

At P2C::Digital Strategies we continue to develop the online mentoring platform as well as providing evangelistic tools and strategies for partners around the world. Pray that God would continue to grant us wisdom in ministry direction and effectiveness in reaching people with the gospel message.

On a personal note, we have successfully sold our place in Chilliwack and moved to a home in Quesnel. Thank you for your prayers for us in this.

Dear Friends,

We are excited and encouraged to tell you that it looks like we have found a place to live! Thank you for praying!

We have made an offer on a house for sale in Quesnel and it has been accepted. We still need to do our due diligence to verify things like financing and getting an inspection done, but over all it looks very promising! We are very thankful that God is answering our (and your) prayers about this!

It is an older home and will need a few updates here and there, but over-all seems to be in decent condition and shouldn't require huge up-front expenses to make it move-in ready. We will find out if there are major issues we haven't noticed once the inspection has been completed.

Thank you so much for praying for us in this. It's been quite a journey over the past several months, first trying to sell our place, then needing to find a place to buy and sorting out movers and such. We're really glad to be able to finally see the big pieces falling into place.

Please continue to pray that everything goes smoothly from here on out. We know there are still a myriad of details to get sorted out.

We will try to keep you informed as things progress.

James & Carolanne, Ben & Julia

Dear CHC friends. Thank you for continuing to pray for us. We really appreciate all the folks who have been so faithful to stand with us in prayer and financial support in this ministry. Thank you for your encouragement and generosity.

The P2C::Digital Strategies ministry is currently developing partnerships in several other countries to translate and contextualize the work we have done into their own cultures and languages. We're excited to be working right now with a ministry in the Czech Republic, having just recently finished working with a similar ministry in Slovakia.

We also continue to build our online mentoring platform in order to help our online missionaries here and around the world be even more effective in reaching their world for Christ.

Please continue to pray for more good technically minded staff to join our team. Please pray also for strength, encouragement and unity for our team.

Thank you for praying for us during this time. Adjusting to Covid has been hard on a lot of people and businesses. Our ministry (P2C: Digital Strategies) has been playing a key role in helping other ministries and teams around the world start doing more online evangelism and discipleship. We continue to have new partners starting to use our online mentoring platform in several new languages to reach people in their areas of the world.

Please pray for our Digital Strategies team as we help these other partners move their ministries to more of an online focus. Please also pray for God's provision for our team as many of us are supported by individuals and churches who are themselves going through this hard time and funds can be tight.

Thank you!
James W

Dear Friends,

Thank you again for your continued prayer and support of us in the ministry during this time. This is a complicated season for many, us included. Please continue to pray for the folks who come to our websites looking for answers and hope. These days more than ever people are struggling to understand their world and we have the privilege of offering them hope in Jesus!

These days I (James) am doing quite a bit more managing people rather than programming. There are now several full and part-time staff and volunteers who report to me. We work together to maximize the ministry effectiveness of the overall team. We do this by creating and improving tools that our front-line missionaries and partners can use in ministry. By doing so we get to be a crucial part of the greater vision: To help people know Jesus!

Thank you for keeping us in your prayers and for your financial support. Please continue to pray for the over-all team as well as us personally as we navigate ministry in these strange times.

This post is a bit of shameless promotion, but might also be a helpful recommendation for one of you.

Recently, we decided to shop around for a new cellphone plan for Carolanne. We wanted something cheap that let her use her own phone and not be locked into a long, expensive plan.

We found Public Mobile. They run on a large network across Canada (Telus I think) and have great budget-friendly plans. Right now they're offering a $10 credit to you and a bonus to us if you use our referral code. MY43ZO
https://www.publicmobile.ca/en/bc/plans

You can help us out and get a $10 credit by using our referral code if you sign up! MY43ZO

We have found the plan and coverage to be quite good! And very budget-friendly.

For $15/mo (their starter plan) you get:

• No need for a yearly contract
• 100 Canadian outgoing call minutes
• Unlimited incoming minutes
• Unlimited text and picture messaging
• and 250mb data if you sign up for auto-pay

You can also reduce your bill by $2/mo by using auto-pay. (which is quite convenient anyway) AND you can reduce your bill by another $1/mo for each person you refer, which is what we are doing here. But we wouldn't be recommending them if we weren't happy with the plan.

So if you're looking for an inexpensive but decent cell plan, these ones are quite good. No big multi-year contract to sign. Low prices. Decent service. Lots of included features. We recommend you check them out. And if you use our referral code you'll get a $10 credit and you'll help us out too!

https://www.publicmobile.ca/en/bc/plans with code: MY43ZO

In this time of social distancing, many people are searching for ways to connect by video conferencing and Zoom.us has become one of the popular choices. However, lately there have also been revelations that Zoom security is a huge problem.

I have used Zoom for quite a while now, being part of a mostly web based team, and so I was both concerned and curious about the truth behind these bombshells.

I decided to do some research on my own and these are my personal opinions and understanding of the situation.

The China Connection

One area people have been REALLY concerned about is that the Chinese are stealing all our data and personal information through Zoom.

As far as I can tell, the likelihood of this being the case is pretty low. YES there is (was?) a connection to China in that previously in some very specific situations when the Zoom platform got overloaded, they rerouted the datastream through their datacenters located in China. This does NOT mean that the Zoom app was stealing your personal information and sending it to the Chinese authorities. What it DOES mean is that there is a very remote possibility that some Chinese authority might be able to watch you talk to your grandkids on Zoom. BUT that's only if they pressured the Zoom company to hand over the encryption keys and had tied in to the Zoom data stream for your conference. AND (I think) they would have had to show up as another participant in the meeting. (not sure on that one)

Suffice to say though, the Chinese authorities aren't stealing your credit card numbers and banking information through the Zoom app. (though it's entirely possible they could do it in other ways hitting you through far more vulnerable areas)

The Encryption Problem

They say the connection isn't encrypted. Isn't that bad?

Again, as far as I can tell, the key phrase here is "end-to-end encryption". Yes, as far as I can tell, the Zoom connection IS encrypted. However, it's not encrypted without gap all the way from you to your grandchild. Rather, it is encrypted between your computer and the Zoom server. And then also encrypted between your grandchild's computer and the Zoom server. Zoom holds the encryption keys to control the encrypted connection.

The ZoomBombing

This actually IS a problem, but more related to how people have been using Zoom, rather than an issue with Zoom itself. (ok, there are issues there too, but let me explain)

Zoom basically acts like a conference center. Anyone with the address could potentially come to the conference. The problem is, for most of the conferences, there was no receptionist (bouncer) at the door. So, people could just drive by, see that there was a conference, come on in and cause problems.

Zoom has fixed this issue recently by adding passwords to the rooms by default. So now you have to know the password to come into the conference.

The Conclusion

So, these are the issues I've identified so far. There may be others. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

For myself, I'm not going to stop using Zoom. It's a very handy tool with very good video capacity for both small coding sessions as well as large scale conferences.

Of course, I'm not handling huge trade secrets or discussing the overthrow of govt's. I just want to talk to my coworkers and get work done together.