Dear Friends,
We wanted to update you on some of the thing we have going on this summer. Alex (4 1/2) attends summer school 3 times a week during the day and some local church VBS at night. He is a very social child and loves to make new friends wherever he goes. Krista has been doing some freelance editing projects and I have been finishing a seminary course, doing some computer work and some traveling. I recently got to go to Boston on assignment with eDOT (the ministry we are going to be a part of in Europe) to learn more about how to more effectively use computer learning centers which are a part of our ministry. Then I turned around and went on our church’s Middle School summer mission trip to The Pittsburgh Project, an organization that works in the inner city of Pittsburgh doing home repairs.

The Pittsburgh Project is a wonderful faith based organization that does a lot to help those in need in their area. They have been slowly expanding over the past 20 years (I have been going up there most summers since 1998) and their most recent expansion was the purchase of an old Catholic church. Each night over 260 teens and leaders met in this sanctuary that was modeled in the classic cathedral architecture similar to all the great cathedrals throughout Europe. One night I was looking around while everyone was singing and thought about the people that had sold the property to the Pittsburgh Project. I wondered if they had known that the building was still going to be a house of worship. Many of the churches and cathedrals sold throughout Europe have now become apartments, restaurants, dance clubs, or just plain empty except for the occasional tourist.

I also looked around at all the teens and thought that if this group were in Sarajevo, Bosnia (population just under half a million), then according to the statistics, a majority of all the evangelical Christians in that city would have been in one room. Where we live in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA there are just over half a million in the city proper, but yet look at all the churches on every corner and we know that it would take a lot more than one sanctuary to hold all the Christians in Charlotte.

Please pray for the Christians that are in Europe who are diligently trying to help others come to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The Lord wants these Churches to multiply and flourish and not to become a place where God is forgotten.

In His Service,
Krista, Alex, and Courtney
www.RoesGarden.com