Uncategorized

Good Morning Everyone,

So much has been going on here in Bolivia, I really can’t seem to find the time to sit down and write it all out! Right now we’re in the airport in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, waiting for our connecting flight to Buenos Aires, Argentina. We’re heading to Buenos Aires with Norah to attend a Leadership Conference there, with Gustavo and Susana Rossi, their pastors and several others. There is a group of about 12 leaders from our church who are traveling now, most of them by land. Norah and I decided to fly, because that trip by land is a minimum of 48 hours, sometimes longer.

Since our last letter, so many things have been going on here. The church is just booming. Really, since the beginning of this year quite a few things have come together to get things back in order in the church, and now we are beginning to see the fruits. In February we had a large leadership retreat. In that retreat, God literally challenged us to stop talking about and to get back to doing the work that he has called us to do. In March, we did a huge reorganization in the leadership in the church. We moved up quite a few of the most fruitful leaders so that they would form part of our main leadership group. In April we had our annual cell church conference, which was great for all of us. In June we began what we called the “Prodigal Month”, where we went out and found so many of those who had been with us before, but had later fallen away. That continued up through the most part of July. We had many people return to the Lord, and at the same time we hay many more come to the Lord during all of those activities.

This past month, we have freed our group of leaders to start doing their own Encounter Retreats. Since, things have been so active in the church that it’s hard to keep up, trying to figure out all that is going on! Over the past 4 weeks, we have had 9 Encounter Retreats! It’s been quite exciting.

Our family is doing very well. Derrick is now crawling all over the place, he runs around in a walker well, and can even walk some on his own holding on to things. He seems to be developing very well. Jordan’s speech continues to improve. He speaks better Spanish than English right now, but we’re working on teaching him both. He understands both just fine.

Norah and I are traveling alone now. Norah’s sister, Rosemary, along with a girl who we trust from the church in Sucre are taking care of the kids. It’s hard leaving the kids… especially Derrick, but I think that it’s good for all of us. It’s good for me and Norah, just so we can get a few days to be away from them, and have some quality time together. I also think that it’s good for the kids. They (at least Erynn & Jordan) seem to adapt to change quite well. It helps them not be so attached to us all of the time.

Please keep us in your prayers. We appreciate your prayers so much. We also thank all of those who have been so faithful to God and good to us in sending gifts to help us continue forward. We’re doing much better now, although we still regularly have more expenditures than monthly income. We just ask that you would pray for us, and if God puts it on your heart, please support us financially in any way that you can.

May God bless you richly. We thank God for your lives, and pray for you always. Write us if you can!

Love,

Jason, Norah, Erynn, Jordan & Derrick Skipper

Hello Everyone!

I’ll tell you, I really need to figure out WHY I get so far behind on these updates! I’m developing a theory, but I’m not 100% sure… I think that we have so many BIG things going on, that I want to give those BIG things justice by writing a lot about them, but since I want to do it well, and I never have enough time to do a good article on them, I just put it off until I do have time. Of course there NEVER is enough time. I decided this evening to just make some time. I have so many things to do, but hey… this is very important too!

This will be pretty long, so I’ll try to divide it up into sections and add quite a few pictures, that way it should be a little bit easier to read.

Third International Cell-Church Conference… Sucre, Bolivia 2008

Way back in April, from April 24-26th, we held our 3rd annual Cell-Church Conference. Pastors Gustavo and Susana Rossi and Sebastian Carnival, all from the mega-church “Catedral de la Fe” (Faith Cathedral) in Buenos Aires, Argentina came in for the conference. We had pastors and congregations from over half of Bolivia, plus the assistance of missionaries from Brazil, Venezuela and the United States (I’m NOT counting myself). This year we held the conference in our own church building, which holds about 350 people well seated.

The conference went very well. The theme was “From The Inside Out”. The classes and sermons were geared towards pastors and cell leaders, helping us all understand that success in the conquest of our city and country is for everyone who believes, not just for a select few. God will and does use those who believe and are willing to give their all towards that cause.

We’ve had several churches from other parts of Bolivia come to our conference over the past several years. One church, from Santa Cruz, who has taken us as their model church, began with the cell vision last year after our conference. We’ve been monitoring them, and one of our disciples, Luis Fernando Negrón has traveled there to help them several times over the past year. They came this year with an amazing testimony. In 1 year of work with cells, they now have 30 small groups! Wow.

One of the most important aspects of the conference was that God moved in an awesome way. His presence was so evident, and we feel that God did something supernatural during the conference. The leaders from our church came out of the conference with such a different way of looking at the ministry, and we are beginning to experience once again the enthusiasm, power and revival that has characterized our growth over the past several years.

Here are some very small pictures from the conference. To see them in a much higher resolution, just click on the picture itself.

Travels – Trips to Cochabamba and La Paz(2x)

The day after our conference, we drove to Cochabamba for “Carachipampa Christian School’s Field Days”. Erynn’s school is an extension of an English school in Cochabamba, and they require that all students attend the Cochabamba school for a week each year. The group in Sucre have the custom of going for what they call “Field Days”. They have all types of running, jumping, ball throw and more sports, and each student competes with other their age and sex. Erynn was in the 7 & 8 year old girls group with about 20 other students. She participated in 6 events. The 100 meter dash, the 200, 400 & 800 meter runs, the standing long jump and the ball throw. She is quite a runner! She won the 200, 400 & 800 meter races. The longer the race, the easier she won. She’s not the fastest girl out there, but she just keeps going, and everyone else just falls behind. She won the 1st place prize for her age group, winning the most amount of points for her team from her group. Needless to say, she was VERY happy. Here’s a few pictures of Erynn there in Cochabamba… (Actually, the last one is in Potosí a few days ago… but it’s a nice picture so I added it in there too. )

La Paz

After 5 days in Cochabamba, we traveled to La Paz for two main things. One, to fill out papers and apply for Derrick’s U.S. Birth Certificate and Passport, which wasn’t too hard to do. We should be getting them in the mail within a few days. We also had to do some medical tests on Jordan.

Jordan’s Tests

Jordan is now 4 1/2 years old, and he is not talking well at all. For quite awhile we hoped that he was just a late talker, but it has become obvious that he has some sort of problem in that area. We’ve checked some things out in Sucre, but honestly there is very little knowledge or help from doctors here.

So we did quite a lot of tests on him… a tomography and a EEG. We also took him to a phonologist, and had him checked out with several different types of pediatricians. After several weeks of studies and traveling back and forth from La Paz twice , we’ve come to the conclusion that Jordan has an expressive speech disorder… basically in the articulation side of it. He understands English and Spanish very well, and he is now speaking 4 and 5 word sentences. The problem isn’t his knowledge of language, it is his pronunciation of it.

We had him tested for several other disorders… apraxia, autism, etc., but the doctors have pretty well ruled out any type of sickness or other disorders. From my understanding, there really is no known medical reason for these articulation disorders in about 90% of children who have them. The good thing is that they are treatable. We were given quite a few exercises to teach Jordan to move his tongue and lips in certain ways. These seem to be helping him a lot. We need to go back to La Paz every 3 months or so to get him checked out and to get some more exercises for him.

All in all, we feel pretty good about him getting over this. I think within a few years he will be just fine. For more information, you can read these articles in Wikipedia…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_sound_disorder#Articulation_Disorders (Also read Residual Errors and Causes)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech-Language_Pathology_in_School_Settings#Articulation_Disorders

Upcoming Activities in the Church

After so many weeks of traveling, we’re happy to be back in Sucre, continuing with our work here. One thing that God put on our hearts after the conference was the amount of people who have slipped away from us and God over the past several years. We’ve taken about 1500 people to the Encounter retreat, but many, if not a majority of those people are not with us now. All though the month of May, we began praying for these people, and we have now named June as the “Month of the Prodigal”, of course I’m talking about those who resemble the prodigal son in Luke 15. We will be going out and looking for these people throughout the month, doing activities weekly, and we will be finishing up the month with an Encounter Retreat for these people, and a huge celebration for them on Sunday June 29th. We may do that celebration service in a coliseum/arena here in the city. We’ll see how everything goes.

We have a baptism planned for this coming Thursday, June 5th. We also are starting a new school in the church… for those who have finished our “School of Life”. This school is called the “School of Vision” and is focused intensely on cell group leadership and multiplication. We will be starting that on Thursday, June 8th.

In August, we will be uniting with several other cell churches in the southern region of Bolivia… Sucre, Potosí, and Taríja, and will be doing a combined conference for all of the cell leaders of our churches. There is a lot of expectation for this. I’ll let you know more about that as we come closer to the date.

Conclusion

I could probably sit here and write for 8 more hours about all that is going on, but I’m sure no one would read it, so I’ll stop after ONE MORE THING!…

HELP

I’d like to finish with a cry for HELP! I know that sounds awful, but it’s true. We didn’t do much fund-raising last year while we were home, thinking that we would be coming back very soon. Now things have changed and we remain here. We don’t know how much longer, but we can’t leave yet. (You can read earlier posts if you’d like more information on that.) The problem is that we are literally out of money, and we owe money on our credit-card. We used that to buy the plane tickets for the Pastors from Argentina (+/- $2000), and the inscription money did not cover the amount. The Hand of Hur is now 2 months behind on paying us our salary, and we owe two months rent ($500) and have to pay Erynn’s school bill by the end of next week ($750). I also had to do something that I think is terrible… I had to withdraw cash from my credit card to be able to buy groceries and pay several of the bills in the house. We haven’t wanted to say anything about this to you all, but we are in dire need right now, and that doesn’t count all that we need to do here to accommodate the growth that we are experiencing in our ministry.

I really hate asking for your help, but that’s what we live and work with down here, and we are doing it for God’s glory. I know that he will provide (he always does), but it’s important for me and you to understand that many times that provision is through you. So… if it is possible, PLEASE help. You can do it online securely with Paypal or you can send checks made out to “The Hand of Hur, Inc., 293 Bray Hill Lane, Oakland, MD 21550”. All gifts are tax deductible. Thank you so much, and may the Lord bless you richly!

As always, sooner or later, I’ll continue updating the site! Check in often! Lot’s of love…

Jason, Norah, Erynn, Jordan & Derrick Skipper

Good morning! This really has been an exciting time for us here in Sucre. Sometimes it seems so hard to “Keep Up”, sharing with you all the things that are going on here in our lives and ministry! Mom wrote yesterday wanting to know if we were still alive… That’s a sign, showing me that I need to do a little bit better in keeping in touch!

There’s so much to write about, but I’ll try to keep it short and to the point so that this post doesn’t get TOO long!

DERRICK

Well, Derrick is now 4 1/2 months old, and is great. He’s pretty well “great” in every way! He’s been healthy; he’s such a happy baby. He just smiles and laughs all of the time. He’s a lot of fun. He just talks up a storm, plays with his voice, the things around him, etc.

We need to take him to the pediatrician soon, he’s also due for some more vaccinations, so we’ll probably have to do that this week some time. He’s put on quite a bit of weight. He’s weighing about 16 lbs now (16 1/2 lbs with his clothes on). We haven’t measured him in quite awhile, but he has grown a lot!

THE REST OF US

When you are a baby, you get all of the attention. Since the rest of us aren’t babies anymore, phenomenal things have to occur to hear much about it! In any case, Erynn and Jordan are doing very well. Erynn will be finishing 2nd grade in a few months, and Jordan is doing a lot better in his pre-kindergarten. He enjoys it a lot, and is learning quite a lot there. He is talking a little better, although he is still not understandable to most everyone except Erynn! He does seem to be putting sentences together now, sometimes of quite a few words… BUT he just doesn’t pronounce things well at all. We realize that he has some sort of speech delay, but we’re praying that it’s just temporary and that it won’t affect him his entire life! One thing we are certain of is that God has everything under his control… so we aren’t too worried. He knows what he’s doing. Norah’s been great. A few weeks ago she got a few of those dizzy spells again, so she took more of those iron pills, and she immediately got better. I guess her body needs more iron than what she is taking in naturally at this time. I figure it has a lot to do with her breastfeeding Derrick.

MINISTRY

The ministry, of course, is what is keeping us so busy. We’ve been working hard on starting up quite a few new cell groups, along with consolidating the small groups that have recently opened and reopened. We continue with the 40 days of prayer in the church. Every morning, from 6 to 7 AM we have prayer there. Norah and I are leading this time, so we have to be there early. So we get up about 5:25 am every day, get ourselves and Derrick ready, and then we go and open up. We have about a 20 minute devotional at about 6:30 and usually get back home by about 7:25 in time to get Erynn ready and to school by 8:00 and Jordan to his school by 9:00.

During the past few weeks we’ve had quite a bit of movement in our main team of workers. A couple who has been with us for several years left last week to go live and work in Santa Cruz. We really don’t like for those who work with us to leave us (Of Course), but since we don’t pay most of them for the work they do, we can’t FORCE them to stay. This couple was having some financial problems, and they were offered a job in an orphanage in Santa Cruz, so they ended up taking the job, with our blessing. We took in most of their disciples, and have also promoted several of our disciples’ leaders. We now have 27 people on our main team of leadership between the two of us. I have 12 men, and Norah has 15 women.

We now have two MAJOR events coming up in the next month. From April 3rd to April 6th, we will be holding an evangelistic campaign in our church. I’m kind of jumping in head-first here. We are promoting it as an “Evangelistic Crusade of Healings and Miracles”. We believe that God wants to heal the sick, and as was prophesied in Isaiah 53, “By His stripes, we were healed”. We believe that he died on the cross so that we can have eternal life with him, and a blessed life here on Earth. During the past several months, quite a few people have been healed, and we believe that God wants to do even more. Several of our team of leaders are visiting the main hospital here in Sucre daily. On Friday, 16 people received the Lord while they were there, and on Saturday I was told that 14 received him as their savior also. God is doing a great work during this, time… and we give God all the glory!

We are also preparing for our 3rd annual International Cell-Church Conference that’s coming up from April 24 to the 27th. Pastors Gustavo and Susanna Rossi will be coming again this year from Buenos Aires, Argentina. They now have close to 2000 cell groups under their ministry! It’s exciting to have them come and share their experiences and God’s word with us. We hope, as in years past, to have participants from all around Bolivia.

It’s kind of hard to explain ALL of the things that we do daily here. We have several cell meetings a week, we meet individually with each of our team members monthly, and we have weekly meetings with other pastors in the city. In another meeting, Norah has prayer every Tuesday afternoon with other pastors and leaders from around the city. We have prayer every morning; we seem to be invited to preach in different churches and events almost weekly. We visit and minister to our team’s disciples often. We prepare to teach for each of the events that we have, we are visited about 15 times a week by different people (that’s a rough estimate), we make sure things are running smoothly in the administration of the church. We read and read and prepare and prepare, and visit those who are having babies (which we have many in the church during this time), we take the kids to school and piano lessons (Erynn is taking piano lessons), we take them to visit other kids, and others come here… That’s not counting all of the work it takes to take care of Derrick, and cooking, etc. Man, when I write these things down, I get tired just typing it all out! Anyway, if you wonder what we really do here… there’s a few of the things that I can remember right now!

We ask that you would ALWAYS pray for us. NEVER FORGET! We need God’s help, his blessing and his power daily. I think I’ll end this here. May God bless you in all you do.

Love,

Jason, Norah, Erynn, Jordan & Derrick