July 2021 New Horizons

Ministry in Strange Times

by Mark E. Richline

Our family had only been back in Montevideo from our brief furlough for about a month. We had just started enjoying worship again with our church family at Iglesia Presbiteriana Salvos por Gracia. Two new visitors came to our service the second Sunday we were back. Our new audio and video equipment was in place to transmit our services better than ever. Our congregation had embraced the session’s 2021 vision for the church. We were ready to begin meeting for worship twice every Lord’s Day. A church barbecue was scheduled, and a marriage conference was being planned as an evangelistic outreach to couples. And then, in April 2021, we had to do a complete one-eighty turn, closing our doors and moving all our church activities back online. Resurgence of COVID-19 in Uruguay As our Uruguayan friends like to put it, “the coronavirus here se complica todo .” The situation has become much more serious over the past few months. Positive cases have increased dramatically. Hospital ICUs are filled to ... Read more

A Mission Letter from Karamoja

by H. James Folkerts

Our family of nine has been serving in Karamoja, Uganda, for a year and a half now. Time passes quickly here for us. Not a day goes by without a new lesson or a challenging experience, many of which we never dreamed of. At times, the intensity of daily life leaves little time for processing these events. This past week, for example, we heard that one of our compound guards had suddenly become sick and tragically died and that his body needed to be picked up from the hospital and brought to his village. Since we were several hours away in Kampala for a meeting, I asked another team member to pick up the body with a mission vehicle. I received a call later that he hadn’t passed away—yet. He did die a few days later, and mission members collected his body and held a funeral. We arrived in his village the day of his death, just able to be there for the last part of the funeral. So, in the past week, we have had three funerals of people close to the life of the mission. Such suffering and loss are all too ... Read more

At Last, a Visit to South Sudan

by David P. Nakhla

This spring, after some years of waiting, the OPC was able to visit members of a sister denomination in South Sudan: the Sudanese Reformed Church. Their country has been riddled with violence. In 2011, following years of conflict with the northern part of Sudan, whose people are mainly Sudanese Arab and predominantly Muslim, the African and predominantly Christian people of the southern part of Sudan voted overwhelmingly in support of independence, officially becoming the Republic of South Sudan. But less than three years later, South Sudan entered its own civil war, this time mostly along tribal lines—the Dinka versus the Nuer. Because the president and the government were mostly Dinka, the Nuer were under threat of massacre. Millions sought asylum in the neighboring countries of Uganda, Ethiopia, and Sudan, while many others hid under the shelter of United Nations peacekeepers who placed these Internally Displaced People (IDPs) into camps sprinkled throughout South Sudan. Among those taking shelter ... Read more