Summer Months Fly By

By Branden and Annie

“Commit your way to the Lord, trust in Him, and He will bring it to pass.” Psalm 37:5
The summer months have flown by and the school year is quickly approaching; we still have a lot preparation and foot work that needs to be done in order to get our new academic center up and running! Please commit to pray for us as we undertake this enormous project! Our director left for a year in the States and has given this task over to Branden. Our goal is to have five hundred students become members of our center and be coming on a regular basis.


SUMMER PROJECT

We were privileged to have a team from a church in California come the second week of July and help kick
off the promotion of the center. For nine days we spread ourselves among seven universities and
passed out around fifteen hundred brochures to up-coming freshmen. In the afternoons we invited students to come visit free English clubs in order to create interest in what we will offer full time in the near future.

OUR VISION

We want our center to be unlike the other academic centers around the city that only offer high priced grammar classes. Our vision is to be more like a club, where there is an upbeat environment to practice speaking English. We want to attract students with interesting topics, guest speakers, and special events! Each day we will offer something different; for example on Mondays we will have cultural day where we will invite individuals to come speak on their native country (there is an international church with several countries represented, we also have a Chinese team and a Korean team here long term). On Tuesdays we will have our usual fun filled interactive English clubs. On Wednesdays we will offer grammar with preparation for test like similar to the SAT. Thursdays will be career day. We will discuss topics such as resumes, interviews, business etiquette, etc. We will also have guest speakers come from around the city and speak on their professional experiences such as doctors or embassy employees. On Fridays we will open our doors for anyone to come and check us out. On these days we will show films in English that we will discuss afterwards.
Our goal is to build a place for the students to get connected and feel a special identity. We will not have any clear spiritual meetings at the center that would destroy our platform. But as we build relationships with these students and their friends we feel that we will have many “open doors” to present the gospel.

OPPORTUNITY AWAITS YOU!

We also have an opportunity for you to be a part of this project! Our home church,
Thompson Station Church, in Tennessee is coming here October 7th-16th and we want to invite you to come along!!! If you are interested, here is an opportunity to come and serve with us! Please pray and consider if God is leading you to come! We are excited to have some of our ministry partners come be a part first hand in the kingdom work they have been praying for and financially giving towards! For more information you can contact Brandon Akers at bdakers@gmail.com.

MORE TEAMS!

Please also remember to pray for us during the month of September. We have two more teams coming from other states to help jump start the semester and the grand opening of the center! We are thankful for this timely help and are praying for the students to be further interested due to the presence of foreigners!  We love you all and are thankful for your partnership with us! Hope you are enjoying your summer months!

(TSC supports the work of Branden and Annie through GOCTW offerings and will be sending its first team in 2011! For more info on how to join this team, go to http://www.goctw.org/.