Our Team

Setting records is great & I love to be a part of a team that excels. With TORCH however, setting records isn’t what we are all about. Our only purpose is to follow the Great Commission and to do the works of service that our God prepared in advance for us to do (Ephesians 2:10). Then at the end of the day, we will give our great and awesome God all the glory.

The good news about numbers is that our God likes them. There are a lot of occasions in his written word that show us that numbers are important to God. For instance, we know how many people were fed out of a small basket of fish and loaves, we know how many people became followers in Acts, and we are blessed with many other number references throughout the Bible.

With this in mind, I think that it is important that I share a few numbers about our 2005 mission to Honduras. You are about to be a part of TORCH history. Our team will more than likely be the largest single TORCH team ever….we will likely be about 150 strong. I truly believe that we are going to be this big because God has planned it and he has a lot for us to do. I believe that our size means that we have assumed the responsibility to work harder than ever and that when we do, the accomplishments for our God will be incredible. Right now we plan to plant a new church and build a meeting place, we’ll build as many houses as possible – 25 to 30 would be great, we will pack and deliver food to as many hungry families as we can – hopefully over 1,000, our medical team will treat over 1,000 sick & hurting people, we will send more than 10 evangelistic teams into the mountains every day and the harvest will be amazing, hundreds of children will see Jesus in the daily teams that work at Hospital Esquala, and much, much more. Then…at the end of our 2 week mission we will all see Jesus more clearly than ever.

I hope that all of you are excited about what our God has planned for our mission. I am! I would encourage any of you to use the comment section to let us know about how you or your group are coming along with plans to raise working funds for building, feeding, etc. I look forward to hearing from you.

Marc

February Newsletter

February 15 has come & gone and most of you were right on time with your applications and I would like to thank you for that. This year’s team will be fairly large and that means that the paper work will be pretty complex – especially if you don’t send everything on time and all together. Please keep in mind that there will be over 120 of us and Terri & I will need your help to get us your stuff (and money) on time. Here are a few simple requests that will really help us out:

1) If you sent an application without a passport number, we still need it. Please email (or snail mail) your number as soon as you get it.

2) If you sent a deposit without an application, please go to
irccorp.org to download an application. Fill in the application and mail it as soon as possible. You will not be assigned an airline ticket if we do not have an application.

3) If you are under 18 and traveling without a parent, you MUST have a Spanish consent form completed, notarized, and in my file. You can download this from the site mentioned in #2.

4) The next due date will be May 1^st. All airfare is due and the payment per person will be $600. This is a HARD due date and means that I need to have the money ready to deposit on May 1. Money is due on this date so that we can pay the airlines before a late penalty is incurred.

Working Funds
Now is the time to build up our working funds. Here are several uses of these funds:

1) Houses - This summer we will be building both wooden & block houses – and every house we build will be built better than any we have built in the past. The cost per block house will be about $1100 and a better variety of wooden house will cost about $800. We will build about 15 wooden houses and 5 or 6 block houses.

2) Food – We plan to pack about 1000 bags of food for hungry families. Each bag will cost about $14.00

3) Medicine – We will have at least 4 days of clinics where we will treat over 500 people a day. The medicines for a one day clinic will cost about $1000.

4) Church Building – We plan to plant a new church and build a building. The cost of the building will be about $10,000 and the land will be another $2,500.

Our team has ambitious plans and we will all need to work together to make our plans come together. Please pray for the planning, the resources, and the work that God has planned for our team.

Our God is good…..All the time.

Get ready for another great day in Honduras,

Marc

New Communication Tool

Welcome to the MS TORCH team web log. The new communication tools that are available on the internet are amazing and I hope that you will welcome the introduction of a place that will give you the latest news & information about our mission. This site will replace the need to email monthly newsletters. Instead, I will post updates as they happen. Additionally, everyone and anyone can communicate through the comment section. This summer we will use this site to post daily updates for our friends and families back home. Please share this address with anyone that may be interested in our work.

I plan to post a new newsletter the week of February 20, 2005
Marc