Haitian Ministry With a Slightly Different Twist: By Henry Bieber
In July of 2012, Alan Tucker, Danny Spano and I joined a team heading to Haiti. We looked forward to loving on the children and encouraging the work there at the orphanages, but God had also laid on our hearts a different vision for the people of Haiti. Building on relationships that our church already had, our desire was to begin the process of talking with pastors of churches,, about the ministry of Celebrate Recovery.
So, we left for Haiti, bearing our suitcases filled with leader’s guides and participant guides and excited about the possibilities of carrying the message of the Gospel through the vehicle of CR and the eight principles that come right out of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. God blessed our times spent with Pastor Moise Vaval and Pastor Doni St. Germaine. We had some great conversations with them and they were excited about helping their communities with hurts, habits and hang-ups. We left our materials with them, instructing them to work the program with some of their members and letting them know we would return and offer some more training when they had familiarized themselves with CR.
Fast forward: 6 months later. We returned to Haiti with a team of our CR leadership and offered 3 training sessions for 25-28 people over the course of 4 days. What an exciting time we had, sharing our experience in CR and how God was using it here at home and sharing the vision of what this tool of recovery could mean to the people of Port-au-Prince, Haiti and Source de la Grace Church! God also allowed us the opportunity to preach in 2 services about the 8 Principles from the Beatitudes, so the entire church could get a glimpse of the vision.
We left encouraged that they were catching the vision of how this could be used to introduce people to the message of the Gospel and help people recover from their hurts, habits and hang-ups. It was a humbling, encouraging experience for our team to be able to see God use them to “carry this message others” especially to the people of Haiti. Please pray that God would raise up leaders in this ministry that have a heart for hurting people and patience and compassion.