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Local Church Spreads Good Word through Global Missions
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July 7, 2010, at 06:59 AM
Christ Community Church missions continuously aid communities locally and abroad.
Five years ago, Christ Community Church in Omaha helped initiate and fund the first Christian hospital in Mali, one that includes a segregated area for women and children so the most vulnerable may have a safe environment for services.
Since then, rotating mission groups from churches around the country have joined a permanent staff of two long-term missionary doctors to help deliver babies, treat women and sick children, and build new additions to the hospital.
According to Christ Community Church Missions Pastor Craig Walter, the atmosphere, cases and diseases encountered are nothing like we experience here in America.
“There are countless stories about women coming in as their last chance for survival,” said Walter, who was in Mali this spring, “I remember a woman who had come in to deliver after losing her first seven children ... our doctor delivered for her successfully and the child is now three years old.”
The hospital and missionaries are making an observable impact. In a nation where one out of fifteen women will die due to complications during childbirth,the hospital has delivered 6,000 healthy babies and conducted over 1,000 surgeries. When the hospital opened, 25 percent Mali children would die before the age of five. That grim statistic has since decreased to a still gut-wrenching 20 percent, but Walter counts his blessings with each life-giving improvement in the healthcare system.
Beyond Mali, CCC missions teams stretch around the globe, from orphanage work in Guatemala and Beijing to public schools in El Salvador and even to neighborhoods here in Omaha.
Next month, a team will be heading to the Middle East to teach English as a second language. Another team will be heading to Mali in August to do a mission inoculating animals, something CCC missionaries have never done before.
One of the main goals of the missions is just this, said Walter, “spreading the good word of Jesus.”
“For most of our short-term missionaries, it is their first-time, and we tell them to be prepared for a big culture shock,” said Walter, “but it will be amazing the impact they make in the lives of these people all over the world. Just looking into the eyes of a girl, boy or woman you have helped is tremendous.”
CCC teams raise their own funds to support the group's dozen or so annual missions.
More on Walters and the group's work may be found at the blog he keeps at the church website.
Christ Community Church is located in Old Mill at 404 South 108th Avenue. Sunday service times are Sundays at 9 and 10:45 a.m.
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