To learn more about our missionaries, see the list in the menu to the left, or click one of the links below:
Matthew and Megan Cox are missionaries with Mission Aviation Fellowship assigned to Latin America. Matt, as a pilot, looks forward to using the airplane to help spread the Gospel. He believes the airplane is a great tool to help touch lives and show God"s love. "Because God has loved us and showed us His grace and mercy," he shares, "we are inspired to love." A verse of special significance to Matt and Megan is 1 John 4:19, "We love because He first loved us."
Matt was born in Mississippi and spent his school years in Colorado and Kentucky. When he was 11, through the invitation of a school friend, he attended Vacation Bible School where he accepted Christ as his Savior. Later, his parents came to know Christ while attending this same church. As a high school student, Matt taught Bible clubs in the summer with Child Evangelism Fellowship. During this time, he met a missionary who told him about MAF and Moody Bible Institute. Matt earned a B.S. in Missionary Aviation Technology from Moody Aviation in Tennessee. He is a commercial pilot with instrument rating and a certified aircraft mechanic.
Kip and Katy joined the CMF Kenya Field Team in September 1999 to work among the nomadic Turkana people of Kenya’s northwest desert. They have two sons, Patrick (1998) and Brian (2002, born in Kenya).
After spending their first year studying the Turkana culture and language, the Lines family moved to their first location of Loupwala to aid in church planting and leadership training. Kip and katy helped to start new congregations in the Loupwala area and trained leaders from several villages.
Upon return from furlough, the Lines family moved to the small village of Kosikiria, which is more central to their ministry area. Kip spends much of his time preparing for and teaching courses for new Christians and church leaders. He is also working toward the start-up of a viable Bible training institute for Turkana church leaders. Katy creates Bible study materials and leads a weekly Bible study for women.
Jake and Erin are serving with CMF’s church-planting team in Ethiopia, East Africa, primarily among the Gumuz people. Jake’s responsibilities are in evangelism and leadership development. Erin ministers to Gumuz women through friendship and Bible studies.
The Gumuz—numbering about 170,000—are isolated from every form of development; no road for vehicles reaches them. This people group remains isolated because of the Nile to the west and the Blue Nile River to the north with hundreds of hidden villages untouched by the Gospel. CMF missionaries now live among the Gumuz at Yasow to plant churches and train evangelists, as well as to provide other leadership training, medical ministry, and community development projects.
Matthew Parris, columnist for The London Times, lived as a boy in Africa. A self-described atheist, Parris has traveled extensively through Africa, and recently returned to his boyhood home of Malawi to visit a charity supported by the paper. While there, he came to a startling conclusion: Africa needs Jesus Christ. “Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa….In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real.
A group from Hopwood, along with five other area churches, recently returned from our weeklong service trip to New Orleans. While it has been over two years since the devastating hurricane Katrina hit the gulf cost, its presence nevertheless remains among the dilapidated neighborhoods as well as the broken spirits of the natives. Even now, two years later, the population of the city is only one third of what it used to be. Many of the houses in the poorer districts were bulldozed over because the owners were unable to gut the house of all their belongings that had been soaked through with mold and mildew. Many of the houses that were not leveled are still only standing as a skeleton in neighborhoods that are cluttered with trash and overgrown weeds.
[acidfree:194 style=image align=left size=200][acidfree:196 style=image align=right size=200]Billy Graham said: "There is nothing that will inform, inspire, and motivate Christians for world evangelization like Perspectives. It will stretch your mind, warm your heart, and stir your will."
The Perspectives Course is coming our way again. Perspectives is an internationally known, sixteen week introduction to missions that could change your life! Hosted by Emmanuel School of Religion, Perspectives is a course of vision—a vision that mobilizes and equips the people of God to live a life of passion and purpose as Jesus did. Perspectives is also a course of purpose—a purpose to create a movement to help God's people embrace their destiny of extending the blessing of Abraham received to every people group.
Praise the Lord! On December 1, 2006, the Turkana Bible Training Institute (TBTI) was pleased to celebrate its first ever graduation! Let me share some highlights....
We are amazed at the way everything worked out for the graduation to even happen. We are always thankful for rain in Turkana, and give thanks to God for a very abundant rainy season this October and November. However, rain also forces plans to change. For us, it disrupted our graduation plans in about three different ways.
First, our guest speaker, former missionary to Turkana and currently working with the Urban Poor in Nairobi, Keith Ham, and his son Jonathan (Patrick's friend), were flying up on Thursday and were forced to return to Nairobi due to dangerous storm clouds. They were able to reschedule a flight on Friday, and were due to arrive at 10AM, the same time graduation was scheduled to begin; we were grateful they could arrive at all.
