Meeting practical and spiritual needs of hidden peoples.
With a $30 gift to this mercy ministry, you can help lift up the fallen in the Greece.
“We met a sex-worker who had been to church over Christmas,” says an OM team member. “She told us that there had been one song she really liked, and we asked her to sing it to us. She sang, ‘My Jesus, My Savior’, and we all joined in with her. We were a small group on a street in the middle of the city in the early hours of the morning, with only drug addicts, ‘working women’ and their potential customers nearby. It was lovely, a real reminder that our God is Lord in that place, too. He is ‘our comfort, our shelter, tower of refuge and strength’.”
This is just one story from the Greece outreach that ministers to the marginalized across five countries; offering safe haven to prostitutes, widows, orphans, street kids, the Roma (Gypsies), and abused women in a region of high vulnerabilities. Widows receive new wood stoves or roof repair, getting them through another winter, so they can care for their children and try to keep them in school. Some street kids receive food and tutoring, while others learn to read. The kids get a safe environment in which to learn and are cared for with the love of Christ.
For those in the sex trade, OM workers meet them where they are, literally, visiting brothels in the morning and the streets at night to chat with the girls. The girls are given contact information in case they want to call or visit the OM team who offer legal aid, medical assistance, and job placement when available. Sometimes the team helps with special gifts: Bibles, CD’s, and testimonies of others who got out of the trade. These women are usually victims of trafficking. Often they will have been made to go through voodoo rituals so that they will be “cursed” if they try to run. Their families usually depend on the money they send, so the women feel trapped. But the team lets them know there is hope.
Through Freedom Climb, the OM team in Greece wants to reach 1600 people -- widows, orphans, the Roma, the poor, and the prostituted. Your gift of $30 helps bring dignity to one of these people, hidden in their culture, but known to God.
