Beautiful One Celebrates One Year

As of May 2013, we have now been bringing God’s love to women in the sex industry for one year! Truly it has been a glorious year of favor, answered prayers, divine connections, and joy for those of us who have prayed for this ministry for many years. A few Saturdays ago, we had a party to honor and rejoice with those who have been involved from the beginning. It was a joyous time of recalling all that the Lord has done and how far the new ministry has come. Here are a few highlights:

• Sharing the Gospel with many women who come from a Buddhist background (in the massage parlors) 
• Hearing two ladies say that although they are propositioned constantly, they refuse to provide sexual favors to customers 
• Hearing one woman say that because of us, she knows she has friends in America 
• Watching one of our girls get baptized on Easter Sunday 
• Being taken out to dinner by two owners of massage parlors 
• Training five new team members in the past few months 
• Adopting several new massage parlors 
• Adopting four strip clubs as of March 20, 2014, the first day of spring. (The verse from which we got our name says that the winter is over and spring has come.) 
• Bouncer: “So you want to just come in here, give gifts to our dancers and tell them they’re loved?! Yeah, you can do that anytime!!” 
• Customer: “The Church is in the strip club?!” 
• Giving a female bouncer a rose. Later she emphatically declared that she would be the one to lead us to the dressing rooms.

Helping Jose Find A Church

A man named Jose, who was visiting from Boston for a few days, stopped by Tompkins for the first time last week. When Ryan asked him about whether or not he attended a church in Boston, he said that he did not because he had bad experiences with churches. So he sat with Jose for a while and carefully went over biblical examples of what to look for in a solid, healthy church body. He said that important qualities to look for include believing that the Bible is the inspired and authoritative word of God, loving prayer and devoting themselves to it corporately and privately, loving others, and being dedicated to the work of God in building up the body of believers and reaching out to the lost.

Jose was very thankful for the conversation. His ears really perked up when Ryan started talking about love because his past experience made him feel like the church only wanted him to come so they could get his tithe. Jose admitted that he had sort of given up on looking for a church to go to but said that when he got back to Boston, he was going to make more of an effort to find a church that lived out some of the things Ryan had mentioned. Pray with us for him to get plugged in with a church that can help him grow in his knowledge of the word and the objective realities of Jesus Christ.