TONY'S NEWSLETTER
JANUARY 2009
Dear EAPE Partners,
Here’s a year-end summary of what your giving has accomplished. In spite of the downturn in the economy, you have been faithful and have helped make many good things possible.
- Relief for desperate people in Haiti following a devastating hurricane
- 50,000 Haitian adults going through our literacy program, using the Bible as their primary text
- Extensive efforts and successes to end the enslavement of some of the 300,000-plus children who have been virtually enslaved in the horrendous practice that the Haitians call the Restavek system
- Many new classes for children added to rural schools, along with a significant teacher training program for hundreds of Haitian teachers
- The Mission Year program placing more than 90 young missionaries in urban settings in Atlanta, New Orleans, Chicago, and Philadelphia
- The UrbanPromise ministries in Wilmington, DE; Camden, NJ; Toronto, ON; and Vancouver, BC reaching out to thousands of disadvantaged inner-city children (most from single-parent homes) and sponsoring and incredible array of summer camps, after-school tutoring and athletic programs, cultural enrichment trips, and Bible studies
- Cornerstone Christian Academy, the Camden Forward School, and others offering alternative education to needy children and teenagers who otherwise might have fallen between the cracks and failed
- Space does not permit me to even begin to list the accomplishments of our other affiliates, including Aquila House (providing transitional housing for homeless women in the northeast of England), REACH (providing summer camp experiences for hundreds of kids suffering from AIDS), and OASIS (our program in Zimbabwe that serves more than 200 children orphaned because of the AIDS crisis in that country)
- Hundreds of thousands of people challenged and encouraged by our combination of evangelism and social justice, through the speaking and writing of Shane Claiborne, Bart and me.
Finally, I have to tell you about the formation of our Red Letter Speakers Fellowship. This is an incredible group of young up-and-coming speakers (and a few of us seasoned veterans) who are gaining wide national and international recognition. Brought together by us once a year for three days, we discuss how to be more effective communicators and how to promote a holistic gospel message while carrying on the kind of work that EAPE has initiated over the years.
All of this great stuff gets done on a very limited budget because we keep our overhead low and because so many of the workers in these ministries raise their own support—and because you make up the difference when they can’t.
So please, keep on giving! We work overtime to not waste a penny that comes our way—and we really need your help!
Sincerely,
Tony Campolo
ABOUT TONY + JANUARY 2009