This summer I was blessed enough to go on two mission trips: one to Glennallen, and the other to Manokotak. During these trips, my team(s) and I were able to impact about one hundred children with the life-changing message of Jesus Christ.

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When I was at Glennallen, we taught children at the annual Wrangell Mountain Bible Conference. While their parents were listening to testimonies being shared and pastors preaching, we were singing songs, playing games, and learning lessons from the Bible. By the end of those ten days we spent there, a large number of the children that had attended were able to recite Scripture and tell us the Bible stories that we had told them a couple days before! It was amazing to see the impact that God made on those children.

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Manokotak was different. Aside from having to take a plane to get there, the children were also different. As opposed to the crazy rowdy kids of Glennallen, the kids at Manokotak seemed shy and slightly wary of us. The first day, I taught the Bible lesson and a couple kids came back to learn more about how they could accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. As I shared the Wordless Book with them, I got the impression that they were absorbing what I was saying, but not really understanding it all. They accepted Christ and prayed for salvation, but in my heart I wasn’t sure. I prayed for them throughout the next couple days that they would fully understand what it means to be a Christian. During that time, those kids and many others came back to talk with various members of the team. I wanted to make sure that I would be able to talk more with them about their salvation decision before we left. Thankfully, I got the chance; on the last day of club, I taught the Bible lesson again and about the same group of kids as the first time came back to talk more about accepting Christ. This time, they knew what was up. They wouldn’t even let me tell them the Wordless Book, because they were all trying to tell me.  It was incredible to see how God had changed this over the course of just a couple days. I had never seen such a change in children in such a short time.

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Another thing we did in Manokotak was help set the foundation of a Youth Group. The youth in that village seemed a bit distant from the church, even if some of them attended the local church and Sunday School. The goal in creating that group was to try to bring the teens into a close and personal relationship with Jesus, which would inspire them to branch out to other teens and their parents about Jesus. We also invited some of the teenagers to attend CYIA and we had about six people that were interested in going! If that were to happen, then they might be able to start an entire Good News Club there, led by the teens. I have been praying every day for God’s hand to be in this and for his will to be done.

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To me, this entire trip was a powerful testimony to God’s power. Not only were we able to plant the seeds of being active disciples in the teens, we were also able to help lead several children to Christ, which is really what CEF is all about.

 

Dominic Alioto 2017