Dear Friends of Christian Concourse, (mailed June 15, 2023)
Joyful “HELLO’s” to all! We are so glad and feel so honored to be alive in this time of privileged opportunity in reaching out to our dear brothers and sisters who are under the cloud of long-term care in America. The constraints on direct contact with care facility residents due to the pandemic are being lifted at a quickened pace all over the country! Christian volunteers are being asked to resume their services in direct ministry in care centers nation-wide. And all this renewed focus on nursing home ministry is resulting in more and more requests for our long-term care Christian ministry materials. Everything we produce and distribute is sent out for free! What a blessing for us that we are able to do that!
From April 20th to the middle of June we produced and mailed out or delivered directly to a facility the following items:
1464 booklets (large print hymn books and scripture books).
54 CD sets (instrumental and vocal accompaniment for the hymn books).
18 DVD sets (tools for Scripture meditation centered around the 54 hymns in our 2 hymn books).
12 Christian adult coloring books (usually not available by mail).
These resources went out for use in approximately 36 different care facilities in the hands of over 28 volunteer ministers and care center staff members. These booklets and CDs and DVDs are proving to be very durable but it is not unusual for a resident to want to keep the copy they use in a service. We encourage staff and volunteers to let them have them and to call us when they need more. We get repeat requests often. On the other hand, some of our hymn books are kept in the meeting room of a nursing home and used for years! In 2018 we took a toll of distributed materials and counted over 10,000 hymn booklets and Scripture booklets. That’s just in one year! We have been giving these away at a similar pace for almost two decades. In this way, we can reasonably say that, over the years, our humble little out-reach has touched and is touching the lives of untold tens of thousands of individuals.
In addition, our website offers a wide range of free downloadable resources. To name a few: a giant print version of all our large print booklets is there for the taking. All of the music on our CDs is available for free download. All of the videos we have produced can be viewed online. Our entire Christian adult coloring book can be downloaded. There are many other tools and much more information and guidelines for nursing home ministry that are readily accessed on our site – all for free. The traffic on our website is hard to accurately judge, but we get feedback regularly from ministers who are overjoyed to have found so many free resources online. All we can say is, “Hallelujah!”
We should also mention, in addition to the items that we produce for distribution, we often order online useful items to give to residents in care facilities. With the materials we list above, we included 1 Spanish Bible (med. print), 10 Gospels of John (reg. print), 5 Gospels of John (giant print), 1 box of 50 greeting cards, “Gems for Golden Years” devotional booklets (lg. print), and 5 “Peace of Mind” Bible word search books (lg. print).
With this letter we hope to encourage those of you who pray for us and those of you who also support us with your finances. Thank you for your faithful kindness and your thoughtful generosity. All that we do in this mission field is all about encouraging the Christian faith of the elderly and infirm population of America’s care facilities – all glory be to Father God!
Love, Sincerely,
Jerry and Dar Johnson