Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Greetings to you, our friends! We are so grateful to you for your support of this ministry to the elderly and infirm of communities throughout our nation and beyond. As we have mentioned in recent letters, nursing homes all over the United States are inviting Christian volunteers to come back into their facilities to bring the Good News to their residents again! This is a wonderful development! We thank God for the reprieve from the devastating restrictions imposed on this segment of our nation by the ravages of COVID-19. Though this vicious disease still lurks among our vulnerable seniors, the medical community has developed much better techniques and medications to deal with the symptoms. Praise be to God Almighty!
And, as we have also mentioned in recent letters, as far as Christian Concourse is concerned, this newly reopened door for Christian nursing home ministry has resulted in an exciting increase in the requests we are regularly getting for our resources and tools. This is especially true of our two large-print hymn booklets. The timeless favorite anthems of our faith that we put in these little books continue to bless God’s children living in long-term care settings. Consequently, the demand has out-distanced Dar’s and my ability to keep up. This reality was brought more into focus in light of our aging shoulders and elbows. Additionally, in the past year, the costs have significantly increased to operate both of our printing presses and keep up the necessary maintenance contract.
So…we began looking and we found a printing company in Indiana that offered to help us with the hymnbooks at a really good price, about $1.12 each – including shipping. And, they proposed to bind our booklets in a very professional manner with glue. So far they have shipped us 500 copies of Favorite Hymns of Grace and 1500 copies of Hymns of our Redeemer. We are waiting now for another shipment of five hundred more copies of each.
At the same time, giving all glory to God, and thanking Him for the kind generosity of His children, our financial donations continue to stay well ahead of our expenses! We know many of you are praying for this missionary effort to the nursing home arena and we can testify to the glorious fact that our Heavenly Father is answering your prayers! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Over the last month and a half of this year we have been honored to mail out 1221 hymn booklets, 231 scripture booklets, 34 CD sets and 18 DVD sets to 39 different nursing home ministers. Hallelujah!!! At this pace, that is over 10,000 large print booklets by the end of this year!
Again, we thank each of you who help us. The precious senior souls that use our materials cannot support us financially – and we would not ask them to. Neither do we have the resources to operate this nursing home ministry if we had to rely solely on our own private finances. We depend completely on our Lord to touch the hearts of His people on behalf of the nursing home population to whom we minister. As far as we know, all of you who contribute to this mission see what we are doing and want to help us in this work for the Lord Jesus. To God Almighty be the glory!
Love in Christ,
Jerry and Dar Johnson