In this newsletter we focus on The Evidence for Jesus; Evidence for God and the Evidence for the Bible.<< MORE >>

News from the farm Selah. -Bouke Bokma

Dear Friends and family,

Thank you all for your prayers and thoughts as well as encouragement. Time has gone by extremely quickly and we have not been in touch with everyone so the newsletter will hopefully get us all up to speed.

I present my excuses for lack of communication:  I had to prepare lectures, organise and arrange an implant course. Work and family commitments and just trying to live and hold things together is normal I guess. I call it spinning plates on upright sticks.

 A comment: if and when you either support me professionally (being a patient) and or referring patients to me it is one way of helping my family and I realise the vision of the creation ministry.

As many of you know I recently had a head on car accident with another vehicle operated by a driver under the influence of alcohol and or drugs. He did not know where he was going and when we realised where he was supposed to go we did not understand the route he was using.

Praise to the Lord we are still alive. I thank the Lord for giving me more time to serve Him. Hopefully we can reach out to the man in time. He clearly needs the gospel. My car will be written off and so we will be financially stressed trying to replace the vehicle; insurance pay outs take some time and usually do not cover the replacement of the old vehicle. Thankfully I can use our spare car but it is heavy on fuel and has high mileage. In spite of this in gratefulness we can continue following His calling.

Creation conference 2012.

I appreciated all of you who came to attend the conference. Presenting the first outline lecture was less nerve racking than last year. We enjoyed the following up lectures by the guest lecturers. Like last year we had a professor in the form of Danny Faulkner, and this year we had Jerry Bergman; so we have been privileged.  I learnt much from each presenter and my understanding of the Creation Flood Babel model even better. I had an opportunity to share a few slides about our visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky, USA. In doing so I hope that I communicated what we learnt about AiG and shared something of what they are doing and what we could use to further our ministry. Something special was the behind the scenes tour of the AiG warehouse where the beginnings of the Ark Encounter project were shared with us.

It was great to have so much material on sale from Grace Media and CMI and others to supplement our lectures. The dvds of this conference are not yet finalised, will let you know when the ducks are in a row.

Jerry Bergman, Doug Sharp and Rich Geer together reached 350 people with the creation message in one form or another. We thankfully managed to get to each venue on time and made new friends and people of like mindedness. Our speakers slept in the library we are putting together.

We invite you to send this letter onto others who are interested and passionate about creation ministry.

Following some consideration and prayer we have decided not to have a conference next year. The main reasons are so that we can get something special set up and this will take considerable time and organisation as well as some financial implications.

Our thoughts are to have a Creation Camp on the farm in 2014. The aim would be to have families come and set up caravans and tents on the farm for a week end.  We could then have a time of fellowship, training and fun in a beautiful spot of His creation.

A rough outline is as follows:

Arrive on Friday afternoon. Set up, orientate and have supper (self-catering).

Friday night: opening session for everyone, adults and children. Includes worship session and an introductory talk.

Saturday: Breakfast (self-catering). Split sessions with children having talks and activities age related of course. Adults in lectures/training sessions.

Lunchtime break and teas can be done around communal urns.

Saturday night: Star party with braaing for dinner.

Sunday: Breakfast (self-catering). Morning service for all. Those that want to stay on for lunch would stay and help finish a project. (Hopefully a lifesize dinosaur). There is a private nature reserve next door and we have permission to go in and enjoy so we can experience that during the afternoon.

Financial implications:

In order to get a solid line up of speakers we would need some funding. Doug Sharp and Rich Geer generously paid for their own air fare and we managed to cover Jerry Bergman’s ourselves. We have in principle a few volunteers from the USA who are prepared to give up some of their time and visit us (assuming the dates work out).

1.     Mike Riddle.

2.     Danny Faulkner.

3.     Jerry Bergman.

4.     Jean Lightner.

5.     Andrew Snelling.

Others on the “wanted” list whom I still need to re-approach:

1.     Buddy Davis.

2.     Dan Lietha.

3.     Dave Crandall.

We also have local speakers whom I can call on.

1.     Hennie Mouton.

2.     Koos van der Westhuysen.

3.     Johan Smit.

We would appreciate any comments on this idea. If you think that you may be able to provide help in any aspect of organising the conference please let me know. Please pray that something of this idea may materialise.

Some ideas: tent and chair rental for lectures; portable toilet and shower rental. The more contacts we have to send out invitations the better so if you have access to a data base let us know and when the time comes we can give you the advert for you to distribute for example to your church. For those people not accustomed to camping; there are many places of accommodation within 10 minutes drive from our farm.

Progress at the Farm.

Bearing in mind the full vision that we have:

1.     Creation garden with prayer garden.

2.     Library.

3.     Cottage.

4.     Full scale ark, accommodating a creation museum.

5.     Mountain bike trail lined with life size dinosaurs.

We have the prayer garden and the outline of the creation garden.  Anika has the first station of the creation garden conceptualised and will soon purchase things like tiles and stepping stones. We constructed a water reservoir stand. We have put a tank up and it is connected to piping and it is almost ready to be filled up. It will provide water for the gardens. Little things like this take quite some time and money to put together. Praise the Lord for family, my father in law helps us out a lot. Praise Him for our farm workers who put extra effort in helping me at various tasks.

The library is constructed and I have cut wood and put some book shelves together. Installation will follow soon. We will then be able to un-pack recourses (dvds, cds, books, magazines to lend out) that have been in boxes for over a year. Shelves for my toy dinosaur collection (a few hundred in number, also boxed up) will need to be done as we go along.

The cottage is coming along; brick work is basically done for the ground level. The upstairs walls need to be put up (prefab panels), roof, first floor, window glass, flooring, plumbing, electrics, painting etc. I am thinking of having a work party to come out and help get the basic construction of this project accelerated to completion. If you would like to make yourself available for any project please let me know.  We hope this becomes a six-sleeper for guests, especially over- seas speakers.

The full scale model of the ark remains a vision that will come to fruition in time. I believe we already have enough people to provide talents and information. We have people at AiG and other creation museums who have said help and advice would be forthcoming when we were ready to get going.

The mountain bike trail with life size dinosaurs.  We hope that the trail can be laid out once the gardens are functioning as hands on exibits. We however need life size dinosaurs. Hence we would like to get Buddy Davis to give us a workshop on constructing the dinosaurs.

NPO – Non-profit organisation.

I have been talking about this for some time and I have sent out a provisional document to some of you. I am hoping that with one of our supporters we can this set up and functioning.

Please be encouraged as you read and continue to pray for the creation ministry. Praise Him for the progress so far and please be in contact.

In His service,

 

Bouke and Anika.

 

 

In this newsletter we continue with issues relating to the origin of the Bible, its trustworthiness, its authority as well as the claims made by critics that there are alleged discrepancies or errors in the Bible.<< MORE >>