A little update from us

We finished the camp on 18/7 and went on a short bike outreach with a big team of youth and families. We bike in south china into some villages and visit the local people there, talk with them and share with them about our faith. It has been an amazing time for both of us.

Right now we are in the Netherlands for 6 weeks. Visiting family and friends. We attended Menno's brother's wedding and it was such a beautiful day. We are spending time with family and friends, and also having some time to rest and recover from the crazy season of preparing the camp, the many long days of working and meetings, and the exciting camp itself.

Few pictures:
The beautiful wedding

 Friesland sailing competition, we went to Lemmer to see this one.

 Nice day out at Texel (one of the islands in northern Holland)

 And of course, we bike. :)

Schedule and prayer points:
31/7-11/9 The Netherlands
12/9 onwards - back to HK
 1. Please pray for divine appointments with family and friends to connect heart to heart.
2. Connection with the church and the mission board here in holland.
3. Protection on family and home in HK. (thanks to Zoe our coworker in helping us to take care of our home when we re away.)

What do you do?

Gateway services Asia is a charitable organization founded in Hong Kong in 2006. Gateway's vision is seeing many "gateways" (doors) surrounding china opened for god's purposes to be fulfilled.

Our theme bible passage is from Isaiah 62:10
" Pass through, Pass through the gates!
prepare the way for the people.
Build up, build up the highway!
Remove the stones.
Raise a banner for the nations."

We are, as a gateway city, to open the gates for the nations to come and bless the people of china, build up a highway that links the hearts and the cultures from the east and the west, remove the obstacles (stones) in our unity.  And we would love to see through partnerships, believers from the east and west can be sent out for missions together.

Hong Kong is one of the gateway cities, and in Hong Kong already can see a lot of
Cultures coming together through its time of being a colony of UK and since 1997 handed over back to china. That is also why the gateway camps in the summer is held in Hong Kong.

Our Gateway GPS program has 3 parts: training, camp and outreaches.
We invite leaders from churches to recruit an outreach team, and walk through a whole process of training, camp and outreach together. The reason we invite church team as a unit is because we believe church groups are the people that walk together and grow together for many years. If a person come as an individual, he or she might get all excited about missions and go back to his or her church with really lack of understanding and support. We would love to see the whole church, or at least a whole group experiencing together and be support of each other before and after the training, camp and outreaches.

Each team would plan on an outreaches, usually after the summer camp into serving people. And the camp is a rallying point for celebrating the nations coming together, and for the teams that would partner with another team on outreach, they will meet in the afternoons for planning time for the short mission outreach. We also offer training to teams as earlier in the year to gear up team leader/members on the spiritual and practical side of missions. Our hope is to see teams through training and camp, to be equipped and sent out for mission outreaches, to serve people in or outside of their countries, to bring hope, love and the good news of Jesus to them.

For the training, camp and outreach, Menno is overseeing the operations and logistics and Jan is overseeing the administration and helping in the finances area. And for year around Gateway, they both have many different roles and they would share more ion individual mail messages to you.

Some pictures:
Our daily life at office

The Gateway Camp this year

Worship time

 Children program

 

Praying for the nations

 The admin team helping people check in at the camp

  One of the workshops in the afternoon - Dance

Here are also a couple of pictures from our most recent outreach, after the summer camp.
Biking to visit some villages.

 In one of the villages, we helped the villagers to collect their dried rice.

Who are you?

We are Jan and Menno Stoelwinder.

Menno is from the Netherlands, he moved to HK in January 2008 and stays there since then. He was sent by his church Filadelphia Pinkstergemeente and joining Athletes in Action to Hong Kong. And in Hong Kong their hosting organization is gateway services Asia, where jan joined since the end of 2006. Menno loves to meet people and share life with new and old friends through sports (especially football).

Jan is from Hong Kong. She got to know gateway through the first Gateway Camp in HK in 2005 summer and made friends with gateway staff since then. She has always enjoyed serving in church in her summers and gradually felt the missionary calling in her life through the years. Jan loves music and drama, a recent hobby is cooking, so please pass by for dinner some day so we can prepare our experimental dishes for you!

We got married in February 2010, and since then living in Tseung Kwan O area in Hong Kong. Our home church in HK is the Church of Everlasting Love and our home church in Holland is Filadelphia Pinkstergemeente.