Here is the article mentioned in December’s partner letter:

Greg-Lydia-Trainor-A-King-Is-Born

The address on the pdf is out of date.  Please click on “Contact” in the blog if you need our current mailing address.

Unlike our mental picture of refugee camps, older camps (like this one in Thailand serving Burmese refugees from Myanmar) look more like a crowded town in the refugees’ homeland.  This is much different than the hastily constructed tent cities that we more often see on the news.  The millions of refugees in these camps are overwhelmingly non-Christian.  Refugee camps provide a unique opportunity to preach the simple message of the Gospel, call the residents to conversion and Baptism.  The new converts can be discipled and formed as preachers.  The average stay in such a camp is 17 years!

Read Greg’s two-page October article on refugee camps, converts, and discipling Gospel workers in them:

October 2020 Article on Refugees

God’s call in times of peril is for his people to repent.  It is easy to feel like we could get out of the current mess if the other people could please get their acts straight.  But God calls his people to act first, to humble themselves, to seek his presence and repent of their sin.  We must take a fresh look at our lives and seek God if we are to expect a great healing in our land.

This is the theme of Greg’s article:  06-2020 reprint Heal Our Land

Here is an article that Greg wrote some years back concerning the practical benefits of Baptism.  Many young parents today see  Baptism as an outdated ritual of Church membership and don’t even have their babies Baptized.  This article shows the practical, powerful benefits of Baptism.  These benefits are even more exciting when considered in light of the current pandemic.

To open the article, double-click on it and it will open in a browser or a PDF program on your computer.  Then right click the article to save it on your hard drive.  This will allow you to attach it to an email to anyone with whom  you want to share the article.

giving baby the best

Here is the video mentioned in this month’s partner letter.  You can also find it on  your smart tv by searching YouTube for “Trainor Marsh Harbour Hires”.  Please be sure to use the “HiRes” version on a big screen tv.

The video contains a 10 min preaching clip and slides from our visit to the Catholic school in Marsh Harbour, Abaco, Bahamas in 2017.  Click on icon on bottom right of video to view full-screen.

A pin from my Pinterest board called “Inspiration.”  This is one of many word pictures that I found inspiring.  Like this one, most are based on scripture.   There are more than 900 pictures on this board alone.

You can see the board here:  Inspiration Board

Over the years, we have trained more than 2,000 people in our week-long School of Evangelization in conjunction with local Catholic dioceses around the world. Participants spend last two afternoons in pairs in streets and homes preaching the simple message of the Gospel and praying for the sick to be healed in Jesus’ name.

This map shows where our family has preached in red and in blue are the countries that the small group of ten or so who took on teaching responsibilities in that program have preached in countries that we have not yet reached. These people have gone on to their own ministries and are productively doing the work of preaching the Gospel and building the Kingdom of God. There is no telling what a map that included all 2,000 would look like. 🙂

We first went into the foreign mission field in 1990. Caleb was less than one year old when we went to the Czech area of Czechoslovakia. To the east I’ve been 12 time zones away in Siberia where we had a School of Evangelization for the Roman Catholic Diocese which had 33 parishes in nine time zones at the time. To the west, Lydia and I have been as far as 8 time zones away in Independent Samoa where I preached in a rally on the Parliament front lawn, we taught a School of Evangelization for the National Youth Council (broadcast on national radio) and preached regional rallies for the high school aged youth.

This map shows the provinces of Canada that we’ve preached in over the years:  Manitoba and Ontario. One Lent, Greg preached four three day missions and a two day mission in 15 days in Manitoba. Major league cold for a Florida boy.

The two day mission was in Winnepegosis. The first night (Saturday), there had been heavy snow and no plowing. We had 14 people that lived close enough to walk there. The next afternoon (Sunday), we had about 70 people from about five different denominations. A couple in their forties told me, we’ve lived here our whole lives except for moving away for university. You are the first mission preacher that would drive all of the way out here to our little church. We always try to at least do a short mission at the mission church locations when we are preaching in the larger parish associated with it.

I was so pleased with the warm coat that someone had him me out of their going-to-Goodwill box when he was in TX just a few weeks before the missions. Two old women told him at one of the parishes, “You are from Florida. We feel so bad for you. All you brought is that little Spring coat!”

In 1985, when our hearts were ablaze with the call from Mark 16:15, Catholic lay evangelists Bruce and Linda Simpson invited on the road to share in their ministry of preaching.  In that time, we had a chance to do the work of preaching  the Gospel.  Perhaps more importantly, we saw that we could do it on our own.

The next summer, we set up our own itinerary and preached in Florida and Louisiana.  That summer (1986), Greg left teaching and we began to preach full-time.   Since the first time we loaded up our little Toyota with us and the two kids (ages three and one) to go and preach, we’ve had a lot of stops along the way.  The map shows the states in which we have preached the simple message of the Gospel in parishes and called people to conversion to Jesus.