Pastor John, you're back home in Knoxville after a lengthy trip to the Middle East, your

first trip to the Middle East.

Can you give us a summary of your travels and share with us some of the things that you

did along the way?

It was a three week trip, Tony.

We went to Ethiopia first and spent a week there, spoken for churches and did a Bible

conference with Jason Meyer, who has replaced me at Bethlehem.

It was thrilling to do the tag team preaching with Jason in a conference on second Corinthians

and to be a part of the churches there and see what God is doing in Ethiopia.

I was so encouraged in several of these churches and how God is at work and saw the importance

of the sovereignty of God and saw the cry of the Ethiopian church to help them train

pastors because the spread of the gospel is huge in Southern Ethiopia and probably

80% of the pastors, there have no theological training and they are very good at evangelism.

They were telling me and yet the need for ongoing training and equipping and deepening of

the leadership for the sake of the people is just huge.

I was just encouraged any listeners to give your life away in Bible teaching and pastoral

enrichment and world missions in this way.

Then we went over to the UAE which is on the Gulf, the Arab Peninsula, the peninsula that

has Saudi Arabia in the middle of the huge mass and then Kuwait up the top and then

coming down to the horn, there's Qatar and UAE and then around the corner is Oman and

Yemen.

These are the Gulf oil states and all kinds of revelations were happening to me about

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