CHURCH'S NEW OR OLD?

This is the old church where we first started having our mission Sunday school a little over 6 years ago. Notice all the old wrecked cars down the hill in back of the church? The children used to love to play on those, jumping from one to the other. Many got hurt with glass cuts and bruises and it seemed we were always out there convincing them to stay at the church' especially on nice days. Since this is on a hill, children used to slide down the hill from which I was standing on when I took this photo. They would use cardboard box's, hoods from the cars and some even had plastic sleds.

This church had very little sitting space, well, around the edge of the inside of the church is orange carpet and that's where everyone sits. That is the way all the Native American services,(meetings like they call them) are held. Notice the tile cross in the floor? at the top of the cross is a fire pit used for their coals and cedar burning and smudging. The only heat in this shell of a building is the old barrel wood stove that you can see at the bottom right.
Since this church was situated quite a ways off the main road, there was a lot of mud around and the floor was normally very dirty and dust covered. This picture was taken after we had spent hours sweeping, washing and waxing this floor in preparation for the VBS week.

Here is the church all decorated and ready for VBS!

This is our new church building where we moved to two years ago this month. It needs paint and some repair and this will hopefully all be complete by summer of 2008.

This is the inside! Notice the difference? It has a alter, cross and flags, pew's and even a organ and Baptismal font. We used portable gas heaters for the first year but for the last year one of our mission team workers is a electrician and volunteered his time and materiel's to install electric baseboard heat. We have those on a timer so they turn on early morning on the Sundays that we have church and Sunday school. Much easier then taking fire wood, paper and matches, getting there real early to start the wood stove to heat up the cold church building

This is a old Episcopal church that hadn't been used for 12 years. It cleaned up real nice!

This picture was taken on Palm Sunday 2006.

This is the alter at our Easter celebration in 2007! The candles are nice and the children love learning and taking turns being acolyte's.
So now you see the difference in the buildings. This new site also has the church hall for Sunday school and our meals. It is now furnished with tables and chairs, a fridge, stove and even a microwave for when we have popcorn during the Bible DVDs from NEST.

They are very nicely done animated bible lessons. We usually show one on special occasions or every 4Th time we are there.