Orphan Summit VI Report from Dennis Rainey
Just received this email from Dennis Rainey who is at the start of Orphan Summit VI. This is exciting for me as I was here at FamilyLife when the first Orphan Summit was called by FamilyLife’s Hope for Orphans and 38 people got together at FamilyLife HQ to brainstorm ways to work together to meet the needs of orphans worldwide. After the first few, the group outgrew our room and has been moving around to various other venues. Here’s Dennis’ post along with a really lousy pic from his iPhone 
What started at FL 6 years ago with 38 people representing a couple of dozen Christian organizations, is now meeting in MPLS at a leading church in the Twin Cities. I walked in and saw the crowd and had chill bumps as 1100 leaders from all over the world are here. Amazingly 80% of these leaders are first time attenders. Just outside the auditorium there are more than 80 different organizations who have booths. Give thanks to God for how God has used Paul Pennington and his team to be a catalyst for this movement of God to continue to expand.The former First Lady of Guatemala is speaking about the spiritual condition of her country and explaining that the country is poor because they have followed ancient religions and not read the bible and worshipped the One True God. She shared how she became a believer in Christ at the age of 25 and how she became of single parent of two after her husband was killed. She remarried a man 30 years ago who was a politician and she began working with the street children of her country. There are thousands. Faces that are dirty. Sad. Violent. Gangs. Drugs. Abuse. Bad memories of their father. She invited them to come to a safe place, away from the streets…first came 1 child, then 17, now 500. They now have very old houses that house them and volunteers that take care of them and changing their hearts by introducing them to Jesus Christ.
This morning Paul called an early breakfast meeting of some of the leaders of the largest orphan care organizations here to discuss how we could partner and help a nation who wants to address the needs of their children and build families. Interestingly, ALL agreed that if the church doesn’t doesn’t address the needs of families, the orphan crisis is destined to perpetuate itself. All this has HUGE implications GLOBALLY for all the resources we are creating and will launch this August/fall.
Aslan is on the move.
Dennis
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