News from Alan and Alice Osborn

April 2024

Estonia for Jesus

Revive Estonia Continues

The idea of working across denominations to reach Estonia with the gospel started last year and this is now known as Revive Estonia. Different church leaders and missionaries gathered together to make plans and announce 15 months of prayer and fasting leading up to a major event ‘Hope Festival’ in October 2025, with William Graham.

Training with CfaN missionaries on how to preach the gospel and do street evangelism will take place in every county in Estonia. These ‘empower’ weekends have been held in 4 of the 15 counties in the build up. Parnu was one of these first 4 counties and Alice has helped to organise this and also spent many hours building the website timhall.ee. Over these first 4 weekends the gospel was preached on the streets in 4 cities for 4 hours. This effort reached 620 people, 181 of whom received prayer and there were 24 salvations.

This endless snow

And Sauna Culture

It feels that the winter has finally thawed and that spring is winning the fight to break through. Many of you will know that AIan doesn’t really enjoy the cold and had dreamt of being a missionary in a year round warm climate! Now he really appreciates why there is a sauna culture here. It has been helpful to regularly sit in one to avoid the deep cold.

These last few months have been great to be a part of so many different areas of ministry and see how God is shaping our role here. We have helped with prayer ministry, marriage counselling, preaching, teaching, testimonies, worship, healings and street evangelism to name a few! We ministered within EKNK churches, located in Parnu, Kabli, Lihula and Hiiumaa. In Lihula we saw 2 ladies both healed of a frozen shoulder and also great responses to prayer in the other churches, that led to some prophetic words.

We have been really fortunate to visit a John G Lake Ministries 2 day conference in Helsinki, so that we too could receive.

In the UK. As we travel to minister and begin to raise regular financial support we shared our journey and mission, as well as preached, in the Leigh-on-Sea and Princess Risborough Elim churches, which was great fun and good to meet so many wonderful people.

In early May we head off to Sardina for a short budget holiday, so that we have time together and a good rest. After that we head to Harrogate for the annual Elim Leaders Summit and will minister in the Romford and Barking churches either side of the conference. By the way...

Hurray! Alan finished the A1 Estonian language course.

Evangelist Tim Hall

Final Preparations

Revive Estonia leads us to the biggest evangelistic event since 2009, with Australian healing evangelist Tim Hall. The huge Alexela concert hall is booked in Tallinn for 3 evenings of gospel and healing services 28-30 April for ‘Awake Estonia’. Tim then comes to our home town of Parnu on 1st May. There is an opportunity to give to this mission at https://timhall.ee/en/donation-form/ if you are able to.

Working with EKNK

Missions Conference This September

We have presented our initial proposal to EKNK for their International Missions, and we will be putting together a Why Missions? conference in September for Pastors, Leaders and anyone interested to learn more. From this we will shape new processes and training videos that make it easy for any EKNK church to be able to engage with Overseas Missions.

Hosting Mission Teams

Part of this work includes organising short term teams that come to work and minister in Estonia. We are delighted to let you know that we have our first UK missions team coming for 10 days at the end of June. Led by Pastor John and Irene Young, there will be 13 people arriving from the Leigh-on-Sea Elim church and we have been putting together a varied itinerary for them. We can’t wait!

As our work with the EKNK Pentecostal Church continues. We were fortunate to attend their annual Pastors Ball at a Spa Hotel in Narva, which borders Russia. A river runs through the town with passport control on the bridge with a large Estonian flag on one side and Russian on the other.

FIC Courses

Supporting Churches

Several churches, including some Baptists, are running courses themselves right now and we are helping support them to run it as smoothly as possible. This often means running their Freedom Day with them. One church has incorporated the course into their discipleship program and have now run it 4 times!

Behind the scenes we are working on a new full website to be an enhancement for our current landing page which is found at https://freedominchrist.org/estonia.

We also had a small stand at the annual GLS conference and managed to get a few more contacts and raise further interest in the course.

The Russian translation project is coming near completion too.

Pastors Team Visit

Met Region Pastors Team In September

There will be a team of Pastors heading over to us at the end of September, which we are also super excited about. Details for that itinerary are next on our to do list and we may put on a Men’s/Women’s Ministry Day depending on who comes.

The region is also helping us to buy a 9 seater minibus to use in our ministry which we are extremely grateful for. Watch this space!

Village of Hope

First FIC Course

Slightly delayed from November, but now we have helped to embed the course into the programme and work of the Village of Hope, an addiction rehabilitation centre. The first course was for around 40 people, at which we also piloted some of the newly translated Russian materials.

Resources

Learn and support together

We are keen to make disciples and have written books on what we believe is the single most important aspect of Jesus’ teaching – his Kingdom.

Buying these resources will help to support us while you learn more about this either by yourself or with others in a group setting.

Coming Soon!

Excited to announce that the next book in the Kingdom Perspective Series is currently going through proof-reading and will be available soon.

Worldwide at https://kingdomperspective.net
USA at https://amazon.com/author/alanjosborn
UK at https://amazon.co.uk

Partnering with us

How to help us to spread the gospel

We would love for you to partner with us in our calling and gospel mission to Estonia. Could you perhaps consider being part of a short-term mission team into this nation, or even lead a team from your church or region? Either way, we would be excited to help host and be part of arranging your trip. Do please contact us at alan.osborn@elim.org.uk for further details.

Prayer needs

Your prayers are needed! Estonia is one of the top ten most atheistic countries in the world, with both high alcoholism and suicide rates. Please pray for:

• For the ongoing work with EKNK and Vabadus Kristuses
• New and growing relationships working with the UK Elim Churches
• For the Leigh-on-Sea church as they prepare for mission
• For God to provide the regular giving of finances that we need

 

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