Christian Recovery Ministry
CLI student Lisa Smith has a visionary dream of starting a Christian recovery ministry where she can help her rural community struggling with tons of drug and alcohol addiction.
Read her story below:
My name is Lisa Smith, and I live in rural Western, NC – right in the heart of Southern Appalachia, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I live in the forgotten mission field.
My community is a stark contrast of opulent golf courses surrounded by million dollar homes and barely habitable mobile homes surrounded by wreckages of car parts and discarded children’s toys. Half of our community lives in gated communities, here only a few weeks out of the year to ski or play golf in what is their second, third, or fourth vacation home. The rest of our community barely manages to feed their families from the low paying service jobs afforded by our seasonal visitors. Most employment is seasonal and very low paying.
Many families have simply given up, surrendering themselves to the methamphetamine epidemic. A secret war is waged behind many doors in my community. Families are falling apart because of drugs and alcohol. The initial addiction is just the beginning it’s often accompanied by increased poverty, crime, domestic violence, child abuse…..the fallout touches everyone.
Worst of all, there is a church on every corner, and their doors are NOT open to the men, women, and children who need them the most. At the beginning of this epidemic, a few churches hosted Christian and secular recovery groups. One by one they closed their doors to those most in need. One by one, they ended their recovery groups and told the secular groups that they could no longer host them. The last one shut its door four years ago.
Why? Because the addicts that attended recovery groups sometimes had the audacity to start attending church! No one wanted drug addicts in their pews. These people were too needy. They were too dirty. They didn’t know how to dress the part or put on a “good Christian façade.” They weren’t raised in good Christian homes. They wore jeans and work boots to church. They smoked in the parking lot. They would be a bad influence on the youth. They had no money to tithe. So, one by one, church doors slammed in their faces. They are left to pray to the only God they know, the God of crystal meth.
My community is full of people who desperately need God. I know because my husband is a recovering addict. He was one of the few lucky ones to make it out of this epidemic. He attended a 3-month long Christian rehabilitation center six years ago…..but most families are not so lucky. When an addict looks for recovery, there are few options. Most families don’t have the tens of thousands of dollars needed to attend a secular inpatient rehabilitation center. The Christian rehabilitation center my husband attended requires a 3-month stay. Most families have no way to survive without both spouses working; a 3-month stay is impossible for them.
My dream is to start a Christian recovery ministry that welcomes the lost and points them to the cross just as they are, wherever they are in their walk with Christ, wherever they are in their addiction. I am not naive to the challenges of starting such a ministry. I have witnessed the darkness of addiction in a very close-up and personal way. There are many ministries nationwide that are willing to offer training, but I know that I will need more than training. I will need a strong foundation first. Christian Leaders Institute will help me build a strong foundation upon which I can build a lasting ministry.
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Path of Salvation
CLI student Aquiles Pereyra has had a long journey in finding the path of salvation. He has faced many hardships along the way; he is fired up and ready to follow the path of salvation wholeheartedly.
Read his story below:
I was born in the Bronx, New York, and raised in Washington Heights (Manhattan, New York). My parents were raised Roman Catholic but later converted to Mormonism. They divorced when I was 3 and I was raised by my great grandmother.
At the age of 7, I was sent to the Dominican Republic to live with grandparents because my great grandmother had a stroke. I was enrolled in boarding school. For the next 7 years, I was raised following the Roman Catholic religion. At the age of 12, I was baptized in the Catholic Church. At 14, I was sent to live with my mom in Miami, Fl. She remarried a Jewish man and I began to learn and follow the Jewish religion. At 16, I moved again to live with my dad in New York City. He still followed the Mormon religion and upon my arrival insisted I should be baptized and become a Mormon. To please my father, I was baptized and began to attend the Mormon church. At 17, I moved out because I did not get along with my father’s wife. A year later I decided that it was time to find God on my own. I was invited to a Pentecostal church by my girlfriend at the time (she later became my ex-wife), and instead of finding God and the love of Christ, I found criticism and rejection by the church members.
In December of 2001, I moved back to Florida and started to attend a non-denominational church. Still not being able to find and build my relationship with Jesus, I stopped attending church altogether. For the next 13 years, I lived with a woman who became the mother of my two precious children. In 2013, she was diagnosed with cancer. A year later, she found Jesus as her Savior (I wasn’t as convinced), and for the next three years, God would use her to prepare me for what was to come. It wasn’t until her death on July 25, 2016, that I broke and a week later walked into her church (my home church now, New Dawn Ministries) and truly gave my heart to Jesus, allowing God into my life, and a major transformation has been happening in my life ever since.
I finally received Jesus as my Lord and savior. It has only been five months since her passing, but the Lord has given me peace in knowing that she was saved and left me in the path to salvation. I have felt him calling in my heart to become something greater than what I had become, and this is the reason I have decided to attend CLI.
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His Healing Power
CLI Student Nassang Mimba has faced many challenges, but she has also experienced God’s healing power in her life. She is convicted to share about his healing power and saving grace everywhere.
Read her story below:
I am Nassang “Natty” Mimba; I am a contemporary gospel singer from Cameroon. I bless the LORD for my country Cameroon, for Christianity is not outwardly persecuted as it is in other countries, by His grace ministry work is accepted.
At age 6 I gave my life to Christ. My mom told me a story about baby Jesus, who came into the world, knew no sin but was nailed to the cross for my sins. He died, was buried and on the third day rose from the dead and is in heaving preparing a place and is coming back to take me to be with Him. At that age, I said to myself “what an amazing thing for someone to die for me so that I can have eternal life and all I need to do is confess and ask Him to come live in my heart.” Of course, she painted a beautiful picture of what heaven was like and I made up my mind I wanted to be part of it. So I made the prayer and accepted Him as my LORD and personal savior from sin. In my early 20s, I did stray, but I thank the LORD for His mercies and for bringing me back to Him.
My dream in ministry is to change as many lives as I possibly can, bringing lost souls to Jesus through music and the gospel. Showing them that He is the one “thing” they cannot do without. Evangelist is one word I identify with the most.
I have never shared this publicly but let me tell you right now, God’s hand is not too short to save, to heal and to redeem. I saw this first hand when His healing power healed me from Hepatitis B. A few months after I was diagnosed and on medication. I kept telling myself “I don’t want to keep doing this, I don’t want to keep taking the meds, God, please heal me, ” And He did with one touch. So when it gets hard, I think of all He’s done, nd I get the strength to keep going. This is how I got prompted to go into ministry, to thank Him with my life.
One of the challenges in my country are bad roads. This I think makes it hard for and discourages ministry leaders to want to take the word further and deeper.
The work my church puts into my spiritual life through the word, prayer, and encouragement has gone a great deal to help me in my ministry calling. My mom has also been a great support in my ministry calling, she saw the gift of revelation in me before I could even come to acceptance with it. Her teachings of the word of God to me and her prayers built a great foundation in my walk with God which she still continues to do until this day, she also introduced me to a mentor which is one thing I believe is very vital to have as a revival leader. My mom has and is the greatest spiritual aid I have ever had.
A schorlaship at CLI will get me fully trained and equipped for the realization of my ministry dream. Please pray that the LORD gives me the grace to go throw the tests in my walk with Him and the mission inorder that I come out stronger.
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