SPIRITUAL LIFE at Faith


Senegal Thanksgiving 2011

For the second consecutive year during the Thanksgiving holiday, Faith Christian High School sent a team of students and adults to Senegal to join students and staff from our partner school, Dakar Academy in a series of major outreaches. This year’s team consisted of twenty-four students and seven sponsors who selflessly chose to forgo the break from school and the festivities of the holiday in order to serve the people of Senegal in a variety of ways.

With the help and expertise of Dr. and Mrs. Steitz the FCA team was able to provide medical care for hundreds of street children, some of whom may never before have seen a doctor or had a checkup.  The students from our team took an active role and did an outstanding job demonstrating the love of Christ through this medical outreach.  Some of the students played with the children before and after their checkups.  Others took temperatures, and helped check the children in and out of the clinic.  Several very brave students spent the day cleaning out the wounds and infections that plagued so many of the children we saw.  We were also able to show the Jesus Film to a number of the students after they left the clinic.

In addition to our medical clinic for the street children, our team was also able to work alongside missionaries in Dakar caring for orphaned children, performing upkeep on ministry facilities, and even providing medical care to the missionary community.

From November 25-27, the FCA team split into smaller groups and engaged in three major projects to support missions in Senegal. The first outreach, consisting of fifteen FCA team members and one hundred and twenty three Dakar Academy students, put on a massive evangelical campaign in the village of Niakhar.  This evangelism campaign reached out to the Serer people group and assisted Senegalese Christians in their effort to plant churches.  The second project consisted of 8 FCA team members and missionary, Aaron Toombs, at a mission called Beer-Sheba. Beer-Sheba is a Christian initiative, which seeks to teach local Serer farmers up-to-date and practical farming methods while sharing the gospel with them. The project operates a 250-acre farm and focuses on dry land farming applications. The FCA students assisted in a variety of projects including clearing land and planting trees and shrubs.  The third project consisted of eight FCA team members working alongside missionaries in an area called the Banlieue. The Banlieue is a series of the poorest neighborhoods and slums surrounding the city of Dakar. They contain the largest concentration of people in the country, with a large population of educated young adults.  It is a community overtaken by unemployment and poverty. It is a nearly unreached mission field, with a Christian population of less than two hundred in a community of nearly three million people. The FCA team purchased the necessary supplies to renovate one of the local schools. As a result of their work, one of the local pastors was able to give Bibles to twelve major community leaders in the Banlieue.

As a part of our trip we were blessed to be able to provide $4000 for the purchase of supplies for the ministries we served with, including critical medicine and vaccines.  Our team was also proud to deliver the water filtration system purchased by our middle-school students, and the merry-go-round purchased for Dakar Academy by out elementary-school students. 

More than anything else however, we marveled at what God did that no one else could do.  God orchestrated events beyond human control to change plans and send our evangelism campaign to the village of His divine choosing where the Chief accepted Christ!  God knew that the missionaries’ old water filtration system was going to break beyond repair literally minutes after they began using the new one that the FCA team delivered!  God knew that the outreach team would see some particularly difficult medical cases and that we would need a doctor with us!  Our FCA team was humbled and honored to be part of God’s work!  We thank the Faith Community for all of it’s support these two years, we thank God for showing up in amazing ways, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Dakar Academy in the years to come!

Click Here for Senegal YouTube Video

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Members of Faith Christian’s and D’Evelyn’s boys basketball teams come together at halfcourt for a prayer after the Eagles defeated the Jaguars 74-61 on Dec. 20 at D’Evelyn. Faith, a private Christian school in Arvada, has won four straight Class 3A boys hoops titles.