Ministry Updates from Jason and Janice Rose

 A couple weeks ago, we began an English story hour. One of our native English speakers reads a couple of stories for children in English and for about an hour we keep them non-native English speakers immersed in the English language. We have done this for two weeks in a row now and  we think it's working pretty well. To begin with we have only invited a few families because we want to build a solid core group before opening it up to the general public.  So far, the response seems to be pretty good.  We ran into one dad on the street shortly after the class and he reported that his son thought the English story hour was "awesome!" It's exciting to see how engaged the  children are in spite of the vast age differences. We split the groups into two by level so that those are the capability of reading will have the opportunity to do so. Of course the goal for us, is to provide a service that's needed, and also meet the spiritual needs of the parents while the c

Another exciting program that we will begin in less than a month, is a parenting seminar. There's a huge need to give parenting tools to parents of young children.  So we  we have invited a family counselor to provide a parenting course, that is uniquely geared towards parents with young children. The goal of this course is to provide parents with young children with the skills they need to  overcome the challenges they face when they put their kids in the public school system, specifically the mandatory kindergarten. Rather then go into the specifics of this uniquely Israeli problem I'll just ask for your prayer's prayers.  We are expecting a mix of people both believers and nonbelievers, due to our advertising on Facebook. Hundreds of people have gone to a website to view the details of this free workshop. You Can too:  www.mercaz.org.il

Kids love to play with their siblings and our kids are no different. In 2014, we were in the USA visiting Jason's parents. They had a wonderful basement with a room dedicated to toys. Our boys loved playing down there and their cousins did too. The problem was that the baby, Eitan (his name means MIGHTY in Hebrew), also loved playing down there with his brothers, but he was too little to do the stairs... way too little! We brought a child gate to put at the top of the stairs and brought the crawling baby into the living room. After the meal, all of the kids went to play downstairs, except for the baby, of course. When his cousins and brothers kept coming and going, climbing over the gate, he followed them. At one point, he was so focused on going downstairs to play with all of the other "big" kids, that he pushed and shoved the gate so hard that it released and glided down the stairs with the baby on top. Later the older cousins described his descent like surfer lying