Influence Church
WHILE dale residents were struggling to cope with Storm Ciara and Storm Dennis, two members of the Barnard Castle congregation were experiencing a very different type of weather during a ten-day period in mid-February.
With temperatures reaching 37C, the two, Nathan Thorpe and David Foster, were part of a team from Influence Church taking part in a mission trip to Cambodia.
The team of 12 comprised members from each of the four church campuses at Richmond, Barnard Castle, Penrith and Bishop Auckland.
The leader was Ben Dowding, one of the senior pastors of Influence Church, who has visited Cambodia several times in the last five years to work with one of the many new churches that are springing up there.
Early in the trip the team visited the Tuol Sleng Genocidal Museum, where an estimated 20,000 Cambodians were tortured and exterminated from 1976-79, and also the Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre, which is the most well-known of more than 300 killing fields.
It is estimated that 1.5 million men, women and children were executed along with perhaps as many again dying of starvation and disease. Some 30 per cent of the population and 90 per cent of the Cambodian Church were wiped out. What was seen at these two centres was horrific and can never be forgotten.
In spite what was seen of Cambodia’s past, the country is recovering amazingly well but there is still so much poverty alongside the new found wealth.
The Christian church too has thrived in recent years with a large increase in members.
The team worked with a church in one of the suburbs of Phnom Penh which also runs an outreach into one of the villages an hour away from the city.
In both locations the team ran children’s, youth, ladies and leadership meetings as well as taking the three Sunday services. They also made home visits, distributing food parcels to some of the poorest families and praying with them.
One of the emphases of the church is to provide education and training for young people to enable them to gain good employment and minimise the risk of them being taken for sex trafficking and slavery.
One member of the Barnard Castle congregation who wanted to contribute to the trip donated brochures advertising the town of Barnard Castle.
These brochures were handed over to the school at the village church and were gratefully received. We were assured they would be very useful as the children are learning English and, following the team’s visit, would be of great interest to them.
Further visits to Cambodia are planned and, in addition, members of the Cambodian church will be visiting England and no doubt Barnard Castle.
More information on the mission work of Influence Church, both locally and internationally, can be found on the church website. Influence Church holds weekly services at 5pm each Sunday in the Barnard Castle Methodist Church Hall.
