GLOBAL MISSIONS
Learn more about what’s happening around the globe through the efforts of our global mission partners.
MAKING A DIFFERENCE
Our Mission Partners
India Transformed
India is a major emphasis in our global outreach. We partner through India Transformed! to minister to the whole person. We sponsor children’s programs, women’s empowerment centers, community transformation centers, and building a new college. Learn more about how you can pray, give, or serve. Contact Pastor Roger Theimer.
College Construction
We are helping build and begin United International College in Bangalore, India. This college will make affordable and accessible higher education for many of those in lower social-economic groups. Construction is underway and anticipates completion by May 2025. Financial gifts are being applied toward final construction costs or a scholarship fund. To get an inside look at construction progress and hear from some of the students, go to this link: https://youtu.be/EpkcOToorNk.
Cambodia
King of Kings has worked together with other Lutheran churches and our Concordia Schools toward the courageous goal of building a school and starting a church in the Prey Veng province of Cambodia. This is a Christian school in a village that is 95% Buddhist. It opened in the fall of 2023 with 225 students and currently has 319 students. Already they need two more classrooms. The newly formed church, Life of Christ Lutheran Church also meets in the wonderful facility.
King of Kings works closely with Garuna ministries and partners with them to assist in leadership development. We helped fund the building of a training center known as LISA, Luther Institute of Southeast Asia. We have visited them on a mission trip, developed personal relationships, and continue to support training more leaders.
For $30/month, your congregation and school families can sponsor a child attending the Omaha Garuna School in Cambodia! Please go to the Garuna website to set up your sponsorship — and receive your child’s brochure shortly thereafter! You can also sponsor a teacher for $100/month.
Children's HopeChest
We partner with Children’s HopeChest to sponsor a CarePoint in Los Amates, Guatemala. We are excited about our many opportunities to be generous in the poorest country in Latin America. Over 120 members are sponsoring a child in this community. This also funds the holistic ministry that gives the gospel while helping empower an entire community. We strive to send two mission trips per year. Investigate upcoming trips through the link below.
Africa
The Lutheran Church of South Sudan (LCSS) is a refugee church body displaced by political conflict and genocide in their homeland of South Sudan. They have temporarily moved to Gambella, Ethiopia where they have set up a seminary, a college, and church. Trained pastors from this location have been sent all over that region of Africa. Many people are coming to Christ!
Through our partnership, we are helping President Jordan Long of the LCSS invite Lutheran pastors from America to take a short-term mission trip and teach a seminar at their seminary. Such friendships and relationships benefit both partners who see how God brings different cultures to work together for the advancement of the gospel. These friendships help seminary students find sponsors to help them financially.
Vietnam
Thang and Alyssa Lai are our mission partners in this Communist country. Thang is a Vietnamese pastor and Alyssa uses her background in agribusiness for ministry. Alyssa is a former member of King of Kings whose mission heart took her to Vietnam. Thang and Alyssa have planted a new church and are successfully reaching out to the beautiful people of Vietnam with the organization One Collective. Learn more how you can pray, give, or serve. Contact Mission Support Team Leader: Ryan Reimers.
Kids Kount Publishing
Kids Kount Publishing is part of King of King’s global outreach to serve churches and individuals with online resources for children and family ministry. Kingdom Quest is our version of small group/large group Sunday school. We supply 580 lessons from age two through grade six. “Kids Church” is a companion curriculum. Our family ministry curriculum is “Faith Legacy Series.” Extensive children’s ministry training tools and videos are available. All lessons point to Christ and are delivered in creative and relational ways. With over half a million website hits, we recorded 86 countries visiting our site last year. Our newest project is “Confirmation Plus,” gathering the best practices in Confirmation Instruction and making them available to all.
The complete Spanish curriculum is available as well as translations into Chinese.
We currently are updating our Kingdom Quest material. Suggestions? Email Trish Weander: [email protected].
Questions? Contact: Dr. Roger Theimer: [email protected]
Hand of Hope
Hand of Hope is a partner ministry organization that focuses on spreading the love of Jesus to the poor, uninsured and underinsured after they have experienced a natural disaster. Team members come from various churches, mostly in the Midwest and travel to disaster areas when the overwhelming job of rebuilding is at hand. Not only do they use their manual labor and varying levels of construction skills, but they also take time for one-on-one relationship building and prayer. Learn more how you can pray, give or serve. Contact Mission Support Team Leader: Jon Nelson.
Christ for the City
The vision of Christ for the City International (CFCI) is that there would be no place without a witness, no church without a vision, and no person without hope. If you are not able to take a short-term mission trip at King of Kings, we encourage you to contact Christ for the City and ask about trip openings that are with other churches. Christ for the City has a well-developed mission strategy that is holistic and develops local leaders as the gospel is shared. Their presence in other countries is widespread.
Please contact Chip Anderson for more information on local or global mission opportunities.
Orphan Grain Train
Orphan Grain Train distributes relief items at places of need throughout the country and the world. We are currently remodeling our missions room so that we might take donations of clothing, household items, and more.
New England
We partner with Gina (Giesselmann) Mueller, who grew up at King of Kings and now serves as a missionary in New England. She is leader in the missional movement called 3DM. Their vision at 3DM to equip the church to live out the Way of Jesus more fully and so help to ignite a Great Awakening. To this end, they invest in leaders of established churches, church plants, megachurches, house churches, parachurch organizations, denominations, businesses, and families to build a discipling culture that produces a missional movement with the power to change the world. Simply put, 3DM exists to put Jesus-Shaped discipleship and mission back into the hands of everyday people! Learn more how you can pray, give or serve. Contact Mission Support Team Leader: Tony and Carol Giesselmann. Contact Gina directly.
GLOBAL MISSIONS TRIPS
Mission Trips & Faith Trips
King of Kings strives to equip believers with a global perspective of the church. Christ called us to be one body of believers. Part of that is partnering with people and ministries in other countries and cultures. Together we can do much more than alone. Short-term trips, or Mission Trips, help develop those relationships that benefit both parties. Certainly, lives are transformed.
We also offer Faith Trips, building community among travelers who enrich their faith and their relationships by touring the likes of “Footsteps of Jesus,” the “Footsteps of Paul” or other life enriching travels.
Check out our Mission and Faith Trip page to learn more about upcoming opportunities.
WHAT'S HAPPENING
The Latest News & Updates
I long to see you, so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong, that is to say we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith!
Romans 1:11-12
Big news!
This news has been in development for quite some time now, but now that it is official, I’m excited to announce that I will be changing supporting organizations! Our previous organization was called Resource Exchange International, and this organization is called One Collective (Link to an awesome video!, Link to learn more about them). They are similar in that they focus on holistic community transformation, but One Collective is a bit bigger and able to provide a bit more support to our business, family, and kingdom-building ambitions.
For those support us financially, the link to update your giving is here: https://give.onecollective.org/30US3784
This transition and training will also be a great opportunity to refresh our funding. Life happens, circumstances change, and people can’t always continue financially supporting us, so ongoing fundraising is also part of our work here in Vietnam. We can’t live here long-term without such generous financial partners. If this is something that interests you, or you just want to learn more about our ministries here in Vietnam, I (Alyssa) would love to meet up with you this summer! Each of you will likely receive a personal e-mail from me in the coming weeks about dates I will be near to your city. I look forward to catching up face-to-face!
Thank you all! God bless.
Prayer Requests
-Peace for all the travel details to work out
-God would pave the way for our fundraising efforts
-Being separated for 7 weeks will be hard on our family.
-The details of transitioning organizations and training
-Planning for the church-wide retreat which will happen in July is underway! Pray that our members will be refreshed and matured through these efforts.
The Garuna Christian School is thriving, teaching over 300 students each day! In fact, it’s growing so quickly that we conducted a mini-campaign and are now adding an additional two-classroom building on the Prey Veng campus. The foundation has been completed and the walls are up. The expected completion date is in August.
With pledges from 3 Omaha partners, we were able to begin the project. There was $28,000 remaining from the original building and an additional $30,000 pledged which will pay for this additional space. Check out the full update here.
- Generous Gift from Bright Funds: An anonymous supporter made a recommendation to support a cause in India during a corporate acquisition that raised $78,787 from 144 donors via Bright Funds. This gift was dedicated to supporting the Women’s ARISE! Empowerment Program. This support allows more women to undergo training and addresses pressing needs, like purchasing new equipment and enhancing our training. These mothers will now be able to support their families with a decent income. A heartfelt big thank you for this great introduction that resulted in such amazing generosity!
- Championing Donors: Two donors converged to cover all the items on our Special Needs List, significantly enhancing our Children’s Program with improved technology, educational games, nutritious meals, and transportation capabilities.
- Scholarship Endowment Fund: We received a bequest gift that will help build the nursing program at the college and will seed the College Scholarship Endowment Fund. Contact us to learn more about setting up an Endowment Fund to honor a loved one.
- New Donor Sponsors 24 children: When asked why, we were told God decided the best investment he could make was to sponsor 24 children for $1,000 a month. Imagine the impact this gift will have on these children that will give them opportunities for a promising future!
- The Goat Hope Project: Initiated by King of Kings Lutheran Church in Omaha as part of plan to create a sustainable future, this pilot program will lead the way to create sustainable income, feed families and provide nutritous milk for children. Be sure to read the touching stories below about the widows who have found hope and encouragement in their time of great sorrow.
- 70 New Child Sponsorships hail from India: A new campaign directed at local staff, teachers and friends of our partner has launched to create a plan for a sustainable future. Congratulations for a successful new venture!
Overall, the foundation work has been fully completed.
Local and Regional Updates:
- We hosted a summer retreat in our home for New England senior pastors and their spouses. It was fantastic! We’re praising the Lord for how we saw joy and refreshment returning for so many as they encountered God’s presence and the goodness of being together.
- The teens we are discipling locally have been training in how to hear God’s voice for themselves, how to share God’s story, and how to talk about what God has done in their lives with someone who doesn’t know Jesus yet.
- We launched a 10-month gap-year program for young adults that is high levels of discipleship investment as well as missionary training. We are excited to be recruiting high-capacity young leaders for next year and praying for financial provision to continue this program!
- Our team has been coming alongside Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary to help them revamp their discipleship experience for seminary students. We’ll be helping them lead a training for students for the third year in a row.
- This fall we will be hosting a couple workshops for New England pastors and their teams. We are praying the Lord brings the right people in the room who are ready to make missionary disciples that will live like Jesus in their neighborhoods and workplaces and everyday spaces!
Prayer Requests:
- We’re doing some rebuilding of our team out here in New England. Pray in the right leaders who have capacity to lead both locally and regionally.
- Our team and the pastors we are training have been experiencing quite a bit of spiritual warfare! It makes sense — New England has six of the top 10 most post-Christian cities in the United States, so the enemy is pushing back hard as we make disciples who are falling more in love with Jesus and bringing people to know him!
- In the coming year, we will be building new training for everyday people to learn effective ways to naturally live on-mission in their everyday lives and see their friends and neighbors follow Jesus and make new disciples. We are in great need of financial resources to get this training created — pray the Lord brings in every resource we need to train as many people as possible!
- We are prayer-walking our neighborhood regularly and asking God for favor with our neighbors — join us in that!
- Our kids are gearing up for a new school year. Addy is starting her senior year and will be applying to colleges this fall. Declan is starting his sophomore year in high school. Pray protection over our family, our home, our marriage, and our relationships as we continue to join God in what he’s doing here!
At 8:00PM on March 24, 2023, Rolling Fork, Miss., was mowed over by an EF4 Tornado. With little to no notice, it cut through the middle of town, destroying many structures and killing over a dozen people. Hand of Hope Omaha led three mission teams of nearly 90 volunteers from February 24 to March 16, focused on rebuilding the community.
Visit the site for pictures. https://www.handofhopeomaha.org/rolling-fork-mississippi.html
Cambodia Mission partnership Updates
Springing Into Action in Prey Veng
Yes, it’s officially spring in the USA…and it’s nearing the “hot season” in Cambodia. But that doesn’t slow down the construction crew. Once they get started, they move quickly! Check out the progress made in recent weeks!
Local and Regional Updates
- Our teen discipleship group is committed to praying every day for their friends who don’t yet know Jesus.
- They hosted monthly fun nights at our house that were all about inviting friends they’ve been praying for and loving each other’s friends well. We had an outdoor movie night with a full popcorn bar, a pool/river party, and a bonfire night. Everyone is hungry to be invited into community.
- We are launching a new gap year program for young adults to be discipled and trained. We have a couple of young women joining us in Maine in two weeks!
- We had 10 pastor/church planter couples come for a retreat in July. It was great rest, fun, and encouragement for the season of discipleship ahead!
- We have a number of New England churches in a 2-year learning community cohort with us. This journey together helps the pastor teams live into missional rhythms themselves and then disciple others. We’re excited to watch how God uses them!
- We are continuing to build partnerships with like-minded leaders across the region. We love linking arms with others who recognize we’re all in it together!
Pray With Us
- Declan broke his ankle a few weeks ago. Pray for a full and speedy recovery and encouragement for our active kiddo who is missing out on a lot of fun while he heals. Jeff’s car is toast and we need a new roof on our home asap. Pray in miraculous provision in the form of cars 🙂 and protection over our home and all the things.
- The young girl that has been living with us for the past four months needs a more permanent living situation. Pray in a creative solution that sets her up to thrive!
- School for Addy and Declan looks different this year. Addy is doing full dual enrollment college courses for her junior/senior year and Declan has joined a homeschool co-op with our people.
- Pray with us that God would continue to hold them as they keep saying yes to Jesus on this crazy missional life.
- Pray protection over each of us, our home, our marriage, and our relationships as we continue to join God in what He’s doing here!
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