The Peck Family

This is the web site of JR and Ingrid Peck. We would love to hear from you, we can always be reached at jr.peck@ccci.org.

A full page advertisement was run in the New York Times today that was pretty simple. The top half of the ad, in bold letters reads, “Burning the Qu’ran does not illuminate the Bible”. There is a web address, www.FaithandRespect.com and below that, a list of people supporting the statement. That list includes the president of Campus Crusade for Christ Int., Steve Douglas. Steve also released the statement below.

September 10, 2010

Steve Douglass
Campus Crusade for Christ, President

Statement on Uniting with Christian Leaders of the World
In response to Possible Burning of the Qur’an

The burning of the Qur’an contemplated this week is inconsistent with the response to Islam of mainstream, biblical Christianity. The advertisement published in
today’s edition of the New York Times affirms that this act would not represent my personal views, the views of our organization, or, in my opinion, the position of the vast majority of the leaders of the Christian World.

With any faith, an extreme stance of one person does not necessarily reflect the position of the larger group.

I commend Pastor Terry Jones for the decision that he made not to burn copies of the Qur’an. I pray that he will stick with that decision. Burning copies of the Qur’an will needlessly place many lives in danger.

I don’t really have anything to add of my own. I agree that burning the Qur’an is wrong and does not reflect the teachings of Christ or the leading of the Holy Spirit.

We watched this at our commissioning. It brought tears to my eyes.

Today we finished X-Track, our training to serve cross culturally. It’s been an amazing five weeks of learning and interacting with others. Last night all of us that have finished the program were commissioned. It was a beautiful service that included those of us being sent out being prayed over by the others. We grouped up by area of the world, we were charged, prayed over and then there was a prayer said in one of the languages spoken in the area where we were going. For us that prayer was in Russian.

At the end we sang praise songs and it was wonderful as well. Unknown to me though, my wife was experiencing something a bit difficult. We had the kids and the whole program ran about two and a half hours so we had them in our laps, close by, etc. Rachel was sitting on Ingrid’s lap as we sang a song that included the line, “If you want me to go, I will go”. Rachel looked at her mom and asked, “Do you think God want’s us to go?” Ingrid answered yes and Rachel replied, “But I don’t want to go.” and began to cry. We know parts of this move will be tough for the kids, though we also believe they’ll be very glad later when they can look back on it all. But it can still be tough right now.

There was of course a reception and food afterwords. We were talking to friends, and the kids were playing together. I began to look around to make sure I knew where all the kids were. I found Rachel sitting on a chair next to a young woman.

The young woman next to Rachel, had grown up in Budapest, where we are headed. She had gone to the school our kids will attend. She loved it so much that after college, she returned to the school as a teacher. Last year she taught the 4th grade. Her class will be Rachel’s class mates. She had her camera out and was showing Rachel pictures of all her class mates. She told Rachel each of their names, where they were from and a bit about them. She wont be there as a teacher next year, because she’s following God’s call to a very difficult place. She will be a team leader in a part of the world that may ask all of her, including her life. But last night God put her in the gymnasium of a church in Ft. Collins Colorado to minister to my daughter.

This is why we are going. Not out of obligation or because we think we have anything to offer of ourselves. We are going because there are people in Eastern Europe who have not met our Father who loves us like this. He’s given us more than we can imagine, and as if that wasn’t enough continues to lavish upon us more and more love. We just want everyone to have a chance to experience that love.

Today our Global HR department informed us that we are now officially IRs. (International Representatives) This means we have met the organizational requirements to serve outside the US full time. We still have a lot to do before we move, but this is a very exciting milestone in the overall process.

Now we need to work on setting our support goals. One for the cost of moving our family and another for our cost of living in Hungary. We’ll set those goals and start working on raising the needed funds. You can start praying now for that process as it will probably be the primary factor in determining when we can leave.

God is so good! We are so excited about this.

While it certainly isn’t snowing here, I keep thinking how nice it would be to have a quiet pause but it’s not to be right now. We have promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep. And a lot of miles it will be too. In just under 3 weeks we will be driving from Orlando to Ft. Collins Colorado. That’s 3 full days on the road. We actually spent more time driving last summer, when we went from Orlando to Phoenix, but we didn’t expect to be doing anything that long this year. It’s a bonus.

So what drives us to this craziness? Well it’s a program that CCCI calls XTrack. (We have a thing about “x” around here, I do not know why.) Basically it is cross cultural training for staff preparing to live and serve outside the U.S. long term.

I anticipate the next question this would bring up is, “Where you guys going?” And here it gets a little wishy washy. We might be taking a position at the Eastern Europe Area Office in Budapest, Hungary. The opportunity to do this training just totally worked out, even though we don’t officially know if we are going to Hungary or not. So we are stepping out in faith and heading out to Ft. Collins. (Which is not a bad deal really in the middle of the summer.) I’d intended to not really advertise all this until we knew one way or the other if we were making the big move, but this has forced our hand.

“So when might you be moving to Hungary?” Well we aren’t sure. I don’t think any sooner than January of 2011. So not for a bit, if that soon. We’ll keep you all posted. In the mean time you could pray for safe travel, that we would get a lot out of the training (all 5 of us, the kids get cross cultural training too) and that God would work through the rest of what needs to happen to finalize whether or not we go to Hungary.

I like to pray. I like it even more when I know stuff that I can pray about specifically. I think I’m not alone and to help others to know how they can pray for what’s going on at CCCI, there are a number of resources. I’ll point out a couple here that are new for May.

The GTO prayer calendar is a list of prayer requests for our department (Global Technology Office) and Ingrid put’s together a new one every month. You can see this months by clicking on this link.

Crusade has a Prayer ministry that puts together a prayer journal every month that can be downloaded as a pdf file. Here is a link to the May Global Prayer Movement Journal.

If you really enjoy that – the home page for the Global Prayer Movement is a good one to know. They’ve got some great reports and prayer request up right now from all over the world that were put together for our Global Day of Prayer last week.

This is a cool video for a number of reasons. It’s got good music, it’s ministry taking place in a country that was behind the iron curtain not that long ago and fits nicely with a Biblical admonition. I’ll leave you with that and the video below.

“Better to spend your time at funerals than at parties.
After all, everyone dies
so the living should take this to heart.
Sorrow is better than laughter,
for sadness has a refining influence on us.
A wise person thinks a lot about death,
while a fool thinks only about having a good time.”
Ecclesiastes 7:2-4

While the loss of loved ones is sad, it is an opportunity to reflect on the nature of life and the things that really matter.

I’ve been busy and should have had this up a while ago. This is the last video I’ll be posting here from our conference in Thailand. This is Oumar, our tech leader for Francophone Africa. Oumar lives with his family in Mali and is a joy to be around. I think you’ll pick up a bit of that just watching the video below.

We have a neat job, Ingrid and I. I was reminded of it this week-end as we shared Easter and our wedding anniversary with dear friends of ours that were in town. Due to the fact that we don’t operate alone but rather as part of a large team of ministry partners, we have so many of these great friends that are involved in our life and calling at a very deep level. These people pray for us, care for us and provide the financial support that allow us to put our full focus into our role in fulfilling the mission that God has called us to accomplish.

Our team of ministry partners are the best!

We are always trying to think of ways to improve the communication between the members of that team. For a tech guy, it’s been a pretty low tech endeavor up to this point. Hopefully that is going to be changing. Here are some of the avenues that will be available to keep up with what God is doing with us and to let us know what is going on in your life.

You can always call us, write us, or email us. All the necessary contact info. can be found here at the blog. Those have been in place all along and wont go away. I’ll be working hard to use email more this year to give quicker updates than our monthly newsletters.

We’ll be doing more videos like those in the last few posts and those will be showing up here. You can also see them over at our youtube channel.

You can follow us as well as @jringrid at twitter.

Finally, if you are on Facebook, we would encourage you to be a part of the group In Mission with JR & Ingrid. This will be an easy place for anyone who uses Facebook to keep up with our blog and twitter feed. Both will automatically show up in the group. It isn’t necessary to be our “Facebook Friend” to be in the group, and we’ll try to invite anyone we know might be interested, but if we miss you just ask to be a member and we’ll get you in ASAP.

As Red Green says, we are all in this together. It’s my hope and prayer that these tools will help us all to have a closer sense of team and mission.

This is Sam Varghese. Sam is the IT leader for South Asia and lives in Bangalore India with his wife and sons. Sam shares a bit about himself, his family and his ministry. Sam uses a word that I think would be worth explaining and that is “capacity”. Sam is heavily involved in every aspect of ministry including the operations side of things. Building capacity means putting in place resources, systems or processes that help us to do more ministry. This is a very important aspect of the work that we do.

At the end Sam mentions that he is involved in discipling students, and is trusting God that some of them would become “multipliers”. It is the goal of Campus Crusade for Christ that we not just build ministries but rather that we build movements. That new believers are discipled and become actively engaged in sharing the gospel and discipling others. This is what he means by multipliers.

I’ve worked with and for Sam remotely quite a bit, it was a joy to get to meet Sam face to face and spend some good time together working towards ways to fulfill the Great Commission.

I forgot to mention – that’s Steve Pierce in the background. He is undoubtedly doing something incredibly important during this break in the conference.