Global Outreach

Phil and Catherine Dow and their two daughters, Emma and Sophie serve as the Headmaster at the Black Forest Academy (BFA) in Kandern, Germany. Black Forest Academy is a Christian school whose students are made up primarily of children of missionary families serving abroad. Previously they served for twelve years at Rosslyn Academy in Nairobi, Kenya. God recently led them to this new work in Germany. The Dows sum up what their work means at BFA by saying, “We feel like the work that God has called us to at Black Forest Academy is the culmination of everything He has been doing in our lives to this point. We can’t imagine a more significant Kingdom role than the one that we get to play at BFA – both in discipling and developing the next generation of global Christian leaders and in supporting missionary work in some of the most challenging places in the world, by educating the children of these missionaries.” Please keep the Dow family in your prayers as they advance the gospel through their ministry in Germany.

Joe and Denise Holman, former pastor and wife of BRBC, became missionaries to Bolivia in 2006. After 15 years in Bolivia, the Holmans have moved to Ghana (January 2023). As always, evangelism is a priority. But their primary focus in Ghana is the training and discipleship of national pastors, evangelists, and church planters. This involves teaching courses in seminaries and Bible Schools, speaking at conferences and preparing twice weekly radio broadcasts. Pray for their adjustment to a new country and that their two teenage girls will settle in well.

Luke is a general surgeon at the Bach Christian Hospital; while Nancy is a nurse and does ultrasounds for female patients.

Bach Christian Hospital is an outreach of TEAM; which describes the ministry in the following way:

“BCH was established to promote spiritual; mental and physical wholeness for people living in the mountainous regions of northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. Its services are offered regardless of status; religion; gender; race or income. Since its earliest days BCH has provided medical care for people living in the underserved valleys of Kaghan and Kohistan.

The TEAM website for BCH can be found here.

The Pakistan Children’s Rescue is a direct outreach to the unsaved children in the worst of Pakistan’s ghettos – the brick kilns. The project’s primary content goal is to expose the children to God’s salvation, by bringing them, and when relevant their families, out of the brick kiln ghettos over a multi-year process with the goal to be totally self sufficient at the conclusion of three years. The center will be foster caring for 10 boys initially and hope to be able to look after a maximum of 15 boys.

For more information, pictures, and a video click HERE.

Dr. Ambrose serves the people of Pakistan in many ways. One way he serves is at the Bach Christian Hospital as not only a physician, but also the medical superintendent. Another ministry founded by Dr. Ambrose is Healing Journeys Foundation which is working on a small scale, but in a really fruitful manner through medical mission and compassionate serving. Their medical outreach in the outskirts of Faisalabad is a ray of hope for so many in the area who otherwise can’t afford a trip to the hospital. Medical grounds are the best way to gather people to provide them the Word of God. Salvation is preached directly and indirectly through their medical work. The children’s center at Lahore, also founded by Dr. Ambrose, is effectively nurturing 8 boys from the brick kilns. Whenever he sees those boys and remembers where they came from and what situation they were in when he first met them, his heart is filled with joy and gratitude. He feels that those boys are the fruit of his ministry. All of them are growing not only physically, but spiritually as well.

For more information about the Pakistan Children’s Center, pictures, and a video, click HERE.

Pastor Saint’s ministry has grown to thirty-three local churches throughout Nigeria. Pastor Saint and his denomination pastors lead with a large emphasis on evangelism and church planting. Pastor Saint is also a supported missionary of Blue Ridge Bible Church. One of the most interesting methods of evangelism used by his ministry is it’s bus ministry. It has an agreement with a major bus company in Nigeria to allow their evangelists to ride the buses between cities in Nigeria where they preach and lead hymn singing among the people who are traveling. Christians living in Nigeria suffer serious persecution at the hand of Islamists. Boko Haram, an Islamist terror group prevalent in northern Nigeria, frequently attacks Christian villages burning homes, killing males, and kidnapping females. Boko Haram also instigates attacks by Fulani Muslim herdsmen on Christian farmers in northern and central Nigeria to kill or drive Christians away from their farms so that the Fulani can use their land for their animals. Pastor Saint’s ministry  lost eight evangelists to martyrdom in a bus burning incident at the hand of Boko Haram in 2013 leaving behind seven widows and twenty-five children. In 2018, his ministry lost eleven men and five boys to martyrdom again by Boko Haram when their village was attacked in the wee hours of the morning. Homes were set on fire, and men and boys were shot and hacked to death with machetes as they ran out of their homes in the middle of the night. Eleven widows and thirty-six children were left without husbands and fathers in this attack. Pastor Saint himself has survived two attempts on his life by Islamic terrorists. Blue Ridge Bible Church and Smyrna Ministries International partnered in helping the first group of the families of the martyrs, and Blue Ridge individuals and families have assisted the families of the martyrs in the second case. Smyrna Ministries provides funding for food, clothing, safe housing, and education for the families of the martyrs until they can get back on their feet. As for the first set of eight widows, they are now fully resettled. Three are now seamstresses that sew female dresses. Two of them are in the catering business of frying buns, Cowpea cakes called Akara and fried corn balls.  Pastor Saint prays that one day a member of BRBC will travel there and taste some of these delicacies because BRBC and Smyrna Ministries gave these widows and their children their lives back. Another sells vegetable leaves and okra in the market and one is engaged as a house helper and nanny to a couple that came back from overseas. The youngest of them was married and we to a village to stay with her husband.

Smyrna Ministries International is an organization dedicated to praying for and financially assisting persecuted Christians in the Muslim context throughout the world. Smyrna partners with Christian ministries in nearly 20 countries throughout the Muslim world.

The passion of Smyrna Ministries is to 1) provide tools that will help you prayerfully intercede for Christians who are being persecuted under Islam; and 2) serve the persecuted Church by providing our international partners with the materials and funds they need to minister effectively.

Find out more at smyrnaministries.org

BRBC is privileged to be connected with a number of national missionaries through Smyrna Ministries. We currently support pastors in Nigeria and Syria and are blessed to be a partner with their ministries to local believers, widows & orphans, and refugees, among many other areas. We partner financially, in prayer, and in one-to-one communication. The faith of these extraordinary brothers and sisters has tangibly blessed us and helps to build up our faith.

Steve counts Blue Ridge Bible Church as his home church in the U.S.  He has been ministering for many years as a single man to the French population, in Normandy, France.  Steve’s primary emphasis is to reach the French populace with the Gospel.  Because of France’s history of revolution connected with the church, it is very difficult to engage them in spiritual conversation.  The average citizen typically turns off anything related to religion.  So by friendship development, avenues for sharing the Gospel are sought.  He also hosts groups of American college-age students at the center to introduce them to the French culture and customs.  Over the years, BRBC has sent several short-term mission groups to Normandy to participate in the center’s work, and future groups from BRBC are in the development stage by the BRBC Global Outreach Committee.