Steve and Carol Smith CÔTE D’IVOIRE, W. AFRICA Converge  Worldwide  •  BGC Steve and Carol serve in a three-fold ministry:

1. HEALTH – strategic use of compassion ministries

El Rapha Health Center: healing the body, healing the soul - 70 workers and 250-300 patients a day - Services: maternity, consultations, pharmacy, lab, chaplaincy, dental,

eye clinic & surgery, AIDS program, nutrition, etc. - Holistic care (mind, body, & spirit) and sharing Jesus' love Community Extension Program - healing families and communities - Nutrition, vaccinations, health education - Micro loans & small business training - Evangelism

2. HARVEST - training nationals as pioneer missionaries

- Collaboration of CWW with an Ivorian mission - IFOM (Training Institute for Harvest Workers) opened in March 2012 - 18 month program training missionaries to plant multiplying churches among unreached people in Côte d’Ivoire and beyond

3. HEARTS - renewing hearts of leaders in the joy of knowing Jesus - Small groups for leadership couples - One-on-one mentoring for leaders - Seminars for church leaders and pastors

US MAILING ADDRESS: Steve & Carol Smith, 54 Maple Ave., Bloomfield CT 06002 IVORY COAST MAILING ADDRESS: 06 B.P. 357, Abidjan 06 COTE D'IVOIRE, Ivory Coast, Africa

MISSION ADDRESS: Converge Worldwide, 2002 S. Arlington Heights Rd., Arlington Heights IL 60005 E-MAIL ADDRESS: scsmith7@gmail.com

MISSION STATEMENT – STEVE & CAROL SMITH COTE D’IVOIRE, WEST AFRICA

Our mission is to help catalyze church planting movements by the power of the gospel through the spiritual renewal of leaders, the training of missionaries and the strategic use of compassion ministries. Converge Worldwide/BGC believes that the gospel is most effectively and permanently spread and disciples made through the creation of spiritually healthy, reproducing local churches. So, everything we do as missionaries must ultimately support this end. We seek to help catalyze not just church planting but church planting movements. Spiritual Renewal (Heart): The evangelical church of Jesus Christ in Ivory Coast has grown rapidly in the last 20 years from 3% of the total population to almost 11%. While we praise God for this great development, we have observed that the church is often lacking in unity, love and integrity. Through our own experience of brokenness and renewal, God has given us a ministry of spiritual renewal to church leaders which has already seen significant transformation in the personal, family and ministry life of several key leaders. Our desire is to create a spiritual renewal movement among the churches which will result in a maturing church which will truly be  Jesus’  hands,  feet  and  body in West Africa. Missionary Training (Harvest): In order to bring the gospel to the 27+ unreached people groups in Ivory Coast and those in neighboring countries, our mission partnered with an Ivorian mission to create a missionary training institute called IFOM (Institute for the training of harvest workers). The school was opened in March 2012 and the 18 month program of training for the first students is underway. Compassion Ministries (Health): We believe that the preaching of the gospel must be accompanied by acts of compassion and mercy as demonstrated in the life of our Lord and the apostles. These ministries also can become strategic entry points for the gospel to penetrate resistant  peoples.  By  God’s  grace,  our  mission  has  developed  one  of  the premier health centers in Ivory Coast, meeting the needs of the whole person in a 98% Muslim neighborhood of Abidjan, the largest city. The 75 person all-African staff provides general medicine, maternity, pediatrics, dental care and surgery, eye care and surgery, laboratory, pharmacy, nutrition, vaccinations, HIV testing and retro-viral drug distribution, as well as psychiatric and spiritual care. We also have a growing development ministry called PEEV (Expanded Program for Life Education), particularly targeting poor women and children. This ministry provides nutrition services and training, small business training and micro-loans, and evangelism and spiritual life training. Many of these women have successfully risen out of deep poverty and some have had their lives changed by the gospel. The PEEV ministry is also beginning a community transformation project in the neighborhood of the Health Center. We would ask you to pray for these things: 1. that Jesus continues to transform our self-centered hearts into God-loving and others-loving hearts; 2. that God will renew and revive the Church in Côte  d’Ivoire  through  the  power  of  the  gospel; 3. that the Lord prosper and protect the ministries he has given us in a very unstable political climate.

Stephen Smith Biographical Sketch I was born July 14, 1952 and was brought  up  in  a  Baptist  pastor’s home, the only boy in the middle of two sisters. Christian truth and practice were taught to me from my earliest days and I understood the truths of the gospel at a young age. I remember one particular meeting when I was about nine years old in which I became afraid that I might die and not go to heaven. That evening, I acknowledged my sin before a holy God and put my trust in Jesus and his death as my substitute and so received forgiveness of my sin and eternal life. My understanding of the Christian life was that it was up to me to be disciplined and to try hard to know and serve God but my efforts seemed always to fall short and so, I often felt as if God was disappointed or even disgusted with me. God was so patient and merciful with me and graciously gave me times of joy and inspiration in knowing that I was his child and loved by him, but the general inner feeling I had was one of shame and inadequacy. I know now that I was living like a spiritual orphan, feeling that I had to figure life out and do my best to please God and others so that they would like me and I could feel good about having succeeded. Unfortunately, this was my general understanding of the Christian life for many years. As  a  youth,  I  would  often  read  missionary  biographies  and  being  a  pastor’s  son,  I  had  many  

opportunities to personally meet and get to know foreign missionaries. I was inspired and moved by their love for the lost and their willingness to go to the ends of the earth with the gospel and so decided at a young age that I wanted to pursue a missionary career. I attended Bethel College for one year, then Philadelphia College of Bible to finish out my undergraduate degree. After a dark period of doubt concerning my faith in my second year of college, the Lord helped me in my unbelief and I felt a renewed desire to pursue studies which would prepare me for the mission field. After my college studies, I married Carol Quimby, whom I had met and fallen in love with in Bible College and who shared my vision for missions. While studying at Dallas Theological Seminary, our commitment to serve God in missions was strengthened  as  we  understood  better  Jesus’ commission to the apostles to make disciples of all peoples by planting multiplying churches throughout the world. To better prepare ourselves, we accepted a call to become associate pastor at Wintonbury Baptist Church in Bloomfield, Connecticut, where we spent four and a half wonderful years learning the life and heart of a healthy local church ministry. During these years of study and ministry the Lord gave us five children (four girls and one boy). In  1985  we  were  appointed  as  missionaries  to  Côte  d’Ivoire,  West  Africa, by the Baptist General Conference  and,  after  studying  French  for  two  years  in  France,  we  arrived  in  Côte  d’Ivoire  in  July  1988.   Our ministry has included church planting, community development, missionary training and spiritual renewal. Over the years, Carol and I became more and more weighed down by the stress of missionary life, our struggles in our own relationship, our relationship with our children and in our ministry. Though on the outside our family and ministry seemed to be thriving, on the inside we had no joy and felt a deep sense

of failure and shame. In the year 2000 after three terms as missionaries, we returned to the U.S. depleted and discouraged and told our mission that we were not well and needed help. The Lord gave us rest and refreshment  in  various  ways  and  then,  led  us  to  a  ministry  called  ‘Sonship’ with the World Harvest Mission, in which we were mentored spiritually by telephone for nine months. During that time, the Lord showed us that just like the Galatian Christians, we had begun our Christian life by faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ, but then proceeded to continue by personal effort and self-trust (Gal. 3:1-5). We saw that we were trying to cover our feelings of guilt, shame and fear by performing and keeping rules so that God and people would keep on accepting and approving us. We were living like spiritual orphans. We saw our sin and self-love in a new and deep way and began to learn how to repent more often and more consistently and to run to and trust in our wonderful Savior who loved us and gave himself for us. We were big sinners but we had a big Savior and a Father who loved and delighted in us. Our joy returned, our marriage and family relationships began to heal, and our love for others grew. We praise the Lord for his patience with us and his grace and mercy to us as his weak and often wandering children. We are so thankful for the privilege of living and sharing the powerful message of the gospel of Jesus Christ to unbelievers and believers alike in the country  of  Côte  d’Ivoire!   (revised September 2012)

Carol Quimby Smith Biographical Sketch I was born on July 17, 1951 in Peoria, Illinois. My mother and father were faithful churchgoers and lovingly raised my older brother and me in the Lutheran church. At age fifteen I had a crisis of faith. After having begun to wonder about my eternal destiny, I yearned to know whether God was real or whether this was all merely tradition and culture. God met me in my thirst and assured me through Jesus’  words  in  John 5:24, which I happened upon in my confirmation Bible, that if I personally “believed”    in him I would have eternal life, would never come into condemnation for my sins, but would pass from death into life! The Holy Spirit showed me that these three promises were all in the present tense and that they spoke of my entire record of sin, birth to death. As I came into the deep realization that God was indeed real, had died on the cross for my sins and was personally speaking to me through his Word, I wholeheartedly believed! I felt like someone had just handed me an all-expense-paid trip to Disney Land (a childhood dream!) only it was heaven instead—eternity in the presence of this amazing true God who loved me! With this new joy and assurance in my life, I eagerly pursued a Bible education at Moody Bible Institute and then Philadelphia College of Bible (PCB). During these years I sensed a readiness to do foreign mission work if that is what God wanted me to do. At PCB I met and fell in love with Steve Smith whom I married in 1976. We mutually recognized  God’s  individual  leading  in  our  lives  to  pursue  missions  so  agreed together that we would now pursue it as a couple unless God were to clearly take us in another direction. After  Steve’s  further education at Dallas Theological Seminary and more than four years as associate pastor of Wintonbury Baptist Church in Bloomfield, Ct, we were appointed as missionaries to Ivory Coast, Africa with the Baptist General Conference (now Converge Worldwide) in 1985. In 1986 we left for language school in France with our five children aged 3 months to 7 ½ years old. I was ready and eager to live my Christian life in a new culture and believed that God would help me. However, before many months had passed, I found myself completely overwhelmed and exhausted. I was glad to be living cross-culturally as a wife, mother, student, sister-in-Christ, neighbor, missionary….but  suddenly  found  myself  terribly  lacking  in  ability  and  strength  to  keep  up  with  it  all. In that first 4-year term—two years in France and two years in Ivory Coast—of struggle and self-disappointment (mingled  with  joy  and  gratitude  for  the  Lord’s  faithfulness), God began to show me that he had never intended to send out a strong and perfect person, but rather a person who needed him. He gave  me  new  hope  through  the  Romans  5,  “How  Much  More...!!!”    passage  that  the  same  Jesus  who  had shown his love for me in my sinful state by dying for me was the living Jesus who would continue to “save”  me  day  by  day now that I was his child by faith. We continued on for two more terms, but by 2000, at the end of our third term, Steve and I found ourselves  in  a  condition  of  what  was  then  being  labeled  as  “burn-out.”      The  burdens  and  responsibilities  of ministry, foreign culture, home and marriage had left us weak and joyless. We were appalled and knew that we could not continue in this way. We were graciously granted time to heal and recover in the US but it was not until a year later that we began to discover what the real source of our problem was.

Through  a  nine  month  spiritual  mentoring  ministry  called  “Sonship”  we  began  to  get  a  better  glimpse  of  our hearts and of the very roots of our Christian living. To my dismay, I saw myself clearly in Jeremiah 2:13. I had turned away from the Spring-Of-Living-Water and was desperately digging my own cisterns of self effort that were cracked and not holding water. Even though I dutifully asked God for his help every day, I lived as if the Christian life was my responsibility and all on my own shoulders, like an orphan who was on her own and had no loving Father to provide and protect. The result was defeat, failure, shame and despair. I was a Galatian Heretic who had started by faith alone in the wondrous work of Christ on the cross for me, but little by little I had begun living the Christian life by own works. I was merely trying to polish up the Pharisee end of my flesh spectrum –look good, follow the rules, get good grades. Of course none of this was working and was despairingly lifeless! Along with all of this, God was showing us through his Word and through our patient mentor that the solution  was  not  hard  at  all.    It  was  simply,  “Come  Back!”   I finally began to understand that “repentance”  did  not  mean  “clean  yourself  up  and  promise  never  to  sin  again,”  but  rather  “return.”      Is.  30:15  says,  “In  returning  and  rest  is  your  salvation....”    Instead  of  having  my  back  to  the  Spring-of-Living-Water  and  my  face  to  the  relentless  work  of  keeping  all  the  cisterns  of  my  “good  works”  and  pleasures  in good repair (or not!), I needed to do the opposite—stop depending on Self and go back to Him. More and  more  I  started  “returning”  and  found,  like  the  Prodigal  Son,  my  Father  running  to  scoop  me  into  his  loving arms and provide all that I needed. God had graciously taken Steve and me on a tandem journey and about two years after our lowest point of despair and joylessness, we looked at each other one day and recognized joy bubbling up!! The fruit of the Spirit really was FRUIT! It had grown and flourished as a result  of  the  Spirit’s  transforming  work  in  the very roots and heart of our lives. We were able to come back to Ivory Coast in 2002 with renewed hearts. In the continuing years God has been restoring our marriage, healing our family, refreshing our service and best of all, taking us ever deeper into intimacy with Himself.