Our country is blessed every day by over two million men and women who serve in our military.
In addition to protecting our nation from outside threats, many of these men and women wrestle with personal challenges that reduce their military readiness and resilience and all too often escalate into divorce or suicide.
God has opened a door for us to bring relational wisdom and peacemaker training to many of these men and women. But we need your help to meet this opportunity.
In October I taught relational wisdom to 150 U.S. Army chaplains and their wives (see 4-page handout). The response was uniformly positive, resulting in immediate inquiries about training on several major bases, two of which are already scheduled for February and May.
To serve these chaplains well, we need to develop custom material that focuses on how they can use RW concepts to equip military personnel with skills that not only improve military readiness but also reduce incidents of sexual violence, divorce and suicide (which presently total 20,500, 21,290 and 541 per year, respectively).
Our preliminary research in just one of these areas indicates that our materials will fit well into several key suicide prevention strategies already identified by the military, including: promoting connectedness, teaching coping and problem-solving skills, and identifying and supporting people at risk (see 2018 Department of Defense Suicide Report).
This is just one of the new ministry opportunities that has opened to us since we launched our new values-based training resources (see below), which allow us to take RW and the gospel into all kinds of secular settings, including businesses, police and fire departments, prisons, chambers of commerce and offices in our nation’s capital.
We are working to accelerate our expansion in two of these settings by qualifying our training for continue education (CE) credit.
Our training was recently approved for ten hours of CE credit for public school teachers in Montana. We plan to use this approval and a new booklet for public schools to gain similar approval in other states. The application process is laborious, but with each new approval and careful marketing, we will gain increasing exposure to the 3.1 million teachers who serve in our nation’s public schools and shape the lives of 49 million students every day.
We have applied for similar CE credit for training nurses and are preparing for our first custom training in a local hospital. Lord willing, these efforts will serve as a springboard to other states. It will take many hours to complete the CE application processes state-by-state and then build a marketing campaign. But it will be worth the effort if we can bring the gospel to many of the 3.4 million nurses who serve in our hospitals and clinics every day without knowing the Great Healer.
Thanks to our automated online training system and growing network of Certified RW Instructors, who work as independent contractors, we can deliver training to hundreds of new students with great efficiency. But we need your help to reach those students in the first place.
Although the training described above will hopefully generate significant revenue in the years ahead, that harvest is still to come. We are very much in the sowing season now as we develop custom resources for military, hospital and school venues and add the staff and equipment needed for a full-scale marketing and delivery effort in each of these fields.
In order to launch these efforts, we need to raise $150,000 before the end of the year.
A few friends of the ministry have already pledged to match the first $60,000 of support for these efforts.
That means that your gift this month will be immediately doubled!
Your generous gift or pledge will enable us to bring biblically-grounded relational skills and the gospel itself into military bases, schools, hospitals and businesses around the country in the coming year.
Thank you for considering this request. Your gift could make such a difference to so many of the people who serve our nation every day!
Warmly,
Ken and Corlette Sande
P.S. Our desire to serve these serving professions was magnified by a tribute a woman recently posted about her sister, who serves as a labor and delivery nurse and sees overwhelming relational challenges every day, including “panic and anxiety when a new mom is scared, fear when a stat c-section is called, teenagers giving birth without family support and addicted moms giving birth to babies who are withdrawing” (see her story and poignant photo here). We pray God uses our resources to encourage and strengthen people like this who venture into these types of vital yet stressful jobs on our behalf day after day.
