Description
Listen all about it… Otterness Missions Tuesday outreach is pioneering West into the Saint Catherine’s neighborhood and a testimony of a refugee Afghan family getting transportation, work, and Jesus in the same package. Genesis 1:1 Fine Arts regears as The Blank Walls Protest advances forward. Here is my conversation with Bill Otterness.
Transcript
Nathan Sack 00:10
Welcome to another Faith Horizons Kingdom brief. These are short podcast between 5 and 10 minutes. The purpose of a kingdom brief is to share highlights from ongoing Kingdom activities and announce events in Kansas City. Listen, listen, listen all about it. Otterness Missions Tuesday outreach is pioneering west into the St. Catherine’s neighborhood, a testimony of a refugee family who get transportation work and Jesus at the same time. Genesis 1:1 regears as the blank walls protest advances forward. Here’s my conversation with Bill Otterness. I heard on the grapevine anyway, that you guys are going to be stopping the walk in the park on Tuesdays from four to six. And you guys are kind of letting go of that. There’s been a couple other ministries that have stepped into place that are currently operating in that area, as well as you still live there. But you’re just you’re going to put that down for this season.
Bill Otterness 01:08
Yeah, yeah. So we live in the area, so that going to be a continual effort there. You know, we’ve been able to make friends out there. Yeah, you increase the friends we’d already had, like you’d mentioned there are other ministries that have seen what we were doing. And so they wanted to jump in. And so we feel like it’s gives us the ability to move around a little bit more freely, without completely neglecting the neighborhood and specifically that people around Sycamore Park. And so yeah, we we’re still moving around on Tuesdays, we just kind of move to literally move to the other side of the tracks. And so we’re on the west side of the tracks now, over close to Blue River Road in a neighborhood called St. Catherine’s and Birchwood area.
Nathan Sack 01:59
And you and I started working on that. A little bit on the side, I’ve kind of helped kick that off. And so tell me a little bit about that. What’s going on? There’s something new going on so let me know.
Bill Otterness 02:12
Yeah, that intent there. And in those neighborhoods actually started two years ago. We had stopped, generally, what we’ll do as a team is we’ll kind of stop in the winter and, and for about a week or so and instead of walking, because it’s really cold in January anyway and snowing. We’ll stop and pray about what is it going to look like for us out in the neighborhoods in the upcoming year. And so in 2020, we did that and we stopped and then the Lord provoked us to move into an area that was actually closer to the church that I attend. And there was a couple people involved at the time that were all at the same church, who moved in the areas adjacent to that. And what ended up happening was, that was the year that we experienced all those lock downs. And so we were walking in these in the St. Catherine’s neighborhood in Birchwood during lockdown. And it was just a really impressive to see how open everybody was. And we came in and but then obviously, you know, our heart was always in that Ruskin Heights area. So we moved back there. And then recently, we were stirred about that St. Catherine’s area, because one thing that we found out from the walks is that particular neighborhood had what we thought was a lot of Bible illiteracy. And so now we’ve returned there with hundreds and thousands of Bibles. And we want to put a Bible in the hands that physically put the Bible in the hands of every single household in these neighborhoods. So we’re intentionally doing that. So it’s a little bit different than what we’ve been doing with prayer walk. We haven’t we have a directive from the Lord. And so we’re looking to accomplish that in how I think it’s gonna take a little longer than what we were very ambitious to start.
Nathan Sack 04:08
So St. Catherine’s Gardens on Grandview and then about 105th area.
Bill Otterness 04:16
There’s a Dollar General right there and that little strip area and so currently, we’re just pulling up in parking in that parking lot then walking out from there on Tuesdays and another change is going to occur Daylight Savings guys. And so is we know we lose our hour sleep and everything. So what that does is that adjust the times that we go out and walk because we have winter hours and then we have summer hours and so after the time change our summer hours are six to seven. That’s new guys. We’re out there. It’s from six to seven now. Prayer walking in doing Bible distribution.
Nathan Sack 04:55
I’ll change that on the calendar location and just keep the contacts the same.
Bill Otterness 04:59
And OneEleven Global still out in the Ruskin area, but they’re usually there on Friday mornings around 10 o’clock because- the Sycamore Park- yep, that’s right. And they’re working in that area. And they’re helping.
They’re helping they we’ve connected them with some of the people we’ve connected with out there so they’re able to continue reaching those people. And you know, I wouldn’t say picking up our slack, but they’re just really holding the ground for us. In between Julia and I still have contacts with people in Ruskin. I think we had mentioned previously about coming across the family that just got off the boat from Afghanistan. I mean, really they got relocated. Taliban went into that country and took over.
Nathan Sack 05:39
You said there’s a great testimony there, too.
Bill Otterness 05:52
Oh, man. So you know, they, they’re refugee and they’re here. And they’re learning the language kind of really rough at it. But they have no job, they have no car. And they have four children. And so they’re desperate to find work. And so we’ve been praying with them in the name of Jesus, and they let us pray with them. They’re Muslim. But, you know, we told them, you know, our God’s gonna help you and but they’re asking us like, can you give us a car can you get, we personally can’t but our God can. And so we just continue with that. And we have a lot of text message back and forth. And this has been going on for about two months. And they have three months worth of money that they’re allotted as a first, you know, come in as a sponsor, with their sponsorship, and the sponsorships about to run out. And we hadn’t been physically to the house. We physically went to the house. We wanted to just kind of embrace them and say hi in person again. And so Julia and I were at the home and there was a work truck in the driveway. And we go inside the house and there’s this guy Jimmy there who had just recently give Nuri, it’s the couple’s name is Nuri and Sahar, and he just recently given Nuri a job doing landscape so he comes by the house and picks him up and takes him to work. So dude don’t even need a job. He could just you know, get picked up and go to work and come home and get money. And so this guy Jimmy the other really cool thing about this testimony is Jimmy is a super on fire charismatic Christian, just a Holy Roller. So this guy Nuri is stuck in a truck with him every day, all day is going around the city working in yards, and just having to listen to… getting paid to be with Christians. So we want to continue praying. We really believe that God has brought that family here in this country and put them right there in Ruskin, because He wants them to become part of the kingdom. So we just think it’s just inevitable. And so we hope it’s sooner than later that they would just receive Jesus, you know, they know Jesus, they actually love him, but they don’t see Him as God.
Nathan Sack 07:46
That’s awesome. So something else that we were mentioning, in the last episode, we talked a lot about art. And one of the things that we had mentioned was the possibility of beginning to work with businesses to cover their blank walls. And so one of the businesses that you’ve currently been in contact with, seems to be going forward with that.
Bill Otterness 08:10
We actually did that podcast and we are talking about covering blank walls. I think at some point we had mentioned, like maybe an art protest, like, let’s protest these blank walls, protest these blank walls. I like that. The very next day, just out of nowhere, I get a phone call from a woman who says, Hey, this friend of mine owns a business. She wants art on our wall. I mean, just like out of nowhere, literally 24 hours after we had done that podcast. And so I just thought, Okay, I have to take this call, I have to go out there and meet these people. Because we literally just talked about this on a podcast and prayed about it. And so if I say no, I’m gonna get slapped in the face by God Himself. So we go out there and look, and honestly, right off the bat, I thought, man, is this kind of sketchy? I’m not sure. And but we’ve been praying about it a lot. The Genesis 1:1 staff and team, you know, putting this on prayer. And so, so yeah, there’s a lot of communication going on. Looks like that’s actually going to come that’s going to happen. We’re going to be a part of that business. And what they’re doing is called the ABBA Wholeness Center.
Nathan Sack 09:22
ABBA Wholeness Center.
Bill Otterness 09:23
Yeah, the ABBA Wholeness Center in Blue Springs, just off of seven highway. They have a really nice website and they deal with holistic, spiritual health, all in the name of Jesus. And so it’s a really neat setup they have there but they have a lot of empty space in the office building that she owns. So we’re going to be able to populate that with art.
Nathan Sack 09:44
Yeah, populate some of the entryway. And then also, she’s looking for people to rent those office spaces.
Show Notes
Otterness Missions
To learn more about Otterness Missions and about upcoming events go to
https://otternessmissions.org/
Genesis 1:1
https://www.genesis1-1art.org/
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