#19 - Learning from the Global Church: Social Justice with MCCBC. ft. Wayne Bremner

BCMB 019 - Learning from the Global Church.mp3 transcript powered by Sonix—easily convert your audio to text with Sonix.

BCMB 019 - Learning from the Global Church.mp3 was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best audio automated transcription service in 2020. Our automated transcription algorithms works with many of the popular audio file formats.

Wayne Bremner:
MCC in Ontario actually came up with a victim offender model in terms of helping offenders turn their lives around, and often we tend to think of restorative justice as letting people off the hook, but it's really the opposite because, the easier thing to do after you've committed some kind of violent act or harm somebody is to go away and hide and not change. The harder thing to do is to face them, to hear what impact your actions have had, to try to make it right to apologize and to look at yourself and say, how can I change? Wherever we go, we are openly Christian, even in places where it's difficult to be a Christian. MCC is always openly Christian.

BCMB Intro:
Welcome to The BCMB podcast, Pastor to Pastor. This is a podcast by the British Columbia Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches. We want to help equip and encourage pastors, churches and anyone else who wants to listen in and be more effective in their ministry. This is Episode 19, Learning from the Global Church with Wayne Bremner.

Rob Thiessen:
Hey everyone, welcome. This is a BCMB podcast, Pastor to Pastor, of course, it's open for anyone who wants to listen. I don't know why I named it pastor to pastor, but there it is, and we're so glad that you're with us today and very excited about our guest today. Wayne Bremner is the director of MCC B.C. and has been for a good number of years. How many years Wayne? (13 now). OK, that is a solid commitment, solid run. We really value this time together, to have a conversation about what it means for the church and for Christians to bear witness to their faith in in a broken world through a holistic gospel message, which is a message that MCC has been carrying for many, many decades. And maybe just to get to know you a bit personally, Wayne, why don't you share with us a little bit about the role of community in your own faith formation?

Wayne Bremner:
Ok, well, I think I would start with my family because that's the I guess, the birthing place for faith in many people's lives. It was for me, I came from a traditional Mennonite family. My grandfather was an evangelist and a city missionary. My grandma and grandpa were Henry and Sarah Klassen, and they were known in the day as City Missionary Klassen. So if you talk to people over 60 years, especially over 70, they probably will remember that and maybe even volunteering and going down and serving on Skid Row Mission. In addition to that Skid Row Mission, he also started an inner city church, which became the first Chinese Mennonite Brethren Church and had a radio program on Sunday mornings and a prison ministry and also a ministry for men who were down and out on skid row, as we called it, eventually opened a shelter for 40 guys. And I used to go down with my grandpa when he would make soup and grandma would send along a bunch of buns and and it would be a community meal for the guys on the street and he would have the apron on as he was stirring up the pot of soup and then after that, he would put the suit jacket back on and he would start to preach as the service started, maybe with two or three guys. And by the end, it would be full and then he would throw the apron back on and serve, and it just made a deep impression on me as I saw how he both proclaimed and loved in very practical ways. But also, for me, something that was even more formative is set in the 60s. It wasn't common, but my father left and so I was raised by a single mom. And so we experienced a lot of that turbulence and the difficulties of urban poverty or rural poverty in North American context and all the uncertainty and also the sense of being an outsider and, you know, economic uncertainty, but especially social exclusion, because the church didn't quite know what to do with this divorce woman. Hey, if we if we don't if we do things to help, it might mean that we're in favor of divorce. That's where we were back in the 60s, so that made it extra tough. So that all came together to give me my sense of calling, especially as a encountered scriptures that talked about what it meant to live out the gospel or even the Old Testament. Isaiah 58, true fasting. And so that was all part of my faith formation and the community was a mixture of family and church and difficulty.

Rob Thiessen:
And how about now, which faith community are you part of here?

Wayne Bremner:
I'm part of Highland Community M.B. Church in Abbotsford, have been there for, I guess, about 13 or 14 years now. Before that was at South Abby when Steve Berg was a pastor, and he's back there now, so I hear, OK. Yeah.

Rob Thiessen:
Well, that's great. An interesting story. It just reminds me, when I was a kid, I had a good friend named Len Esau, he still lives here in Abbotsford. But his dad, John Esau also had a downtown mission, and I remember going along with my friend Len when I was just a tike and, yeah, being around the streets, the different scene back in those days than it is now. But that's a great heritage.

Wayne Bremner:
You might be interested to know that John Esau picked up on the ministry that my grandfather started in terms of the Skid Row work. OK. And so yeah, John Esau, he was part of the extended family for us. And there's quite a story about how he was stabbed in the process of serving. And they discovered he had cancer as a result. And so it actually a near-death experience saved his life because they discovered the cancer as a result of the stabbing that he encountered. Yeah.

Rob Thiessen:
Now you're working with MCC, and let's talk. We want to help equip our churches and gain a good understanding for all of us as Christians, how we can faithfully live and proclaim the gospel. And for MCC, which is Mennonite Central Committee, maybe, maybe you just give us as a benefit for our listeners, some of whom may not be familiar with Mennonite Central Committee. What's the story? What brought this organization to an existence and what defines it today?

Wayne Bremner:
All right. So it starts exactly 100 years ago this year when there was a famine gripping what today is Ukraine, what at the time would have been understood to be southern Russia? And as those Mennonites were experiencing famine, they were writing to family members who had already migrated to North America, to Canada, particularly in Ontario, Manitoba, as well as the prairies, as well as in the states. And so basically letters saying we're in desperate shape here, can you send help? And then there was a delegation that came in, I think in 1919 from Russia. And they met with various church leaders and they said, we're urgently. Can you guys help us? But if you do, we would like it if all of the different Mennonite denominations got together and work together and sent it through one central committee. And they had probably practical reasons as well as reasons of principle for that request. And so you know, despite what they might have viewed as differences between them in terms of how they understood the different aspects of scripture, they decided that this was something that called them to work together, so they said yes in 1920, first shipment of aid was on its way through the Mediterranean, through Constantinople and up the Dnieper river to the Mennonite colonies in that region. And they made a big difference in people's lives, overcame a lot of hurdles to get through because it wasn't a place that was conflicted by war at the time. And so that's how it started. It started as relief in that case, soup kitchens, I think 25000 people a day were fed through 140 different soup kitchens in the region. And then in the following year, two moved to development, helping those farmers who had lost their cattle and oxen through famine with tractors so that they could produce again. And then the regulation of the communist regime prevented a whole lot more development. And then we started with refugee work helping Mennonites flee starting in 1923. So for me, my grandpa came in 1923 as a 15 year old boy with surviving siblings and started life over again in Canada without parents, without older siblings. Since then, MCC is now working in 54 different countries around the world. It goes up and down by one or two countries as we ebb and flow with where the needs are, but our focus is relief, development and peace in the name of Christ. And so the relief is what we're best known for because it usually coincides with disasters people see in the news. Development is about helping people help themselves, building self-reliance. And then the peace work, which is often dealing with conflict resolution, trauma, healing and helping people resolve their differences without violence. And so that's the broad strokes of MCC work. And we're well-known with the major disasters like the Asian tsunami or the earthquake in Haiti or famines in Africa. But the bigger part of our work is the behind the scenes stuff that you don't hear much about.

Rob Thiessen:
Mm-hmm. Well that brings up a you know, an interesting question, that is when we do aid work and help. I mean, you know, one of the comments, you know, with a disaster in Haiti, the earthquake, I think there was a book written, something about a big white truck went by or something like that. It's is it. And it was sort of a character, characterization of Western aid as just, you know, something happens, all of a sudden shipments come in, and basically it doesn't help people and it brings up that thing when helping hurts, when our Western aid really doesn't, and it actually can undermine local economies, not help people. We think we're doing something good. We ship them something. We feel better about it. How does MCC think about these things? Cause I know you have been thinking about it a long time and you, like you said, a lot of your work is behind the scenes and maybe how can that help a local church? Because a lot of our churches are involved in all kinds of projects. Be it in Mexico or India, South America, Africa and all kinds of agencies. Why? Why would MCC be a preferred organization and what have you learned about helping people over the long term?

Wayne Bremner:
Well, when helping hurts is good, is a good book and a good line of thinking, because I think a lot of times we feel when we see needs a strong and compelling motivation to help and and we do what would we be calling relief. You know, and that's when you give a handout and sometimes that's what's needed. But sometimes you can give relief in a way that builds self-reliance or builds dependency. And, and so, for example, in the Asia tsunami, you know, as we were doing relief work, we were also looking at building up local partners and and also taking our lead from local partners. You have to talk to the local community to say what are the most important needs and what is the best way to address them? I've gotten a lot of places where I've seen like a big water cistern and it's not being used. And it's because the organization that did it, they didn't really understand what was really important to the people in the communities. So first of all, we always work through local partners. Most of them are local church agencies or the local church itself. But in addition to working through, the local partner is really making sure we're listening because they know that our help is going to be based on to some degree what they tell us. And they are they're wanting to say the right thing in order to get our help. So we have to make sure that they recognize it. We're really listening. We're really we want to know what matters to you. The other thing is that we're looking for skin in the game. They have to be doing something themselves. We're usually, we're coming alongside someone who's already demonstrated a lot of resilience and creativity and courage and tenacity in order to deal with a problem. So we come alongside those people and a lot of inspiring stories of individuals who have tackled problems. And we come alongside and we help them do more. And so they need to have skin in the game for it to be something that's addressing a real issue in a way that makes a real difference. And so that's what we look for. And then we know that at some point in most cases we'll be gone. And so if there's skin in the game, if it's really making a difference, they're going to find a way to keep it going and they're going to do it in such a way that people will want to make it go. I can give you one example if you like. Okay, so Sand Emes in Kenya. And so I was in Kenya a number of years ago, a few times, actually.

Wayne Bremner:
But this most recent time it was during the worst drought in living memory. And so the drought was worse than anybody who was alive could remember. So that's a pretty severe drought. And and so there are communities without water and, and you would walk for miles, kids would walk for miles instead of going to school to find some mudhole somewhere where you get water. And then there would be parasites and people get sick and, and you had nothing for crops or for cleaning and that kind of thing. So we heard of a fellow name, Joshua Macousia, a Kenyan, and he had this dream when he was a kid, going to fetch water of solving this problem. So he became an engineer eventually, and he then came up with this idea of building sand dams. And so what they do that is they find a river that's dry in the summer and flooding in the wet season. And so they'll dig through to the bottom, to the bedrock, and then we'll supply the concrete and the rebar and they supply all the labor. They terraced the mountain sides, both sides. They build a sand dam. We provide the concrete, rebar and advice on how. And then hundreds of people in the community will be working to make this happen.

Wayne Bremner:
And then as the rains come and they've terraced the mountains, the sand will work its way down to the riverbed. Year after year, the sand gets taller and taller and deeper and deeper, and the water is trapped behind it. And so even in the driest part of the year and I was there in that driest part of the year, you dig one meter down and there's water. So this is something that's going to change people's lives. They're going to have water for agriculture to produce their own food for kids to drink clean water, not have to walk to, you know, a neighboring community. And and so it just changes the whole cycle of life. And the community is invested because in order for it to happen, they had to do the work. We just came along with help. And so that's an example of a sustainable solution. If we were just to come in and say and decide what we thought the best way to do to solve the problem, it may not have been the right one. It may have been an orphaned war well, or something like that, in 10 years once our money left. So that's where we really look at partnering with local organizations and finding those that are really committed to solving the problem.

Rob Thiessen:
That's cool. So Wayne, for our community and I guess for a lot of evangelical churches, you know, there's a strong conviction that we ought to be proclaiming the gospel, we ought to be preaching Christ and sharing the good news of the cross and the atonement and how people can enter the kingdom of God. And, but sometimes that has led to us a total bifurcation of, you know, this side is evangelism and then the other side of Christians are shouting about justice and then how we live. How, how does MCC bring these two together? What what are your convictions about that? The proclamation and the living out of the gospel. And then maybe you could share with us some places that you've seen globally where these things integrate, where you see the body of Christ growing and people, you know, hearing the good news coming to faith. And it's integrated with with also the redemptive work that's helping people holistically, like you said, with a job or or what they need.

Wayne Bremner:
Mm hmm. And so I would say first for MCC, when we were organized initially, the conferences said, well, okay, you leave the evangelism to us and our mission boards and we'll work with MCC on the practical relief and development kinds of work. And so that became the way in which we were organized together. But wherever we go, we are openly Christian, even in places where it's difficult to be a Christian. MCC is always openly Christian.

Wayne Bremner:
So in places like Afghanistan or Nepal or or other places around the world, people see that we are living out our faith, that, you know, the practical work we do is an expression of God's love in us. And so the other, is that we work in partnership, overwhelmingly with the church. Most of our four hundred and fifty some odd partners around the world, our church organizations. So we're supporting them and their witness. And the other thing I would say is that we love unconditionally. And so I was explaining a little bit how my grandfather had a Skid Row mission where you come and listen to a sermon and after that you would be fed. And so MCC doesn't make a condition of help that you have to listen to us. But as a result of the help, people are often interested in learning more. And by working with and through the local church, it gives them an opportunity to bear witness to their faith, in that context. And I'll give you a local and an international example in Ethiopia, where there was massive erosion of hillsides and the destruction of farmland. We were working together with the local church, Mizrata Cousteau's church and their relief and development division in an area that had had excruciating poverty. The government asked the Mennonites, can you help us? Because we can't lick it here. So we worked together with the local church and Canadian Food Grains Bank, a sister organization, and did all kinds of work to restore the land, to build terraces and trees and crops and started a seed bank where people could borrow seeds to plant for next year and basically help turn around the issue of poverty in this community. I think over 70,000 people were helped by this project. And as we were standing on the hillside and looking at the physical results of their agricultural work, we asked one of our program coordinators, what's been one of the unexpected results of this work? And he says, well, as a result of the work we've been doing here for the past 10 years, 11 Mennonite churches have been planted here. And so, it was just a risk, a spontaneous response to a faithful living out of being the hands and feet of Christ. People saying, well, if that's who your God is, if that's who Christ is, we're interested. We want in. And so that be an example in Ethiopia and there are other examples around the world. But another one in Abbotsford is we have a program that assists homeless people. And so after we would have a community meal on Thursday evenings and and one on Sundays and South Abbotsford partners with us on Sundays to provide a community meal. And so afterwards people talk and the homeless people end up helping set up and tear down and even flip burgers. And, it's about building relationships. People just come to to be together and to get to know each other and to love each other. And so eventually they were interested in discussing faith a bit more. And so we invited a church to come in and show the Alpha series. And after doing that for a period of time, the church said, well, you know, we're not seeing the results that we would like, and so we're going to move on. And so we shared that with the folks who are gathering and, you know, in the evenings and they said, well, we don't need the church, we can do this ourselves. So MCC is showing the Alpha series because people want to know more about faith. And we find that people on the street, sometimes they come from a Christian home and, you know, through various situations, they find themselves on the street and on the very margins of society. And here's a group of people who actually love them. And so that inspires them to to be on a faith journey. And that's something we welcome.

Rob Thiessen:
You know, that's excellent.

Rob Thiessen:
So you've referred to a little bit of the importance of your partnerships and your partnerships with with churches globally. That's sounds pretty vital to what you're doing, but also the nature of your work. You mentioned like food grains. So how do you, how do you think about this philosophically? Like how does MCC distinguish what kind of partnerships, there are non-Christian groups that you partner with. Maybe there's groups that are, you know, of another faith, maybe, you know, a Muslim NGO or something like that. How, how does MCC think through that kind of partnership?

Wayne Bremner:
So, there'd be several principles that we would work with. First is that we are openly Christian and you have to be, you have to be good with working with us being a faith based organization. And so the other is that you have to have integrity and values about how you do your work, that line up with how we would do it. And then there has to be accountability in that relationship as well so that we make sure there's good stewardship in how their resources are being used.

Wayne Bremner:
And then the other, I guess, would be we would look at how can we best represent Christ and bear witness to our faith. And so we'll consult with local church, especially in contexts where it's very complex, the relationships between different faith groups. And we'll take our lead from the local church in terms of how they would like us to proceed. So for, for example, if it was in the Middle East somewhere and we were contemplating should we work with a Muslim organization, we'd ask a local church, should we work with this local Muslim organization? So they've got to live there. And that's right now. And sometimes we would think, we would think opposite of what they might tell us to do because, and even in terms of how. So in Syria, we worked through the local church to deliver food aid, 30000 people a month. Most of them in that community are Muslim that are receiving the aid. And so after a while, the Muslim community would say, well, these Christians must really like us, must really care about us. And so in that case, the Grand Mufti wanted to meet the Christians in order to say, hey, this is different than we thought. We thought you hated us. We, we thought you wanted to harm us. But here you are loving us. And so the local church then has a sense for what makes those relationships work and what actually helps them be faithful Christians in this context. And so, I mean, I was referring earlier to a situation in Surrey with the Muslim food bank during the peak of the refugee response in the aftermath of the Syrian crisis and Alan Kurdi's body washing ashore and the media picking it up and people really wanting to respond. We had hundreds of refugee families that were being sponsored by the local churches that we were working with. And in Surrey, we found that there was a large Muslim community and there was a food bank and we found that we were working with the same population. So we had to work together a little bit to coordinate care. You guys helping this person here or are we helping and what are you providing and what are we providing? And so we began to coordinate more and more. And, and then at one point the question was, should we more formally work with this particular Muslim organization? And after some discernment, we thought that we should because they know who we are now. We're not making a statement about their faith and they're not trying to make a statement about ours, except that we're saying we can work together in order to meet the needs of people in this community. And so as a result, they would say, hey, this a family here that needs furniture. And so our thrift shop was nearby and we would provide furniture. And at first the family would say, well, why are you helping us? And they said, well, there's no strings attached. We're just helping you because we love you. So that then people could see who we are. They knew we were speaking from our faith. We weren't making any conditions on our helping. And so it's a question of how does what in what way can we be most faithful about bearing witness to our faith and just loving people unconditionally and allowing the spirit of God to work?

Rob Thiessen:
Yeah, I remember we had a missionary at our church who had spent almost 60 years in Africa. Howard Borlas was his name. He had been with SIM in the Sudan and also in Ethiopia. But he mentioned that, you know, when he was there back in the 40s and 50s, they had great relationships with Muslims. And there wasn't this hostility that characterizes the relationship that there is today. And I think as a missionary, he really, you know, he regretted that turn of events that has caused all this hostility. And he valued the relationship that he had with Muslims. And he was, you know, outspoken as a missionary there to bring Christ to those people. But he had a cordial and respectful relationship. So obviously, MCC values and is seeking to promote that kind of an approach. So helpful. When you think about the local churches and you know, our churches also in the communities where they exist are maybe struggling sometimes to figure out, well, how do we get involved with the needs of marginalized people? Be a voice for justice locally? I mean, we can understand, sure, there's a disaster, we could raise money, we could partner with a project, send a team through MCC, maybe do like North Langley or like other churches have done, sponsor a refugee and engage that way. But what do you see as some of the other ways that a church might benefit from a relationship, a closer relationship with a Mennonite Central Committee to help them open up their eyes to justice issues right in their own neighborhoods and be more effective?

Wayne Bremner:
Well, one of the unique things that I think about MCC is we work locally and globally and oftentimes organizations will choose one or the other. It's just worked out for us that it seemed to have integrity. If we're going to help people overseas, that would also help here at home, especially as we would find of our our service workers returning home and they would be inspired by the service, say it done overseas and say, what can we do here at home? Increasingly, we're finding churches are saying we want to do both. We want to be involved in needs we see in the news at night around the world. We want to know that God loves them. But we also want to make sure that people in our own community see a church that loves them. And so in my own journey with South Abbotsford, when Steve Berg was pastor, we started to explore that and he said to me something that stuck out. He said, I think that , what we have as a church is we have people, and we have funds. And what you have is MCC locally here is connections in the community and the experience and wisdom of knowing how to help. So I think we can work together to make a difference. And so locally we do a variety of different things working with homeless people, which I've mentioned. And some churches are connecting and very hands on ways, you know, coming and helping with a community meal. And the community meal has evolved to, you know, a music ministry, cutting hair, counseling, prayer, whatever people feel that they need. And so that's something that we do together. And it's more than food, it's about relationship. And that's where it's really critical that people in the community that are marginalized see that Christians love them. I remember as we were wrestling with this ourselves, we were involved in homelessness as MCC, but more in terms of researching the issues and coming up with solutions and some programs that were preventing homelessness that were not visible. They were for the person being helped, but not for the community. So that's when we started to get involved in the community meal. I remember Jesse Wegenast, I think he goes to Greendale MB, he is with Five plus Two ministry. And he challenged us to say to the people in the community, know you love them. And that really was a profound question for us. And I think it's a profound question for the church. Do people know you love them? And I've heard it said this way. If, if people don't like your music, they're not going to listen to your words. And so the music is love. And so people need to know that the church loves them. And after that, we can talk, you know. And so that's where MCC has a variety of opportunities and homelessness or refugee sponsorship, indigenous relations, domestic violence, a number of different ways and even child poverty.

Rob Thiessen:
So does MCC offer any educational components in those areas, like if a church said, you know, we just, we'd like tools we'd like to be equipped. Does MCC offer those kind of resources?

Wayne Bremner:
We do, and it tends to be more relational and formal. And one example is in Vancouver. Some time ago, churches were wrestling with what to do with the people who are homeless coming to the food bank and some of them who were addicted to drugs. And so out of that, we walked together with a group of Vancouver churches and looked at what would it take to start a drug recovery ministry. And and so out of that, we came up with a proposal and five churches and MCC joined in together and started a drug recovery program called Place of Refuge and ended up, we together bought a house and started a recovery ministry, we initially worked in partnership with another local organization that had more experience. But together, we figured out how to do it. But it was being led by the question of, what does it mean for us as a church to have a presence in our community so we can look at the question from both sides. How can churches help MCC do what we're already doing? But also MCC can come alongside the church and say, how can we help you envision what you might be doing in your community, whether or not at intersections it has an intersection with some of the things we already do.

Rob Thiessen:
Another area that churches have ministry in, and I think a lot of it emerged out of MCC, is the ministry in prisons. And maybe, you know, something that's adjacent to that is the victim offender reconciliation. What, what's going on with MCC in that area? Do you have training? I know there's some stories, maybe a lot of our listeners don't know about the this. I think it's circles of care that you mentioned and how that's impacted prisoners or, you know, people who were formerly in prison maybe share a little bit about that.

Wayne Bremner:
Sure. So MCC in Ontario actually came up with a victim offender model in terms of helping offenders turn their lives around. And often we tend to think of restorative justice as letting people off the hook. But it's really the opposite because, you know, the easiest or the easier thing to do after you've committed some kind of violent act or harm somebody is to go away and hide and not change. The harder thing to do is to face them, to hear what impact your actions have had, to try to make it right, to apologize and to look at yourself and say, how can I change? And so in the in the area of violent sexual offenses, MCC has had this program called CoSA, Circles of Support and Accountability. And so we were working at that together with the Catholic Church here in the Fraser Valley and other regions of Canada. MCC may do it directly or indirectly. And so here we were inviting volunteers to form a circle around an offender who is about to be released from prison, who had committed a violent act. And, and so that circle would be that support and accountability both, for a period of time as that person was transitioning back into the community and that person will have finished their sentence. So they're allowed to come out. The question is on what terms are they coming out? And if you've committed a violent act, especially, you know, an offence related to minors, who's going to want to hire you? Who's going to want you in their community? Nobody. Right? And so, but they're coming out anyway. So what we do is we form a circle around them in order to help them turn their lives around. And I think the reduction in re-offending is 71 percent. So we're preventing harm, but also we're helping someone transform their lives and deal with some deep seeded issues they may have, that brought them to the place where they're harming other people. So that's something that we had done for for a number of years. Frank Sawatzky who is in Vancouver, was a leader for us in B.C. in that area. Another area is in the prison system working with women who have suffered violence. And so we have a program called When Love Hurts Hurts, that Elsie Goerzen coordinates together with a group of volunteers and they work in the prison system to help women walk through and understand their own trauma and abuse and how they can work at healing themselves. And this program is also available to women in the community, particularly those who want to come at it from a faith perspective and also working with husbands who recognize that they need to change. And so that's ways in which we work at the Ministry of Reconciliation, you know, not just punishing, but how do we help people change? How do we help people find healing? How do we help them turn their lives away from hurting others.

Rob Thiessen:
Well that's so helful Wayne, it's almost bewildering to think about how many, you know, opportunities and needs there are. And in MCC seems to just have gone forward on the basis that, you know, if there's a need and our Lord is empowering us or leading us, that, that you'll say yes and figure out a way to help. And it's just a huge blessing to our community, too, to be in partnership this way. So, yeah, we hope that our listeners will have, you know, a just a broader perspective and become aware of the incredible legacy that we have, which, like you said, was founded years ago out of a cry for help from people. And now we have this part, an organization that is so incredible. Thanks for being with us and thanks for your leadership, your faithful witness to the gospel message in word and deed through MCC. We pray God's blessing on you. Wayne, thank you very much. And to all of our listeners, we pray that you'll have a great week ahead and look to to be with you on our next podcast. So bye bye for now.

Automatically convert your audio files to text with Sonix. Sonix is the best online, automated transcription service.

Sonix uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to convert your mp3 files to text.

Create better transcripts with online automated transcription. Sonix converts audio to text in minutes, not hours. Automated transcription is getting more accurate with each passing day. Are you a podcaster looking for automated transcription? Sonix can help you better transcribe your podcast episodes. Get the most out of your audio content with Sonix. Automated transcription is much more accurate if you upload high quality audio. Here's how to capture high quality audio. Rapid advancements in speech-to-text technology has made transcription a whole lot easier. Are you a radio station? Better transcribe your radio shows with Sonix.

Sonix uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to convert your mp3 files to text.

Sonix is the best online audio transcription software in 2020—it's fast, easy, and affordable.

If you are looking for a great way to convert your audio to text, try Sonix today.