Your gifts for Outreach’s COVID-19 Emergency Appeal are making a difference...in Costa Rica

Through your generosity, we have been able to send $2500 to our partners at Shalom Teaching Ministries.

For the last 20 years, Shalom Community Church has been a driving force in bringing about the improvement of Fraijanes, a small town located around 25 miles from the capital of the country. The Outreach Foundation has come alongside the efforts of Shalom Community Church to share with other pastors in the region and other Spanish speaking countries about how to be agents of spiritual and social transformation in their locations.

“Church was never meant to be lived inside the sanctuary walls,” says Roy Soto, who is the founder and pastor of Shalom Community Church. Calling COVID-19 a “mission field,” he outlines some of the ways they have been active in response to the pandemic. Among those responses have been holding prayer walks and delivering meals to people who are homeless. They have also provided counseling via phone to several hundred individuals and made use of their extensive social media presence to urge all congregations to suspend their worship gatherings. Shalom is making use of an application called WhatsApp to provide inspirational video to many people that can’t afford to pay for internet services. Costa Rica’s President Carlos Alvarado Quesada called Shalom to express gratitude for its influential public voice and for making available its facilities for the government to use to help the people of the area. 

The $2500 gift from Outreach’s COVID-19 Appeal will go towards helping Shalom continue to serve its immediate neighbors, especially senior adults and impoverished families, by providing them with much-needed food items and medicines. At this point, more than 350 families have received care packages. 

Thank you for standing with the church in Costa Rica during this time of crisis as it proclaims and demonstrates the hope that we have in Christ. 

Click here to learn more about Outreach’s COVID-19 Emergency Appeal and click here to learn about the use of funds already sent to Kenya, Iraq, Brazil, Rwanda, and to Iranians in Turkey because of your generosity.