August 2009 Newsletter

August 25, 2009

Friends,

Thank you so much for your faithful support! Amazes us always!!!!!!!

I told you in our last letter that I would be posting updates on our website

www.nofencetoohighministries.org. That hasn’t happened yet. Due to problems, illness and busyness by board members; we are still working on our site. It is, however, getting closer to being a reality. Stay tuned!

If you have an email address would you please send it to us? We can then send these updates via email and it will help defray some of the mailing cost. Thank you for doing this.

We have a new board of directors. We have added 6 new members to our board of directors to fill open positions. Teresa and I are blessed to have these new people with us in No Fence Too High Ministries, Inc.

This is our board of directors:

Tom Tippett, president, David Hills, vice president, Michelle Schwartz, Secretary, Todd Ortlieb, treasurer. These are our officers. At large board members are: Teresa Tippett, Russ Jones, Marcia Jones, Les Mahlow, John Grebe, Terry Corrente and Steve Cross.

We meet once a month and are discussing what direction the Lord wants this ministry to go.

We are currently planning a fundraiser to be held on Saturday the 19th of Sept. at the Alanson Church of the Nazarene, corner of M-68 and Mission Rd., in Alanson, Mi. We will start at 7:00 pm with a concert and testimonies. Richard Lanting’s praise and worship band will lead the concert that will end at 8:30pm with cookies and punch. We are excited and nervous since the only person that has had direct working time on a fundraiser is Richard. The rest of us are feeling our way along so your prayers would be greatly appreciated. There will be a free will offering taken and people can give as the Lord directs. We are praying that you will come and join us for a time of praise and worship.

I lost Hiawatha Correctional Facility as a Thursday afternoon destination. The Michigan Dept. of Corrections decided that Hiawatha would close and, as of August 8, locked the doors. The board and I are praying for God to show us the next open door of direction. I have been in contact with the Chaplains at Chippewa and Straits correctional facilities as possible sites to fill the Thursday gap. Please pray with us in these changing times.

God bless you!

December 2008 Newsletter

December 1, 2008 

Our Dear Friends,

A blessing God grants me is being able to see faces of so many I lift up to Him in prayer and/or thank Him for.
 When it comes to all of you I know Tom & I are loved by you and prayed for by you faithfully, as well as financially supported by you. I ask you, how awesome is this? Thank you so much!

I really don’t know how Tom & I ever got through life as long as we did without God in the center of our lives and without our Christian family.  When the times are tough you and God have been there. When our heartache threatened to overwhelm us you and God were there. I know it – I’ve felt it – thank you, thank you!

This letter is from deep in my heart and again, the tears are threatening to flow. I have no idea any more how you stop the tears and I don’t try. That’s not to say I’m always sad – I’m not – I’m normal (I think).

As far as No Fence Too High Ministries is concerned our board of directors is growing nicely and we plan to meet monthly until we are well on the road to where God wants us to be.

The web site is showing promise too. Our daughter Michelle is going to learn how to keep the site up to date. Did you ever hear terms such as “search engines”, “links” and “pay pal”? Neither did I! But it’s part of a web site.

Tom and I feel blessed to have so many who volunteer their time and talent with different programs at the jail: Bible studies, G.E.D., and Sunday services. Wow! It’s a God thing you know?

We will be updating more on the ministry in 2009 – this letter comes from my heart to thank all of you so very much – for everything.

We both pray you’ll all have a blessed Christmas and a great and God filled 2009!

God bless you,

Teresa  (and Tom)

October 2008 Newsletter

October 3, 2008 

Dear Friends,

I know it has been a while, ok 9 months, since you have heard from us. I would like to give you several excuses but all they would be is meaningless excuses.
Teresa and I have had a tough year. Her mother died at the end of February and her dad died at the end of May. Both unexpectedly. God has been our comforter and healer through this time. This summer has been a time of preparing her folk’s house to be put up for sale and it has taken several months to get this done.

I want you to know that I do listen to you (Don I did hear you and thank you for your note). It was great to hear from a friend and we appreciate the advice that you need to hear from us more often than once a year.

A big change, as you can see at the top of the letter is our new web site. We were blessed to have a friend set this up for us a no cost. That’s a friend! Don’t try to search for us because you will not find us. Just type in the site address and you will get to us. We have work to do on this and our daughter Michelle is going to maintain the site for us. I do want to use that as our primary way of updating you. I plan to have a monthly update on the site once we get that far, hopefully in the near future.

We have also lost several of our board members this fall and we are in the process of rebuilding our board of directors. This is frustrating but it is also a time to trust the Lord and watch Him work through my frustration.

That’s about all we have to share with you now but we will put out another letter in early December and hope to have more information for you then.

God bless you all and thank you for your prayers and financial support especially in this time of
economic uncertainty.

Tom and Teresa

December 2007 Newsletter

December 1, 2007 

Dear Friends,

A few days ago our church secretary e-mailed me and asked if I could supply an updated letter for the mission board. She said the one that is on the board now is from last December. I said I would get an update to her and to my shock and surprise that was the latest letter. I realized that I have not sent one since. I do apologize for that and promise to do a better job of keeping all of you up on what we are doing.
O.K., with that out of the way let’s move on.
It has been a short year in many ways as time has flown by the past 12 months.
We are at a point in this ministry that we can’t seem to get around. We want to expand with programs but as of this writing we haven’t figured out how to raise the financial support to purchase supplies. We have a budget this year of $35,000.00. That would pay my support and give us money to buy the needed Bible study material and other course material, such as books to teach budgeting and material to teach people how to handle a check book.
I believe we need a curriculum that can be applied if we start a Christian housing unit, lead Christian programs in place of having a housing unit or start an aftercare program of some sort. These are all things we have been praying about and to be honest we don’t seem to be getting any answers.
One thing I have learned over the ten years (yes I said ten (10) years) of being a missionary in prisons and jails is if God doesn’t speak we don’t move. We just keep praying and wait for Him to open the doors.  That’s how Teresa and I started this ministry and that’s how we continue today.
If any of you have any ideas about fund raising please pass them along to me. I will take them to the board and we can discuss them.

I am still doing basically the same things today I have done for the last 10 years, One on one counseling, group study and victim/offender mediation.
Speaking of mediation, I have had an answer to this prayer. There is an inmate that I have known for several years and he is preparing to go home. He could be paroled soon or could serve his maximum sentence and be released in 2014. I have been praying that God would open the door to discuss his anger. Two weeks ago when he came to see me he said he had eavesdropped on someone else’s conversation on the yard. It happened to be another inmate I see and had tried to set up a mediation with one of his victims. It didn’t work out for the mediation to take place but it did give the man an opportunity to go back in his past and tell me his life story. This helped him greatly and even though it didn’t go to mediation it did open a door for him to write to the mother of his victim. They have written a few letters back and forth and she told him she had forgiven him. This made his year. To know that a mother could forgive him for killing her daughter! Well, he was telling two other inmates about this and he said: “if you have the opportunity to talk to Tom, do it. Even if it doesn’t lead to mediation it will make you feel better about yourselves by getting it off your chest”.
This man heard that and came to me with the request. I was shocked to say the least. Here I am praying for a door to open with this guy and here he is asking me to lead him through the offender half of mediation.
I explained the process to him and that he would have to tell me his life story in detail, including his crime.
I asked if he could do that and he said “I don’t know, but if I can’t tell you I can’t tell anybody”. Well last week we started down his life road and we will continue it to the end. PRAISE THE LORD!

The point to this story is that it gave me a new perspective on the victim/offender mediation issue. Maybe I am to start doing half of the process to be a person an inmate can talk to about their life and crime.
It has been an answer to prayer for me so stay tuned and we’ll see where God takes us.

This is the exciting thing about following the Lord. You never know where he will lead you but
you know it’s going to be a great ride and when you get there you say “thank you Lord, this is
exactly where I wanted to be”.
Another opportunity that popped up out of the blue is an invitation to spend more time at Hiawatha Correctional Facility. Currently I am there on Thursday afternoon. This may increase to all day Thursday (morning and afternoon). I would be helping the Chaplain respond to the many kites (Inmate requests for one time counseling. This has not been completely worked out yet but I believe it will be by the end of the year.
    
God bless all of you and I will write again soon. In the meantime we covet your continued prayer and praise God for you.
If you are called to financially support our ministry you may send checks to:
No Fence Too High Ministries, Inc.
4505 S. State Rd.
Harbor Springs, Mi. 49740
We are a 501©) 3 tax exempt ministry.

Tom and Teresa

December 2006 Newsletter

December 1, 2006

Our Dear Friends,

We are happy to (finally) inform you of our “new” ministry. Our new name is “No Fence Too High Ministries, Inc.”. We have a board of directors set up and they are Jim and Cindy Ghastin from Kincheloe, Russ and Marcia Jones from Soo St. Marie, Todd and Sue Ortlieb from Petoskey, Jeff and Sheryl Peterson from Alanson. Jim is the President, Jeff is Vice President, Todd is Treasure and Cindy is Secretary. Teresa and I will act as Executive Directors.

We thank God for sending these wonderful Christian people to us and for their willingness to sit on our board. We have our By Laws completed and approved and our 501(c)3 paper work in to the I.R.S. We can now start raising support funds and starting programs. You may send support checks to the address above and prayers to the Father.As you can imagine this is a very exciting time for Teresa and I as well as our board. We are on the road to what we believe will be exciting things in prison/jail ministry.

We have chosen the first of January to separate from “AIRO” Ministries. We want all of you to know that we have no problems with “AIRO”. We have had nine great years with them and appreciate everything they have done for us.  We don’t look at an end to our relationship with them but an extension of both ministries. We hope to be a resource for them and they for us. We will now start setting up programs (One has already opened in the protective custody unit for a Bible study. I’ll share more on this in a future letter), and fund raising events to meet our budget.

We also will work on a meeting with the Director of the Michigan Department of Corrections to set up programs. We have been waiting for the November elections to be completed so we know who we will be working with.

Well, that’s where we are to date and we are very excited about this new opportunity God has given us and will continue to seek His leading in everything we do.

God bless all of you!
Tom and Teresa