Please pray for two different teams who will be ministering in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan for the next 2 weeks or so. Especially pray for team unity as new relationships are formed and people cope with the stress of being in a new country with a new bunch of people.

After a few events in Ankara over the weekend, the puppet show will take place at a soup kitchen organised by a church there. Pray for

• Adults and children who have heard the message in parks, at a festival and at a church service over the weekend.
• The team who are a little discouraged about being shut down by police and an angry crowd member yesterday.
• And as a team member writes: "pray that people will come out to the soup day. It's a way where the church can tell people know that they there."

Every year on April 23, thousands of people take a short ferry ride to Büyük Ada (Big Island) just off the coast of Istanbul. The main aim of most folks is to visit an old Orthodox church building on the island and receive a "blessing" from the priest - even though almost none of the folks who come are Christians.

In recent years, Christians from all over Istanbul have banded together to pray, worship and share the gospel with these pilgrims. Last year, the weather was good, and estimates put numbers at around 70,000. Yep, that's a lot of folks to talk to about Jesus!

Taco will be sending a dance, drama, puppetry and music team over this year to draw crowds and engage them with the Gospel message. Please pray for us...

• Weather: We can't perform in the rain - but more importantly, bad weather will keep people at home.
• Energy: It's a 7am start to catch the ferry, and we don't get back to the mainland till 6pm. Between then, we will perform our different shows many, many, times...
• Local artists: As April 23 is also a national holiday, we'll have a few nationals performing publicly with us. Pray that all of us will remember our parts and be bold in sharing.
• Grace: It's a long day with huge crowds and all the uncertainty that can go with that. People can get tired and cranky pretty easily. We will need patience and grace with each other.

As summer quickly approaches (although even in İstanbul it hasn't been approaching as quickly as some would like!) we are working on some material using music, drama and storytelling to arrest people with the message of the Gospel. We had a great workshop session today with help from a local brother giving us some helpful cultural clues it can be so easy to miss as a foreigner here, but we still need further inspiration as we refine these and other ideas, commit them to memory - and of course perform them.

A friend in North Africa shares this...

It wasn't the first time he had found himself in this small town talking to this man. Six months earlier, David*, a worker living in North Africa, had met Mehdi* in this exact spot.

Traveling around the region with his guitar, David stopped to play. Mehdi, a young man in his twenties, was one of the many curious to meet this musical foreigner. As a singer and songwriter, David began to share Jesus through his music. Before leaving, he gave Mehdi the Gospel of Luke as a gift.

"(Mehdi) seemed more interested in my music than in what I told him about Jesus," said David. Still, he prayed Mehdi would read the Gospel.

Now, David had a second chance. Right away Mehdi told David he had read the entire book of Luke and had lots of questions. So much was different from what he knew, he said. When David left, Mehdi had a Bible and a film about Jesus.

Seeing Mehdi's excitement after such a brief encounter, David was encouraged to continue praying. "It has an impact," David said. Please pray for Mehdi and others like him to find the hope of Jesus in 2013.