Dear friends,

I am writing this letter from Florida in the United States of America! This statement by itself is a miracle. As we are finishing the year of 2011 and are already making plans for 2012, I want to reflect a little bit about the last year and share what God has been doing in our midst!

One of the verses the Lord gave us for this year was found in Psalm 66:12;

“You let men ride over our heads;
we went through fire and water,
but you brought us to a place of abundance.”

We have faced quite a lot of opposition this last year and it has continuously been a struggle to fight the good fight. But we are so thankful to see the Lord turning one situation after the other and always bring us to a place of abundance, again and again!

Thanks

First of all we want to thank the Lord for His faithfulness these last twelve months! It has been just absolutely amazing to see Him move so powerfully again and again in all our weakness and inability to make things happen. Truly, He has been working miracles and although men were riding over our heads and the fire was hot and the water deep, time and time again He has brought us to a place of abundance! Thank you Father in the Name of Jesus! Where would we be without you?

We also want to thank every Coworker for your faithfulness and endurance. You have held out when truly the odds were against us many times. I want to specifically thank Erich & Bianca Pfister, Anita Forrer, Nadine Singer, Claudio & Claudia Killias and John & Juster Shiundu from Kenya! You have done very well and we are looking forward to working with you even closer and more effective in the future. Thanks also to all our other international Coworkers! You are very precious to us and we love to work together with you! Special thanks also to the Leaders and the Church in Switzerland! You have made such a difference through all your help and love! You have been the backbone of this ministry!

We thank our Board for standing with us in our spot of weakness and not giving up on us. Thank you Philip & Glenda Elston and Tom & Suzie Brock! We truly appreciate your input and support! It has been intense and you have been there for us all along the way! What an honor to have you with us in this.

Last but not least we thank all the faithful supporters of this Ministry! Wow, it is amazing that God has used such a tiny group of Givers to expand His Kingdom in Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Africa, Europe and the U.S.! Thank you so much for all your financial seeds and prayers that have made it possible to reach out to so many places! Thank you so much!

Challenges along the way turn into Blessings!

Daniela and I with our children had been without a home for about 8 months. We thank God for friends and family that gave us a temporary place to stay until the Lord opened the way for us to have a new home in a new country. It has been quite a challenge and still is.

This year we had our living room on a hill a few miles from the place we both grew up. Since we had no place of our own, we invited our guest to a barbecue place right there and the forest had become our second home ;-). It was an interesting phase and we thank God that the weather was so good in Switzerland when we were there so we could be outside a lot and just make our own fire and have people come to fellowship right there.

But God really honored our faith and endurance in a big way. From having no home at all the first part of this year, we went to having two homes in two different countries. Yes, that is right. God restored the Ministry Center in Wald back to us and we could move in three weeks before we left for the United States and moved into our new home in Florida! This is where we reside right now. There are still some challenges with the immigration process, but we are living in a great house and are not even paying rent because a supporter bought the house for us and allows us stay there for free! Isn’t that wonderful?

Changes in the Swiss Team

We have always been preaching about multiplication. But I guess we did not think that this would happen the way it did in the last years. This year we had two of our closest couples deciding to leave Follow Him and start their own ministries. So we had a chance to prove our principles and to release them with blessing.

Manuel and Kathrin Bestler with their three children Amy, Joshua and Milo have started a new Ministry called “The King’s Chambers”. They have been pioneering with us when we started Gateway Network International in the Zurich Hills in 2002 and we have shared many years together building God’s Kingdom. Our children have grown up together and we have a long history with many great things the Lord has done over the years!

We want to thank you, Manuel and Kathrin, for all the love and support in all those years. It has been great having you with us on the ride and we really appreciate that you were backing us up in the Spirit all those years and were an integral part of what the Lord had been doing through Gateway and also Follow Him International.

It is not always easy to let people go that have been with you for so long and have played such an important part in your life. But we have released them with joy and blessing knowing that they will accomplish the things that God has placed in their lives!

We also had the opportunity to release another dear couple later on this year at our Coworkers Conference, Roman and Smaranda Naegeli and their two children Janis and Janina! They have such a heart to see worship being released in the Body of Christ and God has given them a lot of great songs that they want to publish. In order to accomplish this, they have stepped down from the Follow Him Team and are devoting more time to this project.

We have gone through “thick and thin” with Roman and Smaranda and have known them also since we started the new work with Gateway Network in 2002. Not only did I marry them, but we also saw them rise up in ministry, leading one of our first house churches with many new believers with strong personalities. They were challenged quite a bit over the years and have grown to the task!

We thank God that they are still part of one of the churches and that we get to see them from time to time. Thank you Roman and Smaranda for all the love and support during all those years. Always lending a helping hand and serving in all kinds of things. Thank you for being there and sticking things through. We love you guys and pray that your projects will prosper and be a blessing to many!

As we have released some of our Team Members, we had some new people step up. They are not new to most of you, but they have been helping and serving us all along and so we asked Nadine Singer and Claudio & Claudia Killias to be a part of the Follow Him Team Switzerland. Together with Anita Forrer and Erich & Bianca Pfister, they are building a great team there under the local leadership of Erich Pfister. I am sure you will hear more from them as they continue to move the work in Switzerland forward.

International Work continues to grow

Since we have been informing you regularly about the work in the different nations, I want to just make a short summary:

East and West Africa

Ivory Coast

In West Africa I had the chance to go in together with our longtime friend Patrice Acka (originally from the Ivory Coast, living in Wales now) and visit our coworker and friend just before the political unrest started. We have been in touch with Privat and are in the process of regrouping and praying about the next steps in the country.

The vision remains the same. God has shown us that he wants to bring healing to this nation and restore them. Patrice Acka will take a more active role there, since he is a native and speaks perfect French. We are praying right now how to continue the work there. Please pray that we will see clearly what our involvement will be over there.

Kenya

John Shiundu, our leader in Kenya, has been really happy about the development of our work in his country. We have won a couple of dozen top leaders that are supporting the work and Follow Him has been quite established in terms of coworkers and loyalty. Not only that, but we have also found some other great coworkers that are mature and can complement each other well and support the vision!

We are praying for a place where we can hold schools permanently to be able to really help bring good change to the country. Most of the leaders we work with also support orphans in one way or the other. So we are looking for a place to train the leaders and send them out into rather unreached areas to start new works.

If we could have our own place it would help establish the work, train the leaders, start doing micro business and also help the orphans. Please pray with us for this. We are looking for something near Nairboi that is central. God has opened some incredible doors with some awesome people, and now we need to take the next step!

Southeast Asia

It has been great to have the second Follow Him School this year in Hua Hin, Thailand. It seems that God has really opened a door to Southeast Asia as we seem to be having favor with leaders in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia. We also had students from Pakistan and the Himalayas coming to these schools.

But not only that, we have also found great friends and trustworthy people in Stefan and Moni Schmied who are managing the resort where we are holding our schools. They are Swiss and they are willing to help us expand the work in SEA in the future. It has been a great joy to work with them and we pray it will continue to be like that!

Right now we are praying to be able to have our own center in Thailand that we can run as a hotel to generate income, but also use for regular schools. SEA is one of the least reached areas in the world, and we feel that it is of utmost importance to reach into those areas the people have never heard about Jesus, and those who are followers suffer persecution for their faith in the Son of God, Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior!

Here again, we have faithful coworkers ready to do the work. We just lack the finances to be able to be more effective. We have been praying for years for the workers in the harvest. Now we have some faithful and reliable people. We just need some more finances. Please consider this and pray for us that God would open the way for that.

The Himalayas

We have been working with Richard Suberi from Himalayan International Ministries (HIM) for a few years now and it has been really great to work alongside and reach into the countries in the Himalayas and SEA together.

For the first time now we have a team of people working with us in the Himalayas. Most of them are from India and one is from Bhutan. I will not mention their names here, but want you to pray for their protection. One of them just had an accident with his wife and they have broken rips and some other fractures.

The spiritual warfare is real and the devil is not happy about what is happening in those regions. We have some wonderful people and want to start our first “School for Church Planters” there in September and October 2012. Please pray that we can accomplish this and plant new churches in the unreached areas of the Himalayas!

We will be reaching mainly into countries like Nepal, Bhutan and hopefully even into Tibet in the future. Of course we will also work in the Northern Indian states and start the ministry there!

USA

We have started a little house church here in our house in Florida and already experienced some miracles that are almost unbelievable. God has been good to us and we are learning a lot about building your house with wisdom, understanding and self-control. But this is another topic. I just wanted to say that we have also been growing as a family, a process that will never end.

When we arrived in Florida, we did not know anyone, and the first people we met was our realtor who helped us find a house and her husband. It turns out they are involved in prison ministry like our friends and coworkers from Iowa, the Tanners.

As I was praying about that, I had this vision of starting a training center on a farm with former prisoners, giving them a chance to have work and being discipled when they come out of prison. Both the Tanners and our new friends the Morellis are really excited about that since they see a big need in this area.

So please pray with us that God would give us a farm to produce food and at the same time disciple some former inmates! We have found out that God has been speaking to many different people that he wants to use the former prisoners to really reach out in this country and bring revival to many places. So we trust we are in the midst of the flow of what the Lord wants in this country.

We also want to start schools in California and we will be traveling to the West in January to meet with some people who might give us their church premises to have our first school in the U.S.

Switzerland

We are so happy that Erich and Bianca Pfister have started to take the responsibility for the work in Switzerland and we are starting to see some great fruit coming out of it. The works in the region of Bern and Zurich are continuing and we also started to have some days of ministry in the new Ministry Center in Wald. It seems that people are really being touched there and we get great feedback!

We also want to do the first short term School of Ministry in July and trust that it will bring a lot of blessing to people from Switzerland and other places. Thank you for all your help and prayers for this. We really feel it is crucial to do another School in Switzerland itself!

We are also in touch with some Church Planters in other parts of Europe that would like to be part of what we are doing. We just need to know the right time and place to get that going! Please pray for the work in Switzerland and Europe that we can help to really reach the unreached there too! We talk about SEA, the Himalayas and other unreached places, but sometimes forget that Europe needs a revival as well and the fact that only a small percentage is being reached and born again in our own countries!

Small Beginnings

As we look back at this last year, it just amazes us all how the Lord has been opening up all these venues for us in some of the least reached areas in the world! We are so privileged to get to know people that have suffered persecution, been in prison because of their faith, and yet claim to learn so much from our ministry and are multiplying what we are teaching in their own nations! We are learning and being inspired as much by them as they are by us!

It has been a great joy to do this work. We are just a few people that are giving their time, resources and energy into the vineyard of the Lord, and it is a privilege to work alongside all these men and women of faith in Switzerland, the U.S., SEA, Africa and the Himalayas.

We do not despise the small beginnings and trust that God will be faithful in the days to come, like he has been in the year past! Many times we did not know how God would provide for the tasks ahead. The tasks were too big for us and we had no way of doing it by ourselves! So we give him the glory for all that has happened and for his great patience and love he has for us!

Thank you so much for walking this road with us and we are looking forward to seeing the Lord move in our midst this coming year!

Lots of Love and Blessings,

Claude and Daniela Widmer,
Founders Follow Him International