Pastor John-Paul C. Foster has a tremendous vision for our youth and youth beyond. He wants to see children grow and thrive. To that end, Pastor Foster and the congregation of Faithful Central Bible Church raised $500,000 to help local youth and struggling kids in Kenya.
As the pastor of Faithful Central Bible Church, Pastor Foster is no stranger to assisting our young people to guidance and to a better life.
“Locally, I think it’s important for the church to serve their people,” he said.
“It’s the family community engagement and outreach and when you look at the community that there are churches who do local missions and global missions.” He has held backpack giveaways for over 6,000 children and even held summer camps for kids in the community.
Globally, his missions include working with I Can Fly, an organization to assist young girls in Kenya with various things such as funding for school.
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“We work with an organization, who’s a sister of the church, who I say is the daughter of the church but one of my sisters,” Foster said.
“Those young girls, 10 of them, were graduating. So, we gave them scholarships to help them to go to a university after graduating.”
Currently, he is still a big help to the Kenyan organization to bring an important resource of life to villages in Eswatini as well.
“So right now we’re still working with them. They’re doing some things in the village areas to assess the village to bring clean water there.” The pastor feels it is not only his mission that compels him to take on such a large task but the fact that we have an advantage that we don’t think about everyday.
“Sometimes I think we take for granted the things that we have here. We take for granted running water,” Pastor Foster explained.
“We let water run and we just run away from it, it’s just running. We’ll go do something and come back and it’s just running and there’s areas in the world that they want water.”
Pastor Foster noted that in some of these areas, the only access to water is walking far and filling up at a local pond. Yet, he also feels that students here at home need help as well. The water also helps them to be financially able on their own also.
“Bringing clean water to them changes everything. It changed their economy drastically,” said the pastor.
“To have clean water, they’re able to grow healthy crops, they grow crops, they can sell them. They have clean water, they can also have cattle and then, they can eat their own food and they can sell cattle.”
The pastor talks about how in the past, he and his church has also given some students here at home a new opportunity to obtain the education he feels they deserve.
“For us, being able to pour into the next generation, their education, that just, that changes our community. They change their lives immediately. And so we came up with an initiative to give away scholarship money.”
Although Pastor Foster says the idea is fairly new, he does plan to keep the program going as it helps students to branch out to colleges they love.
“Last year, I think was our first year doing this, but we’ve done it for a year. Last year and this year we gave over $200,000 of scholarship money for our youth to go to school. That’s from HBCUs, that’s Ivy League schools, trade schools. We want to make education accessible to everybody,” he said.
The pastor truly believes that the future of the children inspires him to help the next generation. “We have to invest in our children. As the community we have to, you want to pour into a generation. If you want to impact the community it starts with the children,” Pastor Foster said. He also feels the Word of God is a main factor in what he does and what we all should do. “When God blesses us, we need to be a blessing to other people,” Pastor Foster said. “That’s the hands and the feet of the gospel.”
