It’s almost hard to believe, but the BCP 2008 team leaves for Bethlehem in less than two weeks!! Last time we wrote, we said there would be some big news…There is, and we’ll get to it in just a little bit.

First, as of today, we’ve raised enough money to deliver gifts for 235+ children! Praise God! We cannot thank all of you enough for your faithfulness to give and for your prayers and encouragement. Gifts would not be going to Bethlehem this year were it not for your response to God’s prompting, and we are grateful to Him for you. Any additional funds we raise at this point will help us expand our outreach to far more children than we had anticipated. There are many locations with children who have unmet needs and would love to receive gifts.

Secondly, we will be wrapping gifts for donation at the Weston Town Center from 1:00- 8:00 p.m. on Friday, November 28th and Saturday, November 29th and need 6 volunteers each day. The first shift will wrap gifts from 1:00-4:30 p.m. and the second shift will do so from 4:30- 8:00 p.m. If you are able to volunteer for one or both days, please contact us as soon as possible and indicate which day/s and shift/s you could serve.

Now, for the big news we’ve promised. For several months now, we have been working with Christianity Today (CT) on an article about BCP. Today, we received a copy of the December 2008 edition and are very excited to tell you that BCP is on the cover! We’re not the cover story, but the title of the article about BCP is listed on the cover with a page number reference. We have been told CT will post the article on their website in another week or two. So, if you subscribe to CT, keep an eye out for the December edition. If not, we’ll send out the link once the article is available.

In other news, we still need to upload the mp3 for the radio interview from November 12th. We’ll be uploading tomorrow evening and will send out a short note when it’s up.

Remember, we will blog daily during the project and update our twitter page as we move from location to location. Ali will also be sending status updates on facebook. If you haven’t followed us on twitter yet, connect with us there for real-time updates.

Finally, if you’ve been thinking about helping the project this year but haven’t gotten to it yet, you can still help by visiting our donate page.

Stay tuned- the best is yet to come!

We have some big news to announce in the next couple of weeks so keep checking up on the blog. We can’t say what it is quite yet so just bear with us for now. We promise it will be good news that’s worth the wait.

For now we have a quick note for you. On Wednesday the 12th at 12:30pm EST (11:30am CST), Ali Elhajj and Rod Reding will be live on Iowa’s Praise 940AM with Tamara Scott. The name of the show is “Truth for our Times”. You can listen live at praise940.com

Many thanks to those of you who have either committed to supporting us this year or have already supported us with your giving. Please remember to pray for the BCP 2008 team while we’re in Bethlehem from December 5th through the 14th. We’ll be sending out specific prayer requests this weekend.

Hope you can tune in to Wednesday’s show; if not, we’ll post the recording once we have it.

We have our video up on GodTube! Now, our goal is to get it on the “Most Viewed” page. To do that, we need at least 100 people to watch it. Please help us by clicking here to watch the video.