Thank you for responding to our YouTube appeal for Ukraine Rapid Relief by jamesgilbert.org. Here are six ways you can contribute to our ongoing relief efforts to war-weary Ukrainian citizens:
Secure credit cardhere. You’ll instantly receive an automated receipt for tax-deductible giving. Please consider covering the credit card processing fee.
Your Zelle account to our Bank of America Zelle ID is: office@jamesgilbert.org. (More info on Zelle here.)
Checkpayable to Jim Gilbert Ministries to PO Box 141928, Gainesville FL 32614. Write the word UKRAINE on the memo line.
Remember to include your email or physical address in order to receive a receipt for tax-deductible giving. This is important for anyone wanting to keep Uncle Sam from wasting more money. We won’t add you to yet another list!
Thank you for your interest, trust, and prayers, as together we help relieve the suffering of these Ukrainian people.
I’m headed to Poland and Ukraine for 3 weeks, my 3rd mission in 13 months. Our targets: 1) continue helping Ukrainian widows and orphans; 2) aid Kherson flood victims of Putin’s dam bombing; 3) deliver relief where supply lines are cut off; 4) supply funds for life-saving bandages that our close contacts are delivering to wounded Ukrainian civilians, especially husbands and fathers trying to save their homes. Casualties can drop by 70% with proper bandages and tourniquets; 5) minister in 5 Polish cities, conducting worship symposiums and aiding more refugees.
We American Christians must remain tenderhearted. I’m still awed by what happened a year ago in Poland when our daughter Lexi and I met smiling, hopeful 5-year-old Ukrainian kids who didn’t know that their daddies, who had stayed home to fight, were dead. We had brought them food and blankets, so they made beautiful, personalized cards to thank us, and gave us big hugs because our help changed their lives. But Lexi’s life was changed too, by a hug from one innocent, utterly vulnerable little girl. She still often tells people about it if they ask her about Ukraine.
Lexi and I will never unsee those little ones’ innocent faces. Never. So I’m asking you: On October 5th, please send me back to Poland and UKRAINE.Join us here to change lives there. Here’s how:
Donate via Zelle, a no–fee, instant, 100% secure money transfer from any participating bank to our ministry account. Our Bank of America Zelle ID is also our email: office@jamesgilbert.org. (More on Zelle here.) NOTE: To receive a tax receipt, you MUST send an email address to us. We won’t add you to more lists.
Donate securely on this page via credit card. Just click here. You’ll receive an automated receipt for tax-deductible giving. Please consider covering the credit card processing fee.
Give via Apple Pay (352-316-1212); Venmo (james@jamesgilbert.org); or PayPal(@jimgilbertministries).
Mail your checkpayable to Jim Gilbert Ministries to PO Box 141928, Gainesville FL 32614. Write the word UKRAINE on the memo line.
You know Dolly and me.We’ll do as much as you make possible. My heart is full. Let’s make it my pockets too. I promise to empty them wisely.
(Wanna see Poland & Ukraine for yourself? Click the video below.)
Welcome to the Ukraine Rapid Relief Fund and jamesgilbert.org. We asked you to give in 2022! You gave $130,397 towards Ukraine relief, and we actually SENT $133,000, directly into Ukraine and to refugee efforts in Poland. But Putin’s monstrous war isn’t over, as he bombs not just military targets, but homes, schools—anywhere he can kill innocents. Just yesterday, as I write, air raid sirens sounded over the entire nation. So, WE MUST KEEP FIGHTING BACK, not with bombs, but with life-saving aid sent in Jesus’ name. Look, the worst thing now would be to let compassion fatigue overtake us.
I leave for both Ukraine and Poland in October, and as I said in my most recent Facebook video, this year we’re targeting three relief ministries in particular. All three get relief to areas hardly reached by others. Find out more by clicking the photo below. Then come back here.
For now, let me be bold one more time: No tipping. No “latte” money. Please give AGAIN! Look, when I was in Poland last September, I met smiling 5-year old kids who don’t know that their daddies, who stayed behind to fight, are dead. No more hugs and nightly tuck-ins. They’re gone. Forever. So you can see why I’m saying once again that You and I need to act now!
There are four secure ways you can give, listed in order of efficiency. NOTE: If giving via Zelle, you MUST send your email address to office@jamesgilbert.org in order to receive a receipt for tax-deductible contribution.
Donate via Zelle, a no–fee, immediate, 100% secure money transfer from your participating bank to our ministry’s Bank of America account. Check your online banking page to see if yours is one of the rapidly growing number of banks using Zelle. (You may need to type the word Zelle in your bank’s search box.) Our Bank of America Zelle ID is 352-316-1212. Click here for more Zelle info: https://www.zellepay.com/how-it-works
Donate securely via credit card by clicking the blue Contribute button on the upper right of this page. (On a smartphone, it’s in the upper-right drop-down menu.) You will receive an immediate receipt for your tax-deductible donation via email. Please consider covering the credit card processing fee.
Mail a check payable to Jim Gilbert Ministries to our office at PO Box 141928, Gainesville FL 32614. Write the word UKRAINE on the memo line.
Give via an app like Apple Pay, Venmo or PayPal. (NOTE: The Cash app has changed their non-profit rules, so we request that you avoid that app.)
Ukrainian lives hang in the balance and YOU AND I need to act now. Thank you.
The Kurds asked us to help write true religious liberty into their new constitution
Last year the government of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region asked for our help. Please interview Christian leaders, they requested. What religious rights would they want to be specified in a new Kurdish Constitution? Would we then write recommendations spelling out these rights?
Proud to be named honorary Peshmerga
I landed in Erbil on August 20, 2017. The very next day an armed Iranian militia—yes, Iranian—ambushed and detained our team near Mosul. For the next hour, some 100 militants surrounded us with AK-47 rifles, shouting and firing dozens of rounds into the air. We tried to turn around, but machine guns and a huge rocket launcher blocked us in. Thank the Lord, Iraq’s Prime Minister himself intervened and effected our release.
Wherein we helped make history after we almost died
Last month when Terry Law invited me to join his delegation to Kurdistan, northern Iraq, (Read Part I here.) I leapt at the opportunity. The carrot? The Kurds are preparing to declare their independence from Iraq—now Iran’s puppet—and asked for our help in guaranteeing true religious freedom for Christians and other religious minorities in their prospective new constitution. What Muslim government has ever asked Christians for help in writing a constitution? What majority Islamic nation has ever wanted to establish a true safe haven for Christians and other religious minorities? The answer, until now: Zero.
The Kurds are generally Sunni Muslims, but unlike most Sunnis they are not Arabs. “Kurd first, Sunni second,” they say. A remarkable people, they are descended from the ancient Medes, and like their famed king Cyrus (see Isaiah 45), they have historically looked kindly on Israel. Over the past hundred years, they have also been unfailingly pro-America, despite our nation’s betrayals of their trust, both after World War I and the first Gulf War.
He grabbed at a soldier, and suddenly the whole world shifted into high gear
I was in Iraq for eight remarkable days last month, and in Part II of this report I’ll tell you how I was privileged to help make Middle-East history. But there was one day, August 21, 2017, our second day on the job, that has since taken on a life of its own. In fact, it was a drama that nearly took several of our lives. And for that reason, it forms a fiery preamble to our historic mission.
We were in Kurdistan, Iraq’s largely autonomous northern province, at the invitation of the regional government. Their Interior Minister/Defense Minister had invited us to interview Christian leaders in Kurdistan and the adjoining Nineveh Plain, and based upon those leaders’ desires, to help the Kurdish government compose clear constitutional guarantees and protections for Christians and other religious minorities, should Kurdistan declare independence from Iraq.
We'll also travel to Mosul, freed from ISIS mere weeks ago
You’ve probably seen the news that Mosul, Iraq (aka Nineveh) has finally been liberated from ISIS. Well, here’s more news: I’ll be on the ground in Mosul in just a few days!
Here’s what’s happening:
Last week, Dr. Terry Law, my Unmasking ISIS co-author, asked me to return to Iraq’s Kurdistan Region with him from August 18-26. The Kurds are set to hold a September referendum on independence, and passage is a sure thing. As the only Muslim people in the entire Middle East who don’t persecute Christians, the Kurds want their new nation to guarantee religious freedom for Christians and other religious minorities in their pending new constitution.
Recently, their Defense Minister called to ask Terry to gather the Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant leaders of Kurdistan, Mosul and the Nineveh Plains, to specify what protections they would want written into a new Kurdish Constitution. An independent Kurdistan would become a safe haven for non-Muslims (who include 10 million Orthodox Christians).
This would be an historic first in 1,400 years of Islam!
On the first Saturday in June, 2007, one of my heroes, Jon Karner, was laid to rest in a verdant cemetery outside tiny Milaca, Minnesota. I met Jon in 1980, on a street corner in the USSR. He was Jaanus Karner back then, a leader in the underground church in the Soviet republic of Estonia. We were there to deliver some sorely needed supplies from supporters in the West.
Jaanus was a semi-anonymous legend in the West, and I had seen his black and white photograph hundreds of times. Now, standing there in the flesh, tall and strong with a coal black beard Samson might have envied, I somehow saw him still in black and white. Mind you, contrast was good in the USSR, a lifeless land whose grayness of spirit seemed to drain even the natural world of every shade in the spectrum.
I against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin...
Names changed for safety’s sake..
In 2006, the year after Iraq had adopted a new Constitution guaranteeing greater freedoms, an Arabic friend of mine, “Ali,” traveled to Baghdad, taking with him several Children’s Bibles that present the story of creation, the Old Testament fathers, and the Gospel in Arabic. Commissioned by my writing colleague, Dr. Terry Law, thousands of them had been distributed throughout Baghdad with the permission of—no kidding—The Ayatollah of Baghdad.
When Ali entered the Customs department at the Baghdad airport, the agent inspecting his bags held up one of the Bibles and asked what it was. “A children’s Bible in Arabic,” Ali replied forthrightly.
“Come with me,” said the agent, leading him down a hallway to a nearby room.
After checking the hallway for other personnel, the agent closed the door and spoke freely. He said he had lost his previous job, and had taken the very dangerous position of working at the airport—considered collusion by Al Qaeda because it involved working with Americans—in order to support his family.
“We live in a poor neighborhood,” the man told Ali. One day my son came home with some food, and when I asked him where he got it, he told me the Catholic church down the street.” Ali remembered the church because he and Dr. Law had left a supply of Bibles there.
If there were a hell on earth, Baghdad would be its furnace.
As he scoured the sea of sand four miles beneath him, Terry was acutely aware that planes like this one were clay pigeons for snipers. This really is dangerous, he told himself, as if for the first time. Of course he already knew it was a hazardous mission, so the thought wasn’t new. But the feeling was. For a good twenty years it had been easier to bury his emotions, to lose them in the whirlwind of preaching engagements, plane flights, and frequent missions into various danger zones around the globe. But as perilous as his previous ministry had been, he realized now that he was just minutes from beginning the most dangerous assignment of his life, and Lyle’s words reminded him that this time it was entirely possible that he might never see his family again.
Where are they? he wondered about the snipers he had heard so much about. With only one commercial flight per day flying into Baghdad International, a private flight like his could draw attention. Then again, maybe they were lying in wait along the highway into town. Surely the General has planned for that, he reassured himself, and fast-forwarded his thoughts to the single purpose of his journey.
How in the world does an American preacher get a Muslim nation to rewrite its constitution? he asked himself for the umpteenth time. In two days he would come face to face with Iraq’s prime minister, to intercede for the people’s right to religious freedom, which, along with the lives of thousands of Christians, hung precariously in the balance. Centuries of hatred and prejudice against “Christ-followers” lay blanketed as thick and widespread as the sands below, and the slightest ill wind could stir up a storm of persecution and wholesale slaughter. Someone had to stop it from happening, to speak up now, while there was still time.
