by
Hailey Armoogan
During the building of the Pavilion in Jerusalem, Doc Crowder
faithfully
led 12 work teams to Israel to help us with the building of the
King of Kings Pavilion Conference and Worship Center. He inspired
men and a
few women, from across America to invest their time, resources and
sweat into a God birthed vision in the heart of Jerusalem. Each team
came and dedicated 14 days to the building project and were followed
immediately by the next team. He ran those teams like
clockwork and did the seemingly impossible. It became my routine every
other Monday to get on the bus early in the
morning and ride up to their hotel to meet the “men” and in one team’s
case – two women, one a building engineer, the other a paramedic.
I would meet the group in the lobby and then teach them how to purchase
a bus ticket and ride the bus into downtown Jerusalem. As the
work teams gave long hours of hard work in the construction zone, Doc
Crowder worked in “his office”. Whatever office space with a
computer that was empty in the King of Kings office, became Doc’s work
space. He diligently worked prepping the next MAPS team to come
and recruiting the team that would follow them. He pecked away
email after email – sharing his passion for Israel, the need and
opportunity, the vision God had given him and his knowledge that the
Lord would provide. It was also during his “office hours”
that Doc would seek to serve the men on the MAPS teams with their
communication needs. He would have the men write out their
correspondence that they wished to have emailed home during the
evenings and Doc would faithfully “pigeon peck” those letters home to
wives, family and home congregations. At that time there
was no other computer available to the teams, other than at the KKCJ
offices. However, this endeavour came to a screeching halt one
afternoon when email addresses and messages accidentally got mixed up,
resulting in the wrong wife receiving the wrong message. That’s
when Doc threw up his hands and said, “That’s it boys! You can
send your own love letters from now on!”.