When Steve Saint asked the Waodani Indians of Ecuador — the same tribe that killed his missionary father in 1956 — how he could help them some years ago, they mentioned the concept of a flying machine.

He never forgot the idea and earlier this week drove through Chattanooga with the Maverick Sport Flying Car he helped engineer and which he intends the South American tribe will have one day.

The tech site GizmoWatch has more:

A result of 7 years of research and development by the Indigenous People’s technology and Education center – The Maverick is a car which “transforms automatically into an ATV when the roads are primitive and rough, float when the bridge is out or the river has flooded its banks and inundated the roads – and fly when it is impractical to drive or float.” See the Maverick Sport flying car at Oshkosh AirVenture 2010 in the video below.

I-Tech, the company behind the Maverick, states that its mission is to “support the Great Commission by assisting the ‘hidden’ church in its journey toward independence under the lordship of Jesus Christ.” They hope to have the car for sale by the end of the year for $80,000.

Look for more pictures and videos at I-Tech’s website and YouTube Channel.

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For now, the city of Manchester is telling its citizens to conserve water:

Due to the flooding, the City of Manchester is requesting all residents to conserve water and sewer and urges citizens to watch and listen for continued news media announcements.  Please minimize water usage by refraining from laundry, flushing stools, washing dishes, etc. for the duration of the flooding event or until the City is back to normal operations.

And the Red Cross is assisting flood victims – more information can be found at the Grant Wood Chapter’s website.

KCRG, channel 9 in nearby Cedar Rapids/Waterloo (also home of our own Faith 1090) has more information:

LAKE DELHI – Everywhere you go along Lake Delhi in Delaware County, you see busted boats and all kinds of debris.

About 300 to 700 homes got damaged when the dam broke on Saturday. No one knows how long it’s going to take to clean up the mess.

A chance to see the broken Lake Delhi dam attracted plenty of people looking to snap a photo.

But, downstream, homeowners cried out for attention.

“We need help. We need help down here,” homeowner Tammy Gorman said.

Volunteer Andrew Bacon said, “They need more people out here. That’s for sure.”

If you can give time or money, please contact the Red Cross as the website listed above.

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No one knows exactly how many Christians there are among China’s population of 1.3 billion. There are an estimated 21 million members of the government-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic movement, but nobody knows how many Protestants worship in unregistered house churches.

Some recent surveys have calculated there could be as many as 100 million Chinese Protestants. That would mean that China has more Christians than Communist Party members, which now number 75 million.

And the government’s limiting of religion, which has been extremely oppressive for decades, seems to be waning:

China’s Christians are pushing back the boundaries, and the authorities don’t seem to know how to respond. Recent reports say some leaders of larger unofficial churches are harassed and persecuted and their congregations are prevented from meeting in their previous places of worship.

But in [the] rural part of China, these young missionaries are operating without hindrance.

Read the whole thing, as well as their story about the growth of rural churches in China.

To hear more about missions to China and the east, listen to today’s interview with FEBC’s Greg Harris.

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To learn more or to listen to past shows, check out In Touch Ministries online.

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To learn more about No Longer Music, David, or Steiger International, check out their website. To see some of No Longer Music’s performances — look on No Longer Music’s website.

Author Larry Osborne debunks some Christian urban legends on the next Focus on the Family. His book, 10 Dumb Things That Smart Christians Believe, talks about the myths Christian hold to without checking to see if they’re true. If you’ve been told one too many inspirational quotes that don’t line up with Scripture, give Focus on the Family a listen this Friday at 9:30am!

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CNN has reports from those who are in the country, and they say the conditions are still dire:

Six months later, not much appears to have changed. It still looks like a bomb just dropped on this city. The government has barely begun the cleanup process. Roads in the center of the city are still blocked by debris. And some experts predict that it could take up to 20 years to remove all of it.

Yet they do see some rays of hope in the middle of the difficulties:

But many Haitians are taking matters into their own hands.

Jean-Jacques Jerome is hammering pieces of wood together, building a new house to replace the one that was destroyed in the earthquake.

“I couldn’t afford new construction material,” he says, “so I scavenged parts from the street, from junk piles and from rubble.”

From the rubble of a devastated city, a new generation of makeshift housing is going up, which will likely be even more vulnerable to the floods and killer storms that plague Haiti.

Christianity Today is talking about ministering to Haitian children with soccer games during the recent World Cup, through a ministry called OneHope:

OneHope employees then handed out World Cup–focused booklets that relate soccer to faith. The booklets include a testimony from Kaká, a Brazilian star player well-known for his Christian faith.

The staff also handed out plastic bags of water, which the children poured over their heads and squirted into their mouths. But soon they began asking for soccer balls, and two boys continued playing with a Sprite bottle. A OneHope employee explained that the ministry should try to leave the tent city by 11 a.m. If they stayed any longer, she said, they’d be expected to feed the children lunch, which they were not equipped to do.

Learn more about OneHope at their website, and hear a podcast about their outreach in Haiti.

And recently a group from Sioux Falls (with Ryan Nissley of KNWC-FM) went to Haiti, and this is a video they made of the experience:

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For the next few days, Woodrow Kroll will be talking about Revelations and help us understand what it all means. His first topic for this week is “Is Revelation Fulfilled?”

Be sure to go to Back to the Bible’s website to listen again or get a transcript of the show!

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On Monday, we’ll hear a dramatic retelling of Paul Revere’s famous “Midnight Ride” from Old North Church. Then on Tuesday, author and military wife Sara Horn shares how she learned to trust in God’s strength when deployment separated her family.

Focus on the Family is on weekdays at 9:30am on Faith Radio — for more about Focus on the Family and to hear past broadcasts, visit their website.

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For the rest of the week, Chuck Swindoll will be speaking on Romans 6 and the connection between the law and grace. It’s a series he calls “Dying To Live.” Check out the Insight for Living website to listen again, or start from the beginning of the series.