Prayer Requests

First off, a huge thank you to the many people who have and continue to support Kate and my ministry prayerfully and financially!  You are an encouragement to us and have carried us through many difficult times!  The time we were able to spend praying with you Monday was such a great reminder of that support.

For those of you who were not able to join us in prayer on Monday, but would like to join in praying for us, here are the prayer needs we shared:

• Trainings: Two trainings will be happening this weekend at REALITY as we seek to equip more leaders and present missional community (MC) leaders to lead others well.  Pray that God uses these time to bring both vision and clarity to the life he is leading us to live.  Also, please pray that God would use this weekend’s training to raise up more and new leaders in our community.
• Wulf Missional Community: Kate and I are continuing to seek the Lord for wisdom in living and leading others on mission in our neighborhood.  At present the Lord is knitting us together as learn to disciple each other.  Pray that we would grow as servants and as a missionary community sent by God for his purposes.
• Wisdom: REALITY is entering a new season of defining terms and returning to the basics as we enter in to the hard work of helping the church mobilize for Jesus mission of making disciples throughout all of life.
• Multiplication: Pray that Jesus would be exalted in every corner of Olympia/Lacey/Tumwater as communities of people learn to live their lives around Jesus’ commission to make disciples of the nations.

Thank you again to all our supporters!  God is using you to help making this ministry possible!

Prayer Update: Friday-Saturday Training

Beginning Friday night Paul and I began teaching through Gospel, Identity, Rhythms and Missional Community at a rate of one and a half hours per topic.  Wow.  The incredible thing?  For myself at least, three hours still felt like turning a fire hose on an unsuspecting crowd.

What was the outcome?  I think Paul summed it up well: “I think they’re getting it: they’re excited and scared.  If they were just one and not the other, I don’t think I could say that.”  Honestly, I can’t think of a better response to the power and purpose of God.  If God’s purpose really is in the restoration of all things AND he’s yearning for us to participate with him by his power in that–that is exciting!  Yet, if God’s purpose really is as overwhelming as he says it is, then we should be scared (and driven back to trusting in him and his sufficiency to accomplish his purposes).

Thank you for your prayers for this weekend!  Six hours is a lot of time for anyone to listen to anything and not only did our group do it–they did it well!

Now it is time to follow-up with the participants and file away the things we need to change for next year’s trainings (in the first weekends of February, May and October 2011)

Off to Camp!

Half social/spiritual experiment, half foray in to our identity in Christ, tomorrow we shove off for five days away with the students (American and Dutch) at camp, and this time what we learn and where we end up matters.  Let me explain…

In our quest to discover a missional approach to missions, we have been trying something new with the team from Crossroads.  Instead of putting together an event for people to come to, or conjuring up some thing we think will attract people to come so we can bring them to Jesus, we’ve taken a somewhat reverse tactic; helping the team discover and then live out their identity in Christ.  My hope is that this week as we continue to explore our identity in Christ we’ll begin to uncover what our life together should look like.

That’s where the social/spiritual experiment comes in.  What does a community that lives their identity in Christ together look like?  And how do we build our church around supporting the ministry of people (Eph. 4:11-13) in our fellowship living out their that life in Christ lived out (which translates easily to “ministry”)?  These are the questions I’m hoping we begin to explore this week.

Please pray for us as we spend these five days away!  I’ll try to keep the twitter prayer requests (go here for updates or to follow our prayer request) coming during the week, but I’m not sure how good our cell phone reception will be there (I’m not sure she’ll be able to update either, but watch Kari Hagelganz’s blog for more perspective on the team’s trip as well).  Here are some of our major needs:

• For the Spirit to empower us to live out the identity we have in Christ
• For wisdom as we reshape our expression of church together to support
• For clear leading from God for how our identity in Christ leads us to live

Prayer Requests From the Netherlands

I know its been a while since my last post (sadly lost one I tried to upload from my new phone.  Thinking maybe my old post would show up, I waited a couple days.  It didn’t pay off).  I’m going to try to get a real update on here soon (tomorrow?), but still wanted to let you in on my latest brainchild for the blog: prayer updates!

Not exactly rocket science right?  What’s new about giving prayer updates?  Though I tried keeping our prayer needs updated via a widget on the left side of this blog, I will now be doing it through the Twitter widget now displayed on the left side of this blog (to learn more about twitter watch this video or go to twitter.com).  If you’d like to have our prayer requests sent directly to your phone via text message (normal rates apply), follow this link and set up your account with Twitter.

Click here to find out how to set up your cell phone to receive prayer updates via text from Twitter (don’t miss the option to not block text updates during the hours of your choosing–in case you want to sleep).