A week out

We got to take the current DTS (Discipleship Training School) that we are leading to Cambridge last week for a week of teaching and sharing the story of Jesus on the streets.

It was a really significant week for the group for a number of different reasons. Firstly it helped to deepen the friendships between us all, to help gel us together as a community. Secondly it helped us to be able to challenge some of the heart attitudes that are in all of us. Thirdly it helped to build confidence in our trainees, from not feeling like they would be able to talk to anyone, to being able to approach people and get into conversations with.

We had teaching in the mornings from a lady in YWAM who spends most of her time talking with people and sharing who Jesus is and what he has done with them. We then spent the afternoons on the streets of Cambridge close to the University talking with people. We had a range of different experiences, which is normal, from people who did not want to hear anything and would tell us to go away, to people who really wanted to talk and hear what we were saying. We used a coloured bracelet as a tool to help tell the gospel story. Over the week we had 11 people commit their lives to Jesus and Connie, the lady we were with, spent time with each making sure they got connected to a church or other people who know Jesus.

All in all we had a great week, and it has built excitement for the outreach of the school, which we will be doing in October through to December.

Creative Intercession

As a YWAM (Youth With A Mission) Community we greatly value hearing Gods voice. One way we do this is spend time together as a community each week and spend time interceding for the things that God talks to us about the world.

Last week when we did this, we got out the Giant world map that we have and God started to talk to us about world Hunger, so we decided to be creative in the way we prayed and put food in different areas of the map. As we prayed and listened to God together we moved this food around as a symbolic act of what we were praying about.

This is just one of the many ways we spend time as a community praying for the world, we love it so much we do it every week, with different focuses. Christy and me are both part of the small team, which helps to lead these times and facilitate for others who also have something they want to lead us in prayer for. We really value partnering with God and hearing his heart for this world, and the intercession times often lead us to do more as a community.

Just go again

We have helped to host another Just Go event over these last couple of weeks. Just Go is a short-term mission trip for 16 and 18 year olds who have just finished GCSE or A-Level exams here in England. Last year Christy and myself helped to lead a team to Poland. This year we are not going out with a team, but we helped to run a half night of prayer focusing on the countries that the teams are going out to and also ran some morning workout sessions. We have sent four teams out for 2 weeks to 4 different countries in Eastern Europe, altogether we sent out close to 30 people this year.

Last year was very significant for a number of individuals, with several of them returning to Mission in a number of different ways. We are really looking forward to hearing what God has done in and through the teams when they return, so watch this space for more stories in a few weeks.

God Speaks

We got chatting to a guy in Brighton recently about who God is and what he has done in our lives. He was so interested, and wanted to know what God wanted to say to him that we invited him back to the Church we were working with to share food and talk more.

He ended up spending the whole evening with us, even joining us for a time of worship after the meal. During the evening I got to spend time praying for him and shared with him what I felt God was saying. It was during this time of prayer that the things God had been saying to me made sense a bout where he was at and the question he had. This was the main reason he stayed to be apart of our worship time.

I found out at the end of the evening that he had made a commitment to follow Jesus about 10 years before this, but had slowly drifted away from his faith, and did not know that God is active and speaks. When he came to me at the end of the evening to tell me this, he also told me that he was expecting me to tell him specific direction about where he should go and what he should be doing, but that during worship he had heard God speak to him for the first time, and now he did not need me to tell him these things because he knows God will tell him at the right time.

It is amazing how when we come to God and spend time with him he is faithful to meet us where we are at and speak to us. It really moved me how much that time changed this man, and he certainly walk out of that building with a new purpose in his step, full of hope.

A fruitful time

We got to spend a couple of weeks staying in Brighton with an outreach team we were leading recently. It was an amazing few weeks, where we got to be apart of God touching so many lives.

During our time we got to have many significant conversations with people on the streets about life and faith and what they thought about Jesus. We had the pleasure of getting to be apart of over a dozen people make a firm commitment to following Jesus and then coming to church and we also had over 20 people want to find out more. We got to pray with many others also for healing or blessing. We got to see God heal someone’s mind, we saw God do a number of physical healings etc. It was an incredible time of getting to share the love of God with others, and seeing God produce a lot of fruit.

It was also an encouraging time for all of us in what we believed. We all came away from Brighton with our faith strengthened being able to say that we have seen God do things with our own eyes that we can never deny. I know that for me personally I am excited to be able to talk and pray with more people and see what God has for them. God is amazing, and this adventure with him is so exciting.

A touch of restoration

We had the privilege of being apart of God doing the most incredible thing in Brighton a few weeks ago. We were with the team we were leading sharing with people on the street who God is. A couple of our team (Heather and John) ended up sitting and talking with a guy in one of the local cafes called Nicholas. He described the last 47 years of his life as a living hell; he had suffered with Schizophrenia and was unable to really focus on anything for more than 10-15 minutes. Heather and John spent time listening to him and telling him about how amazing God is. After about half an hour they got to pray for him, simply asking that he would know the peace of God, they also gave him a card for the church we were working with.

The next Day he called the pastor of the church we were working with and told him that since Heather and John had prayed for him that all the voices he had been hearing had gone silent and he had never known such peace and slept so well and he needed to come and talk about what had happened. This was a Friday and he agreed to come to the church early on the Sunday to meet and talk, but he would probably not be able to manage the service.

When he arrived on the Sunday Morning there was a massive change in him, the most noticeable was his eye colour. When he first met Heather and John his eyes were a grey colour, but when we met him on Sunday they were a crystal blue colour. He quickly started to describe a dream he had had on the Saturday night. In this dream he was in his room at home and Jesus walked into it, when Jesus came in He said “My name is Jesus” and He placed His hand on Nicholas’s head and then said “Nicholas, your mind is free”.

All Nicholas wanted from that point was Jesus in his life in a real way. He then stayed for the whole service and spent time afterwards talking with people. He came every week we were in Brighton and is now spending time with the pastor regularly exploring what this all means for him.

Graduation

The Discipleship Training School (DTS) Christy and Myself have been helping to lead since September 2013 has now graduated. We have spent the last 6 months learning more about God and our identity together, seeing greater freedom in our lives and those around us and have spent time in several different nations sharing about the Love of Christ with many different people.

It has been quite an incredible journey and we are so grateful to God for the transformation in individual lives and what he is leading them onto. I have been apart of a number of different schools and this has to be one of my favourite times, when we get to stop and reflect on all God has done, both in our own lives and all those we got to meet along the way. To know that we will never be the same, that this experience has laid a foundation for the next journey we get to have with God.

We are both really excited to hear where each of the trainees goes on to do. It is always such a privilege to be able to be apart of what God is doing, and it is one of the main reasons we do what we do, to see the freedom of Christ come to many different people.

Prayer room

On our recent trip to Malaga in Spain our team got to help the church we were working with organise a 24-hour prayer event covering the first 3 days of the year. We spent time together praying and brainstorming ideas and came up with 7 different stations. We then spent several days before hand turning cardboard boxes into a variety of different items, such as a cross, an archway, armour etc. The idea was that people could spend an hour or two with God in the prayer room, and have some specific focuses of pray during that time. It worked really well, and the people in the church really liked the way we had put together the space.

My favourite station was the communion station. In this place there are two seats, one for you and one for Jesus, and bread and wine are laid out on the table. Here you sit and break bread with Jesus and reflect on what he did on the cross and through the resurrection and it gives an opportunity to have time and a conversation with Jesus.  This was the place where I felt closest to Jesus and all the worries of life seemed to fall away. I have tried to keep this going since as it reminded me of how important it is to stop and take time with him each day.

The team all had a lot of fun, being able to use their creative skills to make something special for others. It also helped to bring us together as a team. We did this very close to the start of our outreach together and so it was a really great team building activity. We each got to take time in the prayer room over the time it was running, and everyone made similar comments about how significant different stations were to them.

Praying over a city

Christy and myself believe that prayer and worship is a very important part of outreach. We believe that prayer or intercession allows us to understand God’s heart for a place, the people who live there and what it would be like for his kingdom to move in a place.

So during the recent outreach that we lead to the south of Spain we made sure we included this regularly in our time. On one of these occasions we felt that we should climb the mountain over looking the city in which we were ministering and spend time worshiping God and praying over the place. It was a beautiful day and we set of fairly early to get to the top.

It was a pretty amazing time, with all our prayers focusing on identity and freedom, and that Jesus would be know by the people. As we came back down it felt like we had done something very significant and special. Our time doing this helped us to see what God was doing in this part of Southern Spain, which helped us to better engage with the people we were talking with every day.

Welcome visitor

We arrived at Church on the last Sunday of our recent outreach to find a man in a florescent jacket waiting outside to come in. I got to sit and have a chat with him, he was not a Christian, and had lost his wife to cancer about 3 months earlier, she was a Christian. He was walking from the Isle of White to Herne Bay and it was his birthday on the Monday so wanted to come somewhere he knew he could be with people and also to honour his wife’s memory.

As we talked he told me that he was probably very close to becoming a Christian, inviting Jesus into his life, but he had one question in scripture that was confusing him. The question he had was why and what did Jesus write in the sand. So we talked about it and I showed him a passage in Daniel where God writes on the wall of the palace. After we had talked for about 15 minutes he said to me thank you, I have no more questions.

At the end of the service the church leader felt he should ask if anyone want to give their lives to Jesus and The guy I had been talking with stood up and invited Jesus into his life. The change in him was amazing; as he left he seemed to have a fresh hope, he walked out of the door lighter. It was great to see God touch his life in a really significant way, it really made my day to be able to talk with him and be apart of his journey.

God is faithful to heal

Last month we got to experience God fulfil a promise that we felt God give us several years ago, and we are so thankful. Christy has been unable to tolerate wheat/gluten all her life, when she eats it she experiences a lot of pain.

While we were leading a team on outreach between December and February to Spain we spent some time praying for healing for each other. Christy and I have been praying for the last few years for healing in her digestion based on a promise we felt God give to us. While we were praying as a team she felt a shift in her stomach area and then she felt God say I have given you new intestines, now you can eat Pizza! Pizza is one of Christy’s favourite foods. The next day we went to get pizza together and to step out in faith that God really has done something.

So we enjoyed pizza together, normally Christy would start to hurt about an hour after eating. She had no pain, and has not had any pain since; we have been able to enjoy Pasta, bread, doughnuts etc. It has opened up a whole world of food for us.

It has both humbled us and caused us to rejoice in the promises and faithfulness of God. God is truly amazing, and we are so excited to see what else God is going to do, it is an amazing adventure.

A Special New Year

While we were on outreach in Spain Christy and I had the privilege of being able to baptize one of our team members, Nina.

It was the first time either of us had been asked to baptize anyone so we were very excited. After we had talked about when and where we decided that what better way for her start her year but with a public declaration of faith.  As we were staying on the coast of the Mediterranean we thought it would be fun to do this in the ocean.

New years day was sunny and warm, one of the best that the local pastors have ever experienced. We headed down to the beach and spent some time worshiping and hearing Nina’s story of coming to faith, before heading into the ocean.

It was a really special day, and being able to share it with the church we were working with made it even better. It was very encouraging for all involved. To hear how she came to know God and what He has done in her life is really inspiring. It makes doing what we do worth every moment, seeking after God and seeing him changes lives for the better.