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.