Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas from all of us!  We pray God's many blessings upon you this Christmas Season. As we reflect on the faithfulness of God in our lives this past year, we want to thank you all who pray for us, support us financially, and believe in our ministry with Gospel Focus at YWAM Salem. We are able to do what we do because of people like you. Your partnership in ministry is priceless, and never a day goes by where we do not ponder on how amazing it is to have a solid group of people who believe in the purpose of our calling. Thank you so much, and we look forward to seeing what 2019 has in store. 

Alistair making our 1,000th batch of cookies over Christmas

Little Adalyn has kept us on our toes this Christmas. She makes a good vacuum cleaner for all the cookies that fall on the kitchen floor.

And yet...another batch of cookies....

Gospel Focus Podcast

The above picture is of two guys who work along with us in Gospel Focus, Joe and Cole. These guys have full time jobs, and yet volunteer their time to host our bi weekly Gospel Focus Podcast.  They had it on their hearts to host the podcast, so I let them have the reigns.  If your a podcast type, please subscribe to the Gospel Focus podcast, which you can find on pod bean, I tunes, Spotify, etc....  We hope this simple podcast is another way we can help equip the body of Christ to reach out to the lost. I think we have 5 posted so far. My advice, is skip the first two as they were pretty rough as the guys were trying figure out the ropes.  The guys would love your feedback so if you subscribe, please give them some!  Pray for the podcast, that it will bring God glory, equip the body, and be a blessing to those who hear.  Joe and Cole will be having lots of guests on, believers and non believers. So it will have some great stuff on it!

OAS Comes to an End

On December 14th, after 12 weeks of hard work, our Outward Apologetics School students graduated. The past 3 months doing life with these 10 students has simply been amazing.  I am so proud of all of them for sticking it out. I am so excited to see what the future holds for them. Two of them will actually be coming back to YWAM Salem to volunteer with us for a few months which I am excited about. One amazing testimony from our graduation ceremony. At the time of our graduation, we still had students owing finances to the school in the amount of around $2,000.  In my years in YWAM, I have seen God provide last minute in multiple ways, however this one was by far the "latest" biting your nails type of thing. As I was handing out diplomas, I had to let the 4 remaining students know that they could not get their diplomas until their tuition was payed off.  They already knew that so it was not a surprise, but it was still dissapointing for them to not recieve the diploma. As I am giving out the diplomas, one of our students looks art her phone and starts crying. She received a text that she got a large ananomous donation which would cover her school. She did not stop there. Apparently it was large enough that she gave the rest that others owed to cover their cost to! It was a room filled with tears I tell you! What a provider we have in Christ!

We enjoyed a festive graduation meal at our staff Melissa's home

In our last week of the school, we had many neat activities we did for the students.  The above is of them doing a "memory timeline" of the past 12 weeks. So good to reflect on the faithfulness of God over the past 3 months. 

Christmas Carolizing and Salvation

This past December was filled with "Carolizing". I was so blessed to see this go over so well.  We did it many times with our OAS students and had a few churches also participate in the city.  This was a great way to get Christians sharing the gospel intentionally over the Christmas season.  One quick story I have to share. We went down to a college campus to do some Carolizing one day only to find out the campus was already on Christmas break.  So we decided to just go to the mall in that city and Carolize outside.  While we ere doing it, I asked the head security guy if we could sing inside the mall. He brought me to the mall manager, I explained that we were the "Cherry City Carolers" (hey, technically we are if you think about it) and wanted to sing in the mall. Long story short, we ended up on a bug stage in the middle of the food court singing before Christmas shoppers! (By the way, this exact scenario played out at various malls in December for us, it was a blast).  After we were done, I walked up to the security guard and began to talk to him. I noticed the whole time we were singing he was listening intently. He had never heard the gospel.  In an amazing discussion and sharing time, this man surrendered his life to Jesus...in the food court of the mall...while on the clock at work! What a faithful God we have.  There are many other testimonies of how Carolizing worked in the loves of people, but I think this one was the icing on the cake type of story. 

This particular church, which happens to be the one we attend, was able to do Carolizing in the Sky Bridge of a local mall. We also were able to raise some $ for the Salvation Army while doing it.

The familiar site for us this December...