An Encouraging Reminder

This past week I arrived early to our downtown office one morning and found a letter on our floor. It was put into our mail slot we have.  When I opened it and read it, it brought tears to me eyes.  It is so life giving to be reminded of why we do the ministry we are called to.  Encouraging words are so amazing to receive.  Please take time to read the above letter that this young man Timo wrote to us. I hope you can read it on the blog clearly.  If not, let me know. Understand as well, through all your prayers and financial support of our family, this letter is as much to you as it is to us!

Transit Testimonies

 

A few months ago, the Lord spoke to me an challenged me to do something a bit different.  You see, we do conversational evangelism every day of the week on the streets.  It has become a familiar place for me, and to be honest at times a comfortable place.  That is when God always interrupts my life and stretches my faith.  He asked me to simply go on our city buses and preach the Gospel.  Simply stand up and in 3-5 minutes preach the Gospel message. Needless to say, this sounded a bit to intimidating for me, so like always, I put it on the backburner of my "I'll get to that later God" items.  Every now and then, the Lord would ask me, "Tim, have you gotten on the buses yet?"  Ah! The persistence of Holy Spirit!  So this past Monday, after hearing a challenging word form a friend who works in the Muslim world about obedience, I looked at my co workers Ryan and Daniel during our morning prayer time and said, "Guys, today we are going on the buses." So we went.  We prayed for God to give us favor with whoever the bus driver would be.  The bus driver ended up being a Christian...and he told us it was about time someone brought the Gospel to his bus!  Long story short, our time was amazing.  We preached, and then sat down and had amazing discussions with people on the bus.  We prayed for people. We encouraged people.  We were rebuked through the looks of scorn and the bowing of heads, and the putting on of headphones.  It was awesome.  We will continue to do this every so often, and plan to do it with our Mission Adventures groups this spring break and summer.  

M y co worker Daniel from Brazil preaching.  The bald man sitting there said if Daniel, "That guy has guts."

Mission Adventures 2015 Changed Lives

2015 was a great year for Mission Adventures around the globe.  Every year, we tally up some numbers of how many students came through, etc... In 2015, we say 3,411 high school students go on mission trips with us, and that entailed around 184 different youth groups. We got numbers from 24 MA operating locations, so that number is not expressive of all the students who ended up going through Mission Adventures.  It is that time of year again for me to begin to think about Mission Adventures as we have spring break coming up.  We already have our three weeks of Spring Break groups booked so it is looking to be a great start here in Salem for Mission Adventures in 2016!

Sharing the Gospel and Listening to Christmas Music

You Mean I Don't Have To Get Baptized?

It was about an hour before the end of the day and I stopped two young men as they were walking.  They were 22 years old, and on their way to the bar to have a few drinks.  I asked them why the celebrated Christmas.  Our conversation slowly began to take shape, and I began to ask them questions about Jesus, heaven, hell, their life's purpose, After establishing some trust and openess, I asked one of the young men whose named was Gustavo if he died today what would happen to him. He thought for a few seconds and said that he would without a doubt go to hell.  I asked him why he thought that.  His response was chilling.  "Because I have not been baptized yet." I related ot him quickly, as growing up in the Lutheran church this is what I was taught. I then shared the Gospel to him.  It was the first time he had ever heard in his life that His salvation rested in faith in Christ, not in a church tradition. I shared an illustration with him of a dirty car.  Believing that baptism saves you is kind of like believing that taking your car to the car wash once will keep it clean forever.  i am always amazed at hoe the man made doctrines held in many churches are keeping people from receiving the grace offered in Christ.  Pray for Eduardo, and that he would look to Christ for salvation, not a tradition.

Hot and Cold

The first week of our Greatest Gift Outreach was amazing.  I would like to say it was hot and cold.  Some days we had just open doors like crazy, countless conversations, and many opportunities to share the Gospel.  Peoples seemed to be very receptive and willing to discuss what they believe and why.  They were curious about Jesus, and the people joining us felt encouraged.  Then, the very next day, it was almost as if we had a complete opposite experience.  Things went from "hot to cold".  People were non receptive, very angry and aggressive, and it seemed as if we were as Paul said, "the scorn of the earth".  This all is part of the territory when it comes to evangelism isn't it?  One of the reasons we see people grow weary is that they are so focused on experience rather than reality.  Experiences will always waver, truth never will.  We try and remind ourselves of this daily.  That whether things be hot or cold, our witness shall never waver.  The reality is, sharing the Gospel although life giving, can be very discouraging and hard.  This should not surprise us, and may we always look to Christs example to not grow weary in proclaiming His name.

Greatest Gift Outreach Week One

This past week we started our Greatest Gift outreach.  The above picture are of some people from 4 different churches who are part of the Gospel Guy Network who hit the streets with us.  this week alone we saw 15 different people participate in our outreach.  What a blessing to see the body of Christ come together for this outreach.  One of the great things we have noticed is that all these people have different fears when it comes to evangelism, but through the Gospel Guy, they are overcoming them and becoming more bold in their witness.  God is so good!  Please continue to pray for this outreach as we hit the streets again on Monday!