Missio Colonia | Kevin and Kathi in Cologne, Germany

I've been reading an awesome book the past couple of days. It's called Church Planting Movements: How God is Redeeming a Lost World by David Garrison. If you're interested in missions, you must read this book! It gives a compelling vision of the flood of God's Spirit moving in the world. One chapter deals with great movements of evangelism and church planting in North America. One particular church shared with the author some of their core values, one of which got me excited:

"Bad people" make good soil, there's lots of fertilizer in their lives.

I love that. Why does the church shy away from sharing Jesus with the least desirable people in our society? In reality it's the people who have the most baggage, the most hurt, the most problems that make the best soil for the Gospel. But, generally they are the people we most timid around. I hope we can be different.

Sorry that it's been a while since we've posted something. God has blessed us with extra hours of work at the YMCA, which is helping us so much with Christmas shopping and other expenses. But, because of this we've had little time to focus on support raising or even relaxing a little. Regardless, we've been thankful for the work.

One of the things that God spoke to me about during my retreat a few weeks back was about how we are spending our time here. The verse Luke 12:31 kept coming up - "Seek first the kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well." For the past year, we've been neglecting loving people and sharing the Gospel in favor of support raising. God confirmed this the other day when our pastor approached us and told us he believed God was telling him the same thing about us (even though we hadn't shared this with anybody).

We spent some time talking it over with our pastor, and we think we're going to try and do some outreach here in Carroll County. I thought about maybe breaking out the evangelistic Bible study material I worked on in seminary and use that in the community. Please be praying that God would open doors for ministry in the here and now, and that He would also honor these efforts by opening more doors in our support raising.