Life Here and There

I wanted to wait to post about this tragedy until I had two big pieces of information to pass along. One is that a Pastor we know well named Francois Norcilus was in Port-au-Prince to attend a funeral when the earthquake hit. We have finally gotten word from his son that he is alright, but tells us the situation there worsens by the hour.

I also wanted to pass along some information from a relief organization we work with called Aid for Developing Countries. I just got this email from Bill Moore…

Brandon,

I am sending out a call for help. We are putting a team together to go to Haiti as soon as we can. This event is changing (for the worse) by the hour. Many people are asking me what can be done. So many that I am no longer tracking the number of calls we are handling but it is heavy. What I can tell you now will be different soon. However, we have heard from some of our partners and we have offers of everything from satellite phones to medical clinics. Water and food will be the most important resource that we can provide. Renita, and I should have a team of people put together by Thursday to go to Port Au Prince. The most important resource that we can have now is money. I do not say this to be crass, but we may have to purchase items where we can when needed. We will have to make these decisions on the fly.

From our previous mission trips, we have a lot of friends in country that we will rely upon as we arrive. I have had limited contact, but as they get more communications we will be able to check on our associates. Please be in prayer for Bro. Francois Norcilus, our local missionary. He has not been located yet. (note above) Jean Claude, his family, Emanuell Samuel, Theodore Trusaunt, and many others that we have not heard from. Right now search and rescue is paramount, but we will soon have to deal with the dead and living. PLEASE keep these in your prayers. I will try to keep you informed as often as I can. Please feel free to pass this along to as many people that you know.

May God give strength to those in the field.

Bill Moore, President,
Aid for Developing Countries
A 501 (c) (3) Public Charity
EIN # 26-0483101

Send donations to:
502 Northeast A St
Bentonville, AR 72712

Contact AFDC
Phone:479-426-3029
Fax: 479-927-2459
Email: wdmcel@msn.com or
Bill@afdc-haiti.org

Bill has led at least a dozen mission trips there and his relief organization currently works toward providing cleaner water in some of the more remote areas. I know Bill – he’s a member of my church and I’m on the Board of this organization, so I tell you without a doubt that it’s a trustworthy way to support people who are going there to meet huge needs head on.

Pray for their team as they try to be the hands and feet of Jesus. Give if you can by sending donations to the address above. And help spread the word!

I love church planters and I love cutting edge, innovative ministry. I’m encouraged by the growth of a kind of Christianity that calls us back to the New Testament model of worship and ministry as we head into the turbulent waters of this next decade. But I’m concerned with what I perceive sometimes to be youthful arrogance, and this concern includes myself.

(more…)

We’re walking with the apostle Paul on Wednesday evenings and we’ve just received our call to Macedonia (modern-day Greece). We parted ways with Barnabas, taking Silas instead, and we picked up Timothy and Luke on the trip. In Philippi, God took the city for Himself! How did it happen?

On Saturday, one business woman named Lydia, a “seller of purple” came to faith in Christ along with her house. Then Paul caused a riot over God’s power to rescue a girl being used by adult men for monetary purposes. A jailer got saved and a bunch of prisoners’ lives were changed forever. In Thessalonica, another riot.

As I watch Paul through the eyes of Luke (the writer of Acts), I get the feeling that the gospel was influential and divisive wherever it was taken. People reacted with warm embrace or heated rejection, but nobody was neutral, and everyone took notice. Riots usually ensued.

Out of this wild and crazy second missionary journey of the apostle Paul comes these three realizations of what it looks like when God takes a city for Himself, such as Philippi…

(more…)

What image comes to your mind when you think of the word “missions?” I think there are several that are fairly prominent – an old guy in a fat tie with a boring voice and a slide projector, a massive organization or denomination spending millions of dollars per year orchestrating global outreach, or just any humanitarian effort anywhere by anyone.

For me, there are two ways to define “missions.” One is the lifestyle every Christian ought to have of sharing Christ with others as God opens opportunities. In this sense, we’re to live our lives “on mission” with a sensitivity to God’s leading each and every moment as to where He would have us to speak well about Him next.

(more…)

Every month, our BMAA Missions Department sends us some updates by mail and this month, they included several pages of quotes concerning missions. I’ve selected some of my favorites to pass along…

You have one business on earth – to save souls. ~ John Wesley

The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become. ~ Henry Martyn

There is nothing in the world or the church – except the church’s disobedience to render the evangelization of the world in this generation an impossibility. ~ Robert Speer

(more…)

We’ve been blessed with a pretty great Youth Pastor in Justin Williams (shhh, don’t tell him I said that). He and Refuge Ministry recently led our Sunday night service by giving testimonies of their amazing and rather interesting weekend living on the streets, so to speak. You’ve got to read about the event here, at Justin’s blog.

The Southern Baptist Convention has recently released its Annual Church Profile report, which spells out that the denomination is in decline. Last week, the Baptist Missionary Association of America welcomed three new churches into its fold. While we have a hard time tracking statistics of churches that have died, I’m going on an assumption that we lost more than three. Mainline Protestant denominations have been declining for a decade or more. What’s happening to my denomination?

I’m not an expert on denominational history or organizational tactics, but I am an observer of culture, so I want to throw out some possibilities of what could be happening, and why it may not be such a bad thing after all.

(more…)

Social media. What in the world is it? Well, think about it. “Social” has to do with people who converse, gather, and relate to each other. “Media” is any platform for spreading any message. Mass media is speaking to the masses through radio, television, etc. Print media is magazines, newspapers, and other printed periodicals. Social media, then, is promoting a message through people, and the phrase is typically used in reference to online media outlets.

I’m a firm believer that the rise of social media is a revolutionary moment for the church’s ministry. We’ll either embrace it (as we did print media and mass media) or we’ll begin to fade (as perhaps we are already doing). John Saddington runs a couple of great blogs and wrote a pertinent article related to why churches don’t “get” social media.

Before you read it, know that I don’t always get it either. I’ve learned a few tough lessons recently, and find it hard to keep up at times, but I’m determined to be a student of a movement that absolutely must be embraced and studied by thinkers and leaders in the kingdom today.

Tonight is VISION NIGHT at Bethel. That simply means I’m sharing my vision for Bethel in the year 2009 – what I believe God has placed on my heart as the leader of the congregation for us to emphasize and accomplish in the next twelve months or so. (I will post the audio later.) What I’m sharing will be the overflow of a lot of what I’ve been reading, studying, and praying about lately and what I shared at the BMAA Missions Symposium. And this, which was written in 1953 by an Episcopal priest named Theolore Wedel…

(more…)

Lost. Search. Rescue. These are the words we were challenged to repeat again and again by Grady Higgs, Director of Missions for the BMA of America at this week’s symposium. It was an all around exhilarating experience. I’ve been attending these symposiums for about a dozen years, and I was more encouraged by this year’s than ever before. Here are the highlights of my own experience. If you attended and you’re reading this, please add your own in the comments…

(more…)