Pray for CONNECT

Well, our visa remains in limbo. We emailed the Department of Justice here in Ireland, and they just told us to keep waiting. We are in line to be processed. So here we are, sitting at home while our colleagues around Europe equip, empower, and encourage university students and staff from all across the continent at Students for Christ's CONNECT Conference.

We have three students from Carlow IT there who are getting trained and prepared for another Autumn semester on their campus reaching student for Christ. It's tough sitting at home, but we can at least pray. 

Please help us pray...

1. We pray the Irish students attending CONNECT will come away feeling refreshed, prepared, and empowered to fulfill God's mission for them on their respective campuses.
2. We pray the staff from various European ministries will encouraged by relationship being built, knowing they are not alone.
3. We pray for the leadership of CONNECT Conference to have strength, joy, and wisdom as they lead this very important conference. 
4. We pray for students from all across Europe to build lifelong relationships with fellow like-minded students.
5. We pray that God would send these students and staff out as missionaries onto campuses all across Europe, connecting students to Christ, making a multi-generational impact on the marketplaces and governments across Europe.

Today's university students are tomorrow's doctors, lawyers, teachers, politicians. On a university campus, life change is world change.

Thank you for all your prayers and support as we stand together this week.

What We Are For

Katy and I have been reconsidering a lot of what we understand to be the priority and mission of individual believers and the church as a whole. I think these thoughts are normal for people who have left their home culture and are learning a new one.

To that end, here are four core values to us in ministry/church life. 

• Community: We want the priority of community to guide what programs we build, what events we attend, and what organizations of which we are a part. (To be clear, we mean both community within the church and also within our local area.)
• Responsibility: We want to prioritize the responsibility of all believers to carry the mantle of ministry within the church and their local community. We want to model the way as believers empowered by the church to be active in our local community, making disciples and preaching the Gospel through conversations, actions, and life decisions. 
• Language: We want to recalibrate our language bringing clarity to what we do and why we do it. Language can not only be confusing for new people attending a church/ministry event, it can cause internal confusion as to a believer's role and responsibility in ministry.
• Holiness: We want to strive for holiness. This is really only fully possible when lived out through community with other believers with the same priority. As we do this, we want to create an environment which would invite and encourage non-believers to see and understand our journey.

These are simple things. They're not new things. These are personal goals. We believe these goals will help us to fulfill the mission God has given us.

Thank you for all your prayers and support. Together we are striving to connect the university students of Ireland to Christ.

If My People

I ask anyone reading this to pray one minute each day this week for our broken world. With all the shootings, hate, political chaos...it would be easy to give up believing God can heal our nation(s). I want to remind us today of this timely scripture.

"12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. 13 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand." Ephesians 6:12-13

Paul is telling us that human weapons are no match. We are not fighting a human battle. We are fighting spiritual forces beyond our awareness. But we have a relationship with the one who has already defeated darkness, hate, and brokenness. Jesus Christ is our Savior.

In the Bible, we see Jesus bring tenacious love, supernatural peace, inexplicable hope, and undeserved freedom to those lost in the darkness. This is how we must fight. These are the weapons we must wield to restore this broken world. We are called to be world changers, culture changers, community changers. As believers, we must step into the chaos and speak peace, love, and hope.

As a team, we give, pray, and go so that university students in Ireland would know Christ. Today, we stand together in prayer. We pray for the terror to cease, the hate to dissipate, the fear to vanish. We pray for believers around the world to courageously rise up within their communities. We pray for the Church to rise up, repent, and believe God to heal our nations.