August Thoughts

Thank you for all your prayers for SFC Europe's CONNECT Conference. We've heard nothing but great reports. We're so thankful for the SFC leadership team who planned and pulled off the event.

Our students who attended CONNECT without us had a great time. It seemed to really impact them and inspire them for the coming year. We were sad not to be there with them and with our colleagues/friends from around Europe. But God definitely has a plan and knows where we need to be.

Missing CONNECT and several other similar situations have made August much less busy. We are taking the time to focus on the details of life, getting smaller things done that may have been put off in view of seemingly bigger tasks.

During this time I've been reading the Bible more. I've also started the book, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzero. It's a wonderful book about allowing God to examine our perspective, priorities, and emotional health. He talks a lot about rest and space. He discusses the Mary and Martha story in Luke 10. He says this of Mary...

"Mary is not trying to master God. Her life has one center of gravity - Jesus." p. 48

I pray that while we are in this short season of space and irregularity, that we take the opportunity to realign every aspect of our life with Jesus as our center of gravity.

Thank you for all your prayers and support. We are so grateful for you all. It takes us all to see God's vision fulfilled. Together we will keep moving forward with Jesus as the center.

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.