Hi!
What a few weeks! Wow! I hardly know where to start, and I’m sure I’m gonna miss something out.
The church is going places. Really going places. A few weeks back we spent a while as a leadership team working on our vision and values. Flood San Diego had some really helpful workshops for us to go through. Anyway we came up with :
Vision: To connect up & coming generations to the life-changing person of Jesus
Values: Compassionate Service, Multiplication, Raising Leaders, Lives of Worship, Authenticity, Creative Relevance, And Inclusive Community.
We still operate under the 3 environments: Encountering God, Growing in community & Impacting the world.
Tomorrow we have our regular vision night and it will be really exciting to share this with the church and look at how we can implement it. We are also launching Growth Group leaders training and I’ve been working hard along with Mafunase to come up with some really good material. We’ve written, re-written and adapted material and can’t wait to kick of the training. We regularly get 200 people worship with us on Sundays and have 70 people in Growth Groups as we speak.
Our home is as busy as ever, with 12 people at its peak all living under one roof! For us it really is the way to live and we feel it stretches and motivates us like nothing else! I thoroughly enjoy getting together with everyone we share life with to chat, pray and read the bible. I’m also so impressed with Jo how she copes. She stretches the budget in a way that no one else could, we always eat well and enjoy her food, and she organizes the cleaning and looks after everyone so well. At the same time she raises our little daughter magnificently!
Things in the village have been really fun recently. We were invited to stay with the chief a couple of weeks back, and it was a real privilege to sleep in his house/hut with his family and share a little in their life. Having said that it always makes me grateful for my bed as sleeping on a bamboo mat is not very comfortable! We are also going able to give Mosquito nets out to all the families in the village thanks to an artist who raised the money from San Diego, and have started educating on Malaria before we do so. On top of that we are able to give all the women bibles thanks to a Christian missionary who was passing through and got inspired by what we are doing. On top of even that we sent the women’s guild (40 of them) on a 4-day conference and helped them show a film outside the church building using our churches generator and projector. So you can see we’ve been really busy there!
So, things are really moving on and I’m so thankful to be a part of it. It feels like a dream sometimes. To be a part of something that is growing so organically – it’s not due to finance or strategy or anything except Jesus. It’s all about him and seeing him change lives is a humbling experience.
Tom
