Resources and Stories from the mission field

Spring Break Missions: Where we are going! San Francisco; Vernonia, WA

Ashley: reading “Women, Worldview, and the Word” serious discipleship for a secular culture: by Iva May………and it is GREAT!

James writes: Our NCM put in approximately 178 hours of labor during the month of February on a Habitat for Humanity house. They did this to help an Afghan refugee family reached the 200 hours of labor required for a family to be eligible for their own home. Normally a family is required to work this 200 hour in on their own, but because of physical disability issues with the mother and school and work constraints that exist for the two college age children in the family, NCM was allowed to help them out. A third child, only in the sixth grade, is too young to be on the worksite. The mother was able to provide lunch on two of the four workdays, not only for our NCM students, but others helping at the site. One of the college students attends CBC, where NCM students are working hard at being his friend. Though active Muslims, we serve them with the hope that our practical display of God’s love will have an impact on their willingness to hear and respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Keith - Everyone should have a staff magician, they are super handy. Drew is Resonate’s creative arts pastor. Drew got to perform on campus for the first time since Resonate started. He did great. The residence hall association asked him to perform so it was a great opportunity. The room they had set up for him held about 150 people. At ten minutes until he was scheduled to go on it was obvious that the room wouldn’t hold all the people. We had to find a new room because there were over 200 people who showed up. It was the biggest event the RHA had ever put on. A student who has recently been coming to Resonate brought a guy from his dorm. Though Drew only mentioned that he was on staff with Resonate it spurred on conversation after the event. As they walked back to their dorm he was able to share about how to become a follower of Christ and his friend accepted Christ right there on the sidewalk!

Petey - We took our annual NCM retreat to the beach. This is the only retreat we do all term that is centered around our local students. We had 18 signed up and disappointingly we had a few drop, but we still took a good group (especially for the size beach house we were in). The weekend was focused on prayer and fellowship. We created a “guide” for the weekend based on Ignatian Spirituality and the stage of Jesus’ life. It was a refreshing weekend where good bonds were formed and some people came out of their “shells” to contribute to the on-going spiritual conversation among our students.

Petey's Books:
the Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
The New Kings of Non-Fiction by Glass (think about the importance of “delivery” in short essays related to teaching and preaching)

Petey's Website recommendation:
http://thebricktestament.com/

Ryan - When we began this year, we started with a renewed focus on relational evangelism. Students were getting to know non-Christian students by being apart of groups (like intermurals) or starting groups of their own. As we have gone along, we continue to see opportunities to share with our friends and stay excited about how God is working. Last week, one of our students was very exited as he told me about doing what we are doing on our campus – back at his high school. A guy who had come to things sporadically, had called Caleb and told him he had recently decided to follow Jesus! Here it is several months later and he is seeing some of the fruit of his labor. It is encouraging to our students to “spur them on …” as they see things happen (even if it was from last year and at a different campus.) We continue to have great conversations with students, sharing the gospel, and praying that God will bring the Harvest!

Ryan's reads: Wired for Influence – Tim Elmore; Search for Significance _ students are going through this; Leadership conference in May in Seattle I am looking into called lead now.

Steve - In February, we refocused our efforts in our Tuesday evening Bible study time. We wanted to be able to apply a practical edge to what we’re doing. We’ve called it “That Thing We Do,” which refers to doing what Jesus would do, rather than simply asking WWJD. Each week we take one line from the Beatitudes, and meditate on it, and consider who we have around us that expresses those values – and if Jesus says that they are the ones God blesses, we try to join Him in blessing them as well. For example, when Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” we thought about who we know that has that kind of desire. We identified a small church in the University District called SCUM of the Earth Church, who has a drop-in center for homeless young people to get a free cup of coffee, and have a safe place. So, we baked up a couple batches of brownies, went down to the drop-in center, and blessed their hunger for righteousness . . . brownies, are, of course, righteous! Our “Bible study” time has become about 15 minutes, and then we spend an hour and a half or so, actually doing what we’ve talked about. Another example of this is we acted on Jesus’ blessing of “those who mourn” by sending a care package of goodies to a family we know, whose father is an Air Force Chaplain, on assignment away from his family for one year in N. Korea. It’s a very simple effort on our part, but what I think is a helpful step toward living out the words of Jesus and joining God in who He wants to bless. We’re looking forward to expanding this effort in the Spring quarter.

Steve's reads: “Everything Must Change,” by Brian McLaren; “The Open Secret,” by Lesslie Newbigin; “Consumed,” by Benjamin R. Barber;“The Future of Religion,” by Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo;“People of the Dream,” by Michael O. Emerson