Okay… after nearly 2 months of “running silent”, I’m resurfacing to jump back into the Blogosphere. My apologies to anyone, therefore, who has wondered if I just gave up on the whole blog idea, but it’s been a packed 60 days, so I offer the following as a quick summation of activities that hopefully justified the lack of comms traffic:
Food Drop For the past 6 years now, we have done an annual Food Drop through our partnership with Feed the Children to service the poor and hurting in our community. This year, we did the same on January 10th, and had the cool add this year of having 3 other area churches partner with us. Total, more than 6,160 boxes (215,000 pounds) of food and personal care items were delivered to families and agencies around the community in a massive outpouring of love and compassion for those who need it most! Nearly 3,000 people from across GCC, GCC Elkhart, Mt. Carmel Missionary Baptist and Bethlehem Baptist Church gathered to help, and you can see a short media of the event by clicking here.
III Text Rob and I began another round of an online learning community experience called III Text, conducted by Dr. Ron Martoia (author of Morph, Static and Transformational Architecture). It's a fantastic experience, and involves a combination of reading, online discussion, conference calls, and an "in real life meeting" at the end, where participants spend some quality interaction time with each other and with Ron. We did one of the first III Texts a year or two ago and it helped to radically re-shape how and what we think about what we're doing ministry and organization-wise on a daily basis. This round focuses specifically around the idea of revitalizing spiritual practices, and has been fantastic. I'll post more about what we're reading and studying in later posts.
EnterMission Coaching We rolled out something that we're SUPER excited about called our EnterMission Coaching Network. It's an opportunity for us here at GCC to intensively coach and collaborate with 15 other churches from around the country in doing this "new way of doing Mission". We're meeting in person with representatives from each of those churches 6 times over the next 18 months, doing monthly conference calls to hack through specific issues and obstacles they are facing in their communities, providing "direct line" contact to each of our GCC Life Mission staff for ad hoc coaching and troubleshooting, and interacting regularly through Facebook and other collaborative tools to make sure we walk together along the way. It's been an amazing journey, and our first two days together were fantastic!
ONE Prayer We're nearing the half-way point on our effort to coordinate the ONE Prayer campaign's "Missional" component in conjunction with our friends and partners at LifeChurch.tv, and have been compiling updated field stats for each of the four regions (India, Cambodia, Sudan and China) for their progress toward the goal of planting 500 churches across those four nations by the end of 2009. If you'd like to download the newest and most up-to-date set of stats and reports, you can click here, and i'd encourage you to stay tuned to www.oneprayer.com for further updates as ONE Prayer 2009/2010 ramps up!
Prepping for India/Cambodia in 3 Weeks Finally, I'll be off to India and Cambodia in about 3 weeks, but this time am taking my wife (Sami) and my son (Elijah) along! This will be Elijah's first time out of the country, and he's pretty excited about it. We have a deep love for other cultures in our home, and it will be fun for the little guy to see the beauty and diversity of life "outside of his bubble" in all its living color. While in India, we'll be graduating a batch of 50 church planters and comissioning them to service, and in Cambodia, we'll be doing a field report for ONE Prayer progress in that nation.
Stay tuned.... i'll do a better job of not going "under" for quite so long next time.
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1 comment:
You were missed. :) Glad you're back.
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