Hello family and friends!
We want to start off by apologizing for the long gap between our last update and this one. We have lots of things to catch you up on, and have been wanting to for a while but were struggling to find any free time to do so. Please know we think of you all often and are incredibly grateful for your prayers and support and are always excited and eager to update you. We also wanted to make it known that you are always welcome to ask us questions or respond to our updates by emailing us.
In our last update we were still a few weeks out from the new school arriving. Well all 42 of them safely arrived and have already been here for 6 weeks--time has flown by! I want to start by giving you a little glimpse of what the weeks looks like before going into a more thorough update. Our students have lectures Monday-Friday from morning until after lunch. Their afternoons and nights are a mix of time off, more lectures, ministry (such as youth group), outreach prep, job duties, homework, digging into the Word, and creating friendship and community. As staff we attend all of these things as well (but we are the ones grading the homework instead of doing it haha) and we have one-on-one discipleship with certain students and our own staff meetings as well. The schedule as staff members has been quite a lot to be honest. Some weeks we feel like we have a great system down and are doing all these things and still have the time for things outside of the schedule, and other weeks we feel like we didn’t fit anything else in. Something we have been extremely grateful for in this season is the advice of wise couples around us that suggested ways to always prioritize each other even in the midst of a crazy season. This means putting date nights in our schedule each week that will always happen, no matter if we have to sacrifice other things such as writing an update (haha sorry) or missing a community night. This has been incredible for us, throughout the chaos and many days that go from 6:45am – 9:30pm we know it is incredibly important for us to safeguard our marriage and to always keep investing in it. God is teaching us the importance of always putting Him first, then each other, and then our ministry. This isn’t always easy and there are seasons that it’s harder than others, but we are so grateful for His grace through it all. We would greatly appreciate prayers that our marriage would continue to strengthen in this season and that God would give us the energy to keep pouring out as we come to Him to fill us.
That takes us to our next area of update- the students! Out of the 42 students we are leading the Youth Ministries Track and outreach which has 10 of these students in it. While most of our week is all together as the 42, Mondays we do lectures and outreach prep with just these 10 students. We feel incredibly blessed by the team we have. Everyone is at a different stage in their faith which is beautiful. You have those that have come in with a firm foundation in their faith, ready for more and ready to share that faith, and you have others that have come in unsure where they are or what they believe. Throughout these 6 weeks, it has been an absolute honor to walk alongside these students, pray with and for them, talk with them, ask and answer questions, and doing our best to always point them to Jesus. Already, so many of them have had such beautiful growth in their relationships with the Lord, breakthrough in areas of hardship and struggles in their life, and healing in their hearts from wounds or misconceptions of who God actually is. It is an incredible blessing and honor to be a part of this and we know this will all continue. We would really love prayer for all 42 students but especially these 10 that are specifically in our team and that we will be taking on the 2 month outreach. Please pray that they would have continued growth and healing and passion for the Lord. We would also really appreciate prayer for us to always go to God for strength, endurance, wisdom and discernment as we feel the emotional and spiritual weight of walking so closely with so many people in their faith. (more specific prayer requests for students are in the email if you are on our email list).
Outreach update! This process has been quite the whirl wind and we would be lying if we didn’t say it has been a journey of feeling a lot of anxiety and continually needing to give this weight to the lord. Our plans have changed quite a bit throughout the months and weeks due to many varying factors and situations. We will not bore you with all of that but instead give you our final plans and destinations! First off, we will be leaving Brisbane, Australia on November 15th and head to Melbourne. There is a large conference called AWAKE Australia that we will be attending for the weekend. We will be going to this as an entire school (all 42 students) as a send off to outreach. We will then leave Melbourne on November 19th to head off to Uganda (for protection reasons we are not putting our exact location on here but feel free to ask us over email). Our YWAM base director in Sunshine Coast lived in Uganda for a few years with his wife and children before they were the directors here. During that time they started up a school for pastors to be trained and released to start up churches throughout the local communities and disciple new believers. At the moment, there is a group of trained pastors waiting to lead congregations. So our ENTIRE school of 42 students, 11 outreach staff and 5 base staff members will be going to Uganda for 3 weeks. During this time we will be working with these local pastors and community members to preach the gospel, show and spread Gods love to those we encounter and to run crusades/campaigns in order to plant six churches with the pastors. Our youth ministry track will specifically be going into multiple high schools a day, sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ and also giving bibles to those who choose to accept Christ and want to be discipled. At each location we will have translators and local community members and the new pastors to be writing down names of those who accept Christ so that they can follow up with them and bring them to the new church plant. This has been a system they have been using for a while now and have seen incredible fruit from it. As mentioned above we will also be running crusades/campaigns late at night in different villages. This basically will look like gathering large crowds of people, dancing and worshipping the Lord, preaching the Gospel, sharing testimonies, praying for healing and inviting people to choose Jesus as their savior. Again, this will all be done with translators, local community members, and the newly trained pastors ready to plant a church. These will basically be the church plants themselves as after people choose salvation they are immediately given a pastor, a church and a community to be discipled in. These new church plants are checked up on and supported then as they grow.
After this we will be spending one more week in Uganda working with another local pastor in the area that has asked us to come. The details of exactly what we will doing isn’t completely clear or set yet but we will let you know asap!
We then leave around December 17th for Papua New Guinea. One of our staff members here on the Sunshine Coast YWAM base is a local Papua New Guinean and is always going back and forth between PNG and Australia. He loves to radically preach the gospel and love on anyone and everyone around him. We will be joining with him and staying at a YWAM base in Mount Hagen, PNG. During this time our main focus will be working with youth in schools doing discipleship ministry as PNG is a Christian country. There may also be an element of village ministry where there is likelihood of people that have still never heard the Gospel. We will be here for about 2.5 weeks.
The last portion of our outreach will be back to Australia where we be running a week long youth conference for local high schoolers here on the Sunshine Coast. This is called Mission Adventures and is a program that YWAM runs in many locations but is being pioneered at our base for the first time. The details of this are still being worked out but we are excited to be apart of the ground work for this new ministry. The hope is that Mission Adventures will run multiple times per year for local youth groups through the YWAM Sunshine Coast base. The heart of Mission Adventures is to give high school students an opportunity to grow in their faith, be exposed to missions, and given tools to share their faith.
We know there is so much more we could tell you, but we don’t want to make you all read a novel. Again, please feel free to email us with questions or responses! We love you all dearly and miss you loads. We are so confident we are where God wants us, and love being here even in the difficult moments. We feel so well cared for and supported not only by our community here but by all of you thousands of miles away.
Lastly, as we mentioned above, we are bringing bibles to Uganda. Our base is a part of a movement called “End Bible Poverty” and we feel honored to be apart of this. In order to do this, our team as a whole needs funds to purchase the bibles. We are so grateful for all the financial support many of you have given to Sam and I and we wanted to give you the information about this project so that you have the opportunity to join with us in this movement and share the fundraising page (perhaps on your Facebook). Here is the link that explains more! Feel free to ask us questions specifically about this.
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