Hello Family and friends,
We hope you are all doing well! It’s been a while since our last update, so we want to breeze through some things that have been going on and also give some updates on what’s to come.
Way back in the beginning of January, the September DTS came back from a wonderful time on outreach and graduated shortly after. The start of the very next week brought training for the January DTS staff. This Jan DTS is a unique one. Back in August, while at a Queensland YWAM gathering, some leaders from various bases gathered and we prayed feeling like God was asking us to run a DTS together. The overwhelming result of the gathering itself was unity, which carried into what we felt like God was saying about the combined DTS itself—to see each other and our strengths more, and to disarm any competition or comparison.
When planning started in September, we quickly realized the staff who would be involved in the day-to-day operations of the school would need to be mature and humble leaders—the logistics alone were going to be crazy! Each base was to pray and ask one person to be a part of the school leader team, and then two staff to send along to be a part of the staff team. We prayed and asked Andrew to be our designated school leader. Andrew is patient, humble, and values relationship. Needless to say, he is doing an amazing job leading a school that is different to any we have ever run before. We also asked Chloe and Joren to go as a part of the staff team for lecture phase and to lead outreach teams.
The school started, and the very end of January, in Sunshine Coast and then moved on to the other three bases (Gold Coast, Toowoomba, Whitsundays), staying at each one for 3 weeks during lecture phase. In only another two weeks, the students and staff will begin the outreach phase of the DTS. They will spread out across Queensland in three teams to serve people and share the Good News that they have spent the last three months learning about.
While the three staff on the DTS have been away, three other Sunshine Coast DTS staff have also been a few hours away doing a secondary school in YWAM called the School of Worship and Prayer in Toowoomba. One of those staff feels called to start a prayer ministry here in the Sunshine Coast, but wanted more training in how to do this and the other two went into the school after feeling prompted by God on the outreach they were leading at the end of last year. The 12-week school will be finished up in the next three weeks. While those six staff have been away, our role with them has been largely over the phone, and a couple visits. We visited the SWAP guys a few weeks ago for a couple days. We also visited the DTS while they were in Gold Coast about a month ago and we just got back this weekend after spending another week with them in Whitsunday. During this most recent week with the DTS, we were also teaching on the topic of relationships. This is not a small topic, but we had an absolute blast teaching this unique DTS. We began by discussing how our interpersonal relationships are founded on our relationship with God (what they have spent the last 9 weeks focusing on). In this build up, we also talked about our heart motivations and what is means to have a pure heart. During our preparation in the weeks leading up to teaching, we had felt God direct us to focus on 4 types of relationships in the Word, and, using a Socratic (questioning) method, help student align their relationships to the Truth found there. The 4 relationships were, family, the Church (saints), romantic relationships, and our relationships with non-believers. We saw a lot of healing, breakthrough, and shifts during the week, which was beautiful. We spent almost every moment not teaching with the students and staff having fun, talking, and being asked lots of questions on the topic we were teaching . We ended the week feeling incredibly grateful for what God had done, honoured to have been used by Him, and also ready for a day of rest when we got home.
All that being said, the last two months have been very quiet from a DTS perspective while we have been in the Sunshine Coast. There was only one DTS staff left on base (he and his wife just had a baby).
Besides attempting to do our best to keep up with our staff from afar with some occasional visits, we have taken the time to attend to some much needed organization and praying into any shifts God may have for the DTS department from the last two years of change. With both of us being so people oriented, we can see this time has been such a blessing, allowing us to actually go after these things that need to be done and not pushing it to the side because there is much more ‘people stuff’ to tend to (something that can often happen for us). It has been a fun process and we are really excited for where the DTS is going and the little things we feel God has put in place for this next season of gearing up for our first international school in 2.5 years! The school will begin September 5th, and already has 14 students from lots of different nations signed up. We will need to cap the school at around 25 (something our base has never done before) due to space at the wave house (the accommodation that we now share with SBS) as well as not having enough DTS staff to properly disciple more than that. We are wanting to prepare good training for our staff as well because only one of them aside from us have staffed an international school, and none of them have led an oversees outreach. We actually feel that this is a blessing from God because we want to build on the strong foundations that the refinement of the last couple years has afforded us.
As of now, we have one new staff coming from Germany in mid July who we are so excited to meet! After she was accepted a few months ago, Karis began zooming every other week with her to start the process of discipleship and transition into staffing. We are praying God will call others to say yes to DTS staffing as well in His timing.
Another thing that our base has been planning for the last few months is a large-scale, evangelistic campaign event, Bible distribution, and a worship and prayer conference for the week before. We have been helping to plan and prepare the conference for the week before. All of YWAM Australia has been invited to intercede for the town that we are aiming to reach, but so many bases only have a handful of staff left (lots left during covid), so it seems it will only be around 75-100 people (our last one was over 450, pre-covid). No matter the number, we are excited to gather, worship our King, and pray for this nation and the town of Nambour. The week will be filled with times of worship, teaching, evangelism, and all night prayer. Everyone will be camping on a large field next to a church that has graciously allowed us to use their building for the conference. The event itself will include a combined effort of many local churches as well as some ministries that will bring entertainment and open up the door to preach the Gospel to everyone who comes to the event. We are believing that many will begin a relationship with Jesus during this event and are helping to prepare the local churches to disciple these new believers so that there would be a wide scale effect of the town and the Sunshine Coast as a whole. Please pray for this event with us, that many would respond to the Good News, that generations would be impacted, and that, as we distribute the Bible around the town, Nambour would see God rightly and be discipled in and transformed by the Truth.
This brings us to our last big update. After going away to pray about 2022 in the beginning of the year, we felt we should plan to go home mid/end of May to mid/late July. This surprised us, but then each week we saw restriction after restriction lift, and it was clear as ever that we were going to be able to visit home! So, here we come after almost four years of being away! We will be setting up shop in Milwaukee for 8 weeks before heading back to Australia. We are so grateful to have that time to spend time with family, friends, our home church, and all those who support us in prayer and financially. It’s been a long while since we have seen your faces, and we’re so grateful God made a way!
While we are both helping plan the prayer conference, only Sam will be staying to help run it at the middle/end of May. One of Karis’ very dear friends (she actually led our outreach when Sam did his DTS!) is getting married the same week and Karis was asked to be a bridesmaid. We both felt a lot of peace of ‘dividing and conquering’, so on May 16th, Karis will fly to Montana to spend a few days with her friend and stand in her wedding on May 21st, heading to Milwaukee the day after. Sam will stay in Australia and help run the conference, be at the event (also May 21st) and leave for Milwaukee on May 23rd.
In reflecting on the last four years, we are feeling so grateful that by His grace, God empowered us to thrive even as our plans to come home were thwarted repeatedly. He continued to show Himself to be faithful and He, Himself became our home in new ways, ways we don’t know that we would have experienced without all the delays. Now, however, we are ecstatic to come back to Milwaukee for a visit, and soak up each day before we come back to Australia, where we know God continues to call us for the next couple years.
That’s all for now! We’re hoping to give our next big update in person to many of you and update you on the longer-term future with I. n. d. * a as well! For those of you that we won’t see in person, we will update you during our time at home on how the Gospel event went and what’s to come! We really value all of you, and the roles each one of you plays and has played in our lives. Please always feel free to reach out with questions, comments, prayer requests, or just for a chat!
With love,
Samuel and Karis
Welcome!
At t he September DTS Graduation
Our DTS staff from the Sept school
The January DTS' luggage, was so fun to have a full wavehouse again!
night time hangouts
The Jan DTS on our week of teaching
Teaching
Teaching
Teaching
Games with the students
Kings kids ministry (we now have 20 kids!)
Kings kids
Date night at one of our favorite spots
Date night
Lots of time in the office the last few months! (this is our good friend Julie who we do a lot of work with for Staff courses)
We went away for a night of spontaneous camping over Christmas break with our good friends the Cunliff's and their new puppy
camping
driving on the beach over Christmas break! (we had 3 weeks off and they were very restful and fun, was a perfectly timed break for us)
Indie (:
Sam going down a massive slip and slide we made for the January DTS when they were in Sunny Coast
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