“It is our confidence in the sovereign grace of God that gives us any hope of success in missions.” – Kevin DeYoung
God has provided for us in so many ways since we originally decided to go to Germany to serve the church and bring lost people into God’s kingdom. For those of you that would like to know more information about our situation, please check out the previous post.
I graduated from my Web Development school in June of this year and received a job offer no more than two weeks later from a company in Hamburg, Germany. We will be working with a relocation agency sponsored by my company to move our belongings to Hamburg on (or around) August 1st, a month from now.
We want to thank everyone who has supported us monetarily in any way, prayed for us, let us stay in their home, and of course my parents for allowing us to live in their house while I completed school. We ask for your continued prayers that we will 1) be constantly abiding in the Lord, renewing our minds with the ocean of grace and truth that is His own mind, 2) continue to persevere in cultural integration, language learning, reaching out in every-day life to make friends, and living missionally in general despite the toll that working full time takes on us, and 3) pray for the church(es) that we will be involved with, extending their ministry in any way we can while building relationships.
A few Sundays ago, we unexpectedly met a couple in our church who were very enthusiastic about a simple ministry strategy for those who want to make a huge impact for God’s kingdom but didn’t consider themselves full-time evangelists. They introduced us to a simple strategy for missional living called ‘BELLS’. I won’t go into too much detail about the strategy because it does get a bit wordy, but in short it is an acronym for weekly goals that encourage the type of ministry conducted by the early disciples. The BELLS method of ministry focuses heavily on one-to-one discipleship. We intend to abide by this strategy in order to more precisely put into practice what we believe is important in evangelistic outreach.
We do not intend to take Hamburg or Germany by force. The strong advice of others who have gone before us has been to build trust first. We believe working regular jobs and living long-term among Germans will help us build that trust. As the ‘BELLS’ PDF mentions, we want to live ‘questionable’ lives: lives that evoke questions from those around us. Once trust is built, we pray that hard and honest questions about God, Christianity, and theology will begin to flow, that interest will be rekindled, and that, by God’s grace, Christianity will be taken off the “that’s for lunatics” shelf in people’s brains.
We ask for your prayers that God would help us live as full-hearted Christians in Germany and that He would help us serve His Church with all of our ability.
Nach Deutschland 