Urban Adventures

Urban Missionary Update - June, 2006

2006-07-08T16:39:00.000-07:00

“I have found there are three stages to every great work of God: first it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done.” ~J. Hudson Taylor

Wow. It’s hard to believe how quickly our January-to-June term blazed by! This urban missionary thing has been the hardest “job” we’ve ever had. The most difficult, the most challenging, the most stretching, the most invigorating and the most satisfying. It’s so bizarre to look back and realize that everything we’ve attempted over the last 6 months has been impossible (for us anyway)… yet God has been faithful and so some of these “impossible” ministry dreams have come to pass and more are still in process. The learning curve has felt pretty steep but we have learned SO MUCH about living life in full-time ministry. Some of it’s hard but all of it is rich.

Unfortunately it’s easy to get so busy DOING the ministry that it becomes difficult to find the time to update those that by their sacrifice have ENABLED you to do the ministry. A humble thank you for your grace towards us in this respect… one of the many things we need to learn to do better!

looking back in celebration!

So what have we been pouring our blood, sweat and tears into? As you may know we have strategically focused our ministry on the young adult age segment in a Winnipeg neighbourhood called Elmwood. If missions had a North American equivalent of a hard-to-reach people group… sometimes it feels like urban post-modern young adults may be it. Yet the more we get to know this enigmatic slice of western society, the more we encounter the familiar human longing for something real and authentic. Fortunately we have the unconditional love of God, the life-transforming truth of Jesus and the deep community of His followers to offer them as a compelling anecdote to mere existence.

Our approach has been to start a young adult ministry (that we named “Stir”) in order to gather as many as we could of the 70+ young adults that already attend Riverwood into an identifiable and growing community. So far we have endeavored to do this primarily through developing relationships and holding weekly café-style events. Knitting that group together has been the main focus of our time and effort over this past term. As this new community took shape we began the journey with them towards the next phase of our vision: to grow and disciple them towards being an intensely missional community of young adults willing to die to themselves, take their place in expanding the kingdom of God and impact the far-from-God young adults in the surrounding neighbourhood/city/country/planet. This part of the journey is in its earliest stages in many ways… but we have witnessed exciting movement already through numerous events that featured challenging teaching and intense discussions. We even got a taste of our future as we made some initial, experimental attempts at making inroads into the surrounding community by putting on three young adult drop-in café events this spring.

While we could have focused our efforts on just the two of us lone missionaries slogging away at trying to have an impact on the urban young adults of the Elmwood area of Winnipeg… we sense God’s purpose and pleasure in harnessing the passion and tremendous ministry potential of Riverwood’s existing young adults as they team with us in the adventure of impacting their peers in this neighbourhood and beyond.

looking forward in anticipation!

Now for some humungous news! As our 6 month term was wrapping up and we were wondering what God had next for us… the leadership of Riverwood graciously extended to us another term opportunity to keep building this fledgling ministry towards our vision of reaching the young adults of Elmwood for Christ! And this time the term is for an entire year rather than 6 months! Obviously this is very exciting for us since it means we can build on the foundation and groundwork we’ve been establishing over the course of the previous term and continue to love, engage and encourage young adults along in their faith journey.

Part of this new opportunity involves utilizing the new youth centre currently under development at Riverwood. Affectionately named The Emergenation Centre (we make up lots of words at Riverwood); this will be the epicenter of our café-style ministry once completed. It will be an appealing and dynamic hang-out that young adults from the neighbourhood can call their own. A safe, non-threatening atmosphere conducive to engaging in discussions about life, faith and the future. An inspiring venue in which relationships can be built with young adults as they are encouraged to express themselves creatively and artistically. A challenging setting where comfort zones are breached, risks are taken, faith is deepened and young adults begin to live their lives for others.

The potential of The Emergenation Centre to be such a vital and vibrant incubator of relationship and ministry for us means that I (Greg) will hopefully be dedicating significant time and effort this summer to moving it towards completion as soon as possible.

support update

Many thanks to the many of you who have chosen to partner with us in this ministry in prayer and/or financial support over this past 6 month term. We have felt so blessed and encouraged by you! Your faithfulness and generosity resulted in us finishing this past term with 100% of the support we needed. Yay God and way to go team!! That blessing is so huge! We’re very humbled and having trouble even just wrapping our minds around it!

In the midst of celebrating that we are also very aware of the reality of needing to raise support for this new term of ministry as Urban Missionaries at Riverwood. Even though our leadership has given us the goal of having new support commitments in place by September 1st, the conclusion of our previous support and the news of this next opportunity being so recent means there will be a gap between receiving the last of our support in June and any new support coming in. So any new support that’s able to start as soon as possible will be greatly appreciated and will go a long way to helping us through the summer. God has proven Himself so faithful to us so we will trust Him for His provision during this period.

prayer requests

We’d be so honoured if you would join us in praying for the following…
- That the Lord would open the eyes and soften the hearts of the young adults of Elmwood.
- That the young adults at Riverwood would embrace the life God created them to live.
- Effectiveness in ministry.
- Rapid completion of the Emergenation Centre.
- Wisdom in forming leadership teams for Stir and other ministries we oversee.
- Family health and protection.
- Provision for the summer and the rest of this one year term.
- Intimacy, growth and dependence in our walk with the Lord.

Thank you again for your prayers, encouragement and financial support of our ministry!!!

Greg & Sherry
(and the girls!)

“You will never do your part to save humanity until you stop pretending that fear is the same thing as wisdom.” ~Dean Sharp

Update.... Finally!

2005-12-20T14:56:00.000-08:00

Well apparently this whole ministry thing keeps you pretty busy... so now it's way past high time to give an update of how things are going!

Support

Wow! I can't even begin to descibe how blown away Sherry and I have been by the whole support raising process. We have been so encouraged and blessed by how many people have come forward to invest prayers and resources into the call God has placed on our lives. We have been so humbled by every dollar that has been committed to this Kingdom cause.

As of this posting, we are only about $200 per month shy of our goal. To keep that in perspective - it represents a small remainder of THE HUGE MIRACLE that God has worked in an incredibly short few weeks to provide the support we need. Thank you thank you thank you to all of you who are partnering with us in this opportunity.

EDIT: We now just need to raise another $100 per month!

I'm also happy to say that enough has been committed to cross the "close enough" line and as of Jan. 3 we are officially on staff at Riverwood as urban missionaries. Yay God! We will still need to keep working towards raising the rest of our support goal but the green light has been given and we're launching forward!

In the next update post I'll bring you up to speed on the ministry we've been doing already over the last few months as "volunteers", as well as a bit of what lies ahead.

Greg

The Back Story...

2005-10-19T11:23:00.000-07:00

This is an excerpt from the support letter we've just started mailing out. It will give you some of the back story of how we ended up where we are today...

The road less traveled

For us the stirring probably started several years ago during late night conversations that grappled with such questions as “What are we doing with our lives that will count for eternity? …and “How can we make a real difference in people’s lives?” This desire and hunger to have an impact for the Kingdom percolated in us even as I enjoyed success in my job developing software applications for a great company. I had outstanding superiors and colleagues. Things were going really well and our family was experiencing the greatest stability and financial security we’d ever had. Then a little over a year ago God spoke very directly to my heart.

I was vacuuming (of all things). I was pondering how very blessed Sherry and I were. How for the first time in our lives we weren’t worried about money. We weren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination – programmers don’t make as much as you might think :) - but we’d always had a fairly modest standard of living and we now felt relatively comfortable. In the midst of this moment of thanksgiving …God invaded my thoughts with this question: “Would you be willing to sacrifice all this stability and security for the sake of advancing my Kingdom?” It was as clear and stark and unmistakable as if I’d heard an audible voice. It seemed like the whole world stopped. I felt humbled, excited and more than a little scared… but my answer was yes.

When I shared this experience with Sherry, she agreed this felt like the Lord speaking to us. One thing we both hoped was that whatever came next, it would somehow be connected to Riverwood, the church we have been wholeheartedly involved with since its inception 10 years ago.

Over the next 8 months I rolled back my hours at work to volunteer more at Riverwood. In that time there was a whole lot of waiting, seeking and praying. It felt like the Lord was taking me through a process of internal preparation during that period. By May of this year, I sensed that all the processing and stirring and churning in my heart was culminating in the Lord requiring us to make the next decision and take the next step. His question of “Would you be willing?” was changing into “Will you now?” and we again answered yes. After a further month of working out the details, I left my job on July the 4th. I’m Canadian obviously, but I still appreciated the significance of it being “Independence” day. We spent the summer enjoying family and friends, traveling, doing a whole lot more of that waiting/seeking/praying stuff… and wondering “What now?!?”

The opportunity

As our “waiting” began to stretch into the fall, a possibility for us started to take shape at Riverwood. A new staff designation was being created called “Urban Missionaries” and the Riverwood leadership was willing to give Sherry and myself a shot at serving in this new capacity.

Obviously this is a bit of an atypical scenario for “missionaries”. We aren’t going overseas or to a different country… we’re staying in Canada. We’re not ministering to a remote tribe… we’re pouring our lives into inner city Winnipeg. We’re not being sent out by a missionary organization… we’re being asked to stay here and work with our local church and raise our own financial support. Nonetheless, I hope you will sense the need, the potential and our excitement to serve in this way.

As Urban Missionaries working for Riverwood, we have three primary initiatives that I will be leading with Sherry’s help:

1. Building (from scratch) a young adult ministry at Riverwood.

The young adult segment of Riverwood is a sizable and sophisticated group who are in the process of charting the course of their future. Sherry and I have an opportunity to influence these influencers and ignite them with the cause and mission of Christ.

2. Outreach to the young adults in the community around us.

In contrast to Riverwood’s young adults, the young adults in the surrounding community face typical inner city challenges. Drug and alcohol addiction, gang involvement and abusive relationships are common. We so desperately want to invite them into an environment where they can experience acceptance and community and have hope, love and the life-transforming truth of Jesus spoken into them.

3. Leading a website development team to better leverage Riverwood’s website for communication and outreach.

We want to seize the opportunity to take communication and connectedness with those we are trying to reach in our urban setting to a whole new level through the medium of our website.

Join our team

The opportunity that God is calling us to feels immense. Sherry and I have resolved to make a difference with our lives but we can’t do it alone. We need your prayers! We are also faced with a relatively short time-frame to raise the support we need to proceed with this opportunity. Basically we need to have the commitments for support (… not the actual money) in by about mid December so we can tell if we’ll have enough support in place from January to June to qualify. We feel so called to this that we have already been living by faith and working at this ministry fulltime since September, but now we need to raise financial support to continue. Please let us know if you want to be a part of helping us impact inner city Winnipeg. Thank you!!

Edit: Please pray that the responses to our support request letters would come in quickly so we can be free to proceed in this call!

Peace to you,
Greg & Sherry ( …and Kathryn and Chloe!)