| Ministry: Gold Ave Church |
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We enjoy being involved in many different aspects of ministry at Gold Avenue Church. Lots of growth has happened over the past half year and we have seen God at work in so many ways.
Children's Worship - Kids aged 3 years through 4th grade come to Children's Worship during the church service each week. We journeyed through the Jesus Storybook Bible, and once we finished with that, we started a new series on the book of Acts and the New Testament. We are learning about how God grew the early church and how he used ordinary people, the Apostles, to spread the word about Jesus. Each week we spend time journaling in response to the story, and it is exciting to see how much the kids are growing. We are learning about the role that the Holy Spirit played in that movement and how he works in our lives today and gifts us for ministry.
It has been fun getting to know the kids and lately, receiving lots of hugs and cute drawings from them. Would you please pray that God continues to work in these kids to grow them up to love him and share that love with others?
GoldRush - Our middle school youth group has been a challenging and rewarding ministry. Each week we drive around the neighborhood picking up youth since only about 3 come from our own church. We have a solid core of about 20 kids and have had nearly 25 others come throughout the year who attended for various amounts of time. We have been studying the story of the Bible and tackling life issues that these kids are facing. Most importantly, we are sharing God's love with them and sharing the gospel of Jesus with them each week. We do fun outings once in a while too, we recently had a blast at Skyzone.
We continue to face hard issues like the transience of the neighborhood. Families are being displaced due to rent being raised and landlords' desire to rent to college students instead of families. They can make more than double the money that way, and many don't seem to mind evicting families with kids in the middle of the school year. It is hard to see families go through this but we help as we can. We miss the kids when they move away! Disrespect and bullying are things we deal with too. We recently had a situation where a parent alerted us to a situation that we weren't aware was an ongoing thing. They forbid their child from coming anymore because they were understandably upset. We saw God bring reconciliation as I was led to write them a letter apologizing and assuring that we don't tolerate bullying. They were touched by this gesture and we vowed to be more attentive and preventive of this type of behavior. Would you please pray that our group would be a safe place for youth where they can learn about the love of Jesus and that they would surrender their lives to Him? Pray for transformation, even as we are only with them for a couple hours a week we know that God is the one who does the hard work of changing hearts!
Prayer Partners - We often see God at work at our Sunday worship services at Gold. Many people who are going through tough times come through our doors to seek prayer and other help. As we seek to be a house of prayer, this new ministry has been started to meet the need. People are now able to come up after the service and receive prayer with the team who have been trained to listen to God's leading in prayer. We have experienced awesome things through praying with people - confessions of sin, people coming to Christ, and even physical healing. It is so great to see burdens lifted from people's lives by offering up heartfelt prayers to the Lord. Would you please pray that people continue to be blessed by this ministry, and pray for wisdom for Rebecca and Anne (our pastors wife) as they lead this ministry?
Summer Plans - Planning is well underway for our VBS-like camps this summer. The first will be Create! Arts Camp. Kids from grades 3-8 will learn about who God created them to be while exploring different fun art forms. This is designed to be an evangelistic outreach to the neighborhood. We are still looking for a few more people to teach art classes, it happens July 11-14 from 1-4pm, let us know if you are interested! The second is Upward Challenge, a camp for our middle school youth group. This camp will focus on deepening relationship with God and learning how to live life for him through the Holy Spirit. We are still working on details but this will be July 25-29 from 6-8pm. Would you please pray for many kids to come and be touched by these camps? Please pray for the planning to be led by God. |
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This spring we were able to make another trip to Romania. We had a wonderfully blessed time, it was so nice to reconnect with so many people that we love so much! The kids had grown a lot, but other than that nothing much has changed, so it was like we picked up right where we left off. We were only there one week, but we were able to see a majority of the kids that we used to work with. We enjoyed spending time with them and hearing about what they have been up to. We also connected with many of our friends and it was nice to hear how they have been and to share about our new ministry in Grand Rapids. Part of our hearts are still in Romania and always will be, and we are thankful to God that he gave us the opportunity to strengthen our bonds with those we love there! Please pray that God would continue to work in the lives of our kids in Romania, that he would watch over, provide for, and protect them. Pray for us as we miss them. Pray also for our friends' ministries to be fruitful.
Pictures from our trip - Click Here |
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It has been almost a year since we started working on our house, and we are glad to say that we are almost done with our renovations! We have redone every floor, painted every wall and ceiling, re-insulated the attic, fixed the decrepit front stairs, planted a vegetable garden and done lots of outdoor landscaping projects. There is still a long list of things to do but nothing major remains. We are constantly reminded of God's faithfulness as he has provided us with this place and gifted us with abilities to do most of the work ourselves along with help from others. Please join us in thanking God for his goodness!
Before & After Pictures - Click Here |
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One of our heart's desires is to build up our family through foster care. Everything that we have been working towards since we got back from Romania is a part of making this dream become a reality. This spring we were able to make some tangible progress by taking all of the required classes (30 hours) and filling out lots and lots of paperwork. We are in the process of having our home certified by our licenser at Bethany Christian Services. Some of our friends had a baby shower for us since in order to be licensed for a baby we need all of the stuff first. We have received gifts from others as well, and for all of this we are so thankful. We felt from the beginning that in order to do this we need good support all around us, and we have been blessed beyond what we could hope for. We now are in the waiting game, it could be a few more months now before our license is complete and we have our first child placed with us.
Would you please pray for the paperwork to go quickly and for our hearts to be prepared? Please pray that no matter what happens, if we have a child who stays with us for a while and then returns to their family (the ideal situation for them) or if we have a child who we are able to adopt, that God will give us the strength to accept what happens. |
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