Summer Update

This week it has been two years since we have been back in the States from Romania.  While we could not understate how much we still miss our kids in Romania, we are thankful that God has given us this new call to serve in Grand Rapids.  A huge plus is that we are surrounded by great friends and family, and God has blessed us with a wonderful church family and wonderful leaders.  

Summer always seems to be a busy time especially for children and youth ministry because of camps, VBS, and other special things that are harder to pull off during the school year.  Our last post was of our Create! Arts Camp, which was our biggest event of the year so far with 50 kids participating.  This post is going to cover everything since then and up until now, including things we were involved with in ministry and things we have been blessed to do personally.

We have really been enjoying being able to pick fresh fruit here in Michigan.  It was something we missed while we were in Romania.

Blueberries are one of our favorites, and it's more fun picking with friends!

At the end of July we had a "camp" for our middle school youth group.  We called it Upward Challenge and it was based on another camp that is run in North Carolina and Alaska by PRMI.  

We had our youth come for a couple hours each evening and started off with a game each time.  We did lots of challenges and team games.

After games we had dinner and then spent some time in worship. It is great to hear middle schoolers praising God!

We had two special teachers come, who also happen to be our good friends Jay and Stephanie.  They were both at the longer Upward Challenge in North Carolina.  We learned about the spiritual reality that we live in and how God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit each work in our lives.

We finished up the week with a fun pool party at one of our volunteer's house.

Everyone loved the pool party!

We also had a bonfire and then we gathered around some of our volunteers to pray for them as they were about to move on to another place of ministry.  This was a wonderful week and we felt like we saw lots of growth in our group.

In August both our Children's Worship and GoldRush ministries took a break so that we and our other volunteers could rest up before starting again in the fall.  We started off by visiting Mark's Mom for her birthday.

 We were able to take a couple long weekends away to get some R&R.  The first was to Ludington to stay with Mark's Dad & Step Mom at their trailer there.

We stopped in Manistee first and spent a nice day exploring and having a wonderful dinner together.

In addition to biking around the state park and playing games at the trailer, we explored the area and found some unique things, like this Alpaca farm.

Our second mini getaway was to the family cabin with Rebecca's parents.  It had been many years since we were there.

The cabin is in the upper peninsula, near Tahquamenon Falls.  The grass was very long!

This is the cabin - it has no electric or running water - very rustic!  We love the setting there though, it is very peaceful and quiet.

We hiked around the woods looking for bogs and beaver ponds.  Thankfully it was sunny so we could find our way back to the cabin without getting lost!

We took a short trip to the falls on a gorgeous day!

Here we are with Rebecca's parents.

On Labor Day we got together with a group of friends at Grand Haven for a pancake breakfast.  The wind was great so Mark got out his kite and flew it for quite a while.  It looks small in the picture but it is 8 feet across and it pulls a lot in high winds.  It is very fun!

The kids brought their kite and enjoyed flying it too.

In between these long weekends and holiday week, Mark was very busy getting things ready for our programs to start back up in the fall.  We added another classroom in Children's Worship for the youngest kids, some of whom will be transitioning in from Nursery this year.  Both ministries needed new curriculum and were short on volunteers, so it was quite a lot to do and honestly quite stressful.  It was made a little harder because I (Mark) was going to be gone the week of the launch so I had to get everything ready to be launched in my absence.

With God's help, everything went well!  I (Mark) left to go on a week long ministry training in the area of Healing and Deliverance Ministry.  A large group from our church traveled to North Carolina to take part in this course.  Over this year we will read many books, work on a project, and go back to NC two more times.  We hope to form a team that will be able to start ministering at our church.

This was the view out of my window, mountains are beautiful!

There were lots of flowers and butterflies flitting around so I took the opportunity to get some great shots!

I enjoyed getting to know Brad, the Executive Director of the ministry and teacher of the course.  He has such a wealth of experience and God has used him in mighty ways.  We practiced what we were taught in small groups throughout the week.  We all prayed for each other and experienced inner healing and freedom.  Inner healing is part of the process of sanctification; allowing Jesus to heal deep hurts in our lives. It was such a great time!

The last day of the conference we went to the HQ of the ministry: The Community of the Cross.

I hiked to the top of the mountain with my carpool group.  We had a good time riding together for the 12 hour drive.

In addition to all of this, we are still waiting for our license to be processed for Foster Care.  It is taking nearly twice as long as expected which makes it really hard to know how to plan for anything.  Waiting is a hard thing for anything, but it seems especially so for this.  Would you please pray for us during this challenging waiting period?  

Thanks for taking the time to read about what we've been up to this summer/early fall.  It is exciting to see the ways God is working in all the things that are going on.  Thank you for your prayers!

Create! Arts Camp

Summer is always a busy and exciting time for ministry involving children and youth.  Kids are out of school and that almost always means having some kind of Vacation Bible School (VBS) or camp for them.  We recently had our big outreach at Gold Ave Church, and it was an amazing time!  Create! Arts Camp was our version of VBS this year.  It was an opportunity to share the gospel with kids from our church and neighborhood and to offer something that most kids love: art.

Last year was our first year of doing Create!. We had around 10 youth come then, but it was still a good time.  This year I was able to spend significantly more time planning and promoting around the neighborhood, and praying for 50 kids to come.  God answers prayers, because this year 50 kids came!  Praise be to God!

In the weeks leading up to the camp, our Thursday night prayer and outreach group at church went out and looked for families to hand out our fliers to.  This led to some great conversations and new relationships formed.  It was great to see how supportive our neighbors were of the art camp and how willing they were to let us pray with them after inviting their kids to the camp.

It was so awesome to see so many kids participating.  Around 5 of the kids were from our church,  some were from our middle school youth group, others were from the Bridge Street House Of Prayer's (BSHOP) tutoring program, and the rest were from the neighborhood.

Each day we started with praise and worship.

After worship we had a lesson.  This was where we were able to share the gospel story with the kids. 

Nate, one of our church's interns, helped lead some of the lessons.  While we were talking, Heather painted a picture of the theme of the day on a huge canvas.

After the lesson, there were two art studios that the kids could participate in.  Each was taught by wonderful people who were excited to share their love of God and Art with the youth.  Each studio had a helper from a high school group that was doing a week long Immersion program at BSHOP.

Here are some pictures of the studios:

Dynamic Dimensions of Dance

Find Your Inner Picasso (Painting)

Masterpiece Drawing

Pottery 101

Top Chef

Printmaking

Click! (Photography)

I had the privilege of teaching this class, and at the end we each made a collage with our favorite pictures.

Rebecca and Kate helped out with child care so that the teachers could come without having to find their own childcare.

Friday there was no camp during the day so that in the evening we could have an art gallery.  This was a great opportunity for families to come and see their children's art.

I had help from two great people, one of whom used to help coordinate the arts camp at Servant's Community Church.  

We set up the sanctuary to feel like an actual art gallery and I think it turned out really nice!

Around 80 people came to the gallery and it was a lot of fun mingling and appreciating the art.

After a half hour we were able to hear from and thank each studio teacher.  They each shared what they did in their studio.

To close I shared an overview of what we had been learning all week.  It was a basic overview of the gospel and an invitation to participate in a loving church family at Gold.  The whole evening exceeded my expectations, it was another thing I could see God's hand in bringing it all together and bringing in the people!

Here are the paintings from each day.  We shared God's good news of salvation through Jesus Christ, using the Creation - Fall - Redemption - Restoration model.

Creation - God created everything and it was good.  People were created to have a relationship with God.

Fall - Sin entered in and ruined the relationship between God and man.  We see the effects of this today in so many ways, one of which is that we have a longing to be close to God but sin blocks us from receiving his love.  We turn to many other things which seem good at first but leave us feeling empty.

Redemption - Jesus knew from the beginning that he would come and give his life as a payment for our sin.  He offers us salvation and relationship with him as a gift, we need to respond by accepting it and repenting from our sin.  When we do we are forgiven and are adopted into his family as sons and daughters who are deeply loved.

Restoration - When we enter into relationship with God through faith in Jesus, he begins a restoring work in our lives, bringing his kingdom to earth through us.  We grow and become more like Jesus, doing the things that he did and living lives surrendered to his plans in our lives.  He gives us good gifts to help us, especially the Holy Spirit as our guide and helper.

Create! Arts Camp was such a success and a wonderful time of ministry.  We saw God working in so many ways.  We are so thankful for everyone who helped with the camp: those involved in planning, teaching, assisting, leading lessons, helping with child care, driving, and gallery setup.  Thank you so much to those who prayed for this camp.  God honored prayers in a big way.  Now we can be praying for God to work in the lives of everyone who came and for blessings on next year's camp.

Here are some more pictures, there were way too many to fit in this blog: Create! Photos

Spring Newsletter

Mark & Rebecca's Spring Newsletter

Hi there!  It's newsletter time again!  We have a lot of ground to cover since this "quarterly" update is actually almost a half year after our last one.  We hope that you are able to keep up with our more frequent updates on our blog or Facebook page.  Thanks for taking the time to read about our ministry and what is going on in our lives.  We appreciate you and your involvement and support!

Ministry: Gold Ave Church 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. Romania Trip   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 Our House 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 Foster Care   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.

Volunteer Crunch: We are experiencing a shortage of volunteers and are eagerly anticipating seeing how God will provide for these ministries. Would you pray for 6 more people to care for our youngest kids in Nursery?  We also need a nursery coordinator to help with scheduling and organizing.   Would you pray for 6 more people to help with Children's Worship; two who are gifted in leading kids in worship, one who is gifted in leading a large group, and the rest who can co-lead small groups.   Would you pray for 4 more people to help with middle school youth group; it would be great to have one who is gifted in leading worship and others who are gifted in leading large and small groups. Would you pray for people to work in some future ministries that are on our hearts such as High School Youth Group and Prayer Appointment leaders? Support  God is so faithful!  We have been called to this ministry as urban missionaries since there is a great need for Jesus to be shared here but Gold Ave Church has limited resources. God has provided for us every step of the way and we prayerfully expect that will continue as long as He has this call in our lives. We fully believe and have experienced that where God guides, he provides. Right now about 71% of our support is coming from monthly or yearly commitments. Another 7% has been given so far this year in one time gifts, so we are currently at about 78% for the year. That leaves about $9,800 left to raise for the year. Our desire is to raise up more long term commitments as we work toward being fully funded, but one time gifts are still an important part of our funding. Would you prayerfully consider partnering with us in this ministry? If you already do, then thank you so much, we appreciate you and your faithfulness! Here are some ways to donate, all of which go through the church and are tax-deductible: PayPal: Securely pay with credit card, debit card or your bank account. This works for recurring and one time donations. Click Here: PayPal Check: Make it out to Gold Avenue Church and include a note designating it to our ministry or write it in the memo line; send it to: Gold Avenue Church 49 Gold Avenue NW Grand Rapids MI 49504 Would you please join us in praying for our support to come in and for God to raise up more support partners? Thanks again for reading our update and praying for us.  Your involvement in our ministry really means a lot to us! With Love, Mark & Rebecca

May Happenings

The month of May has really flown by!  As usual it has been a full month with lots of excitement and lots of projects.  We'll walk through the journey with pictures...

We joined many other people at Rosa Parks Circle for National Day of Prayer.  It was a wonderful time of crying out to the Lord on behalf of our city and nation.

We made it out to Tulip Time in Holland.  It was the first time that we went on one of the weekends, and we found out why: because it's so busy then!  We went and had a picnic lunch at Window on the Waterfront, the park where the test plantings of tulips are.  It was a gorgeous day but we decided not to drive down tulip lane because it was so busy!

We finally had nice weather to work outside of the house, so we did some landscaping and gardening.

We worked on the back yard a bit too, a friend came over and trimmed some branches off of our neighbors huge Maple tree.  This might have been the first time for sunlight to reach this area in quite a long time!  It also really opened up our yard, since some of the branches were hanging almost all the way to the ground!

I found that our local neighborhood park is a very nice place to spend a morning in prayer.  You wouldn't even know you are in the city!

Rebecca enjoys holding our friend's daughter Ember at church and when we visit them.  Ember is almost always smiling and being cute!

We were able to take our middle school youth group on a reward trip to Sky Zone.  This was a smaller group than normal because some of the kids had school camp and others a concert.

We all had a lot of fun jumping around on the trampolines...

...dunking basketballs...

...jumping in the foam pits...

...and playing dodge ball.  The youth really wasted the leaders, we were heavily outnumbered and we couldn't match their ninja-like moves!

This is how we felt after about about 15 minutes there! 

We did make it to the end of the hour alive though!

Things are going well with our youth group.  We are in need of some more volunteers though.   Rose (on the left) and Ben (in the red) have been faithful volunteers since we started.  This fall Rose will be going to grad school out of state.  Ben will be studying abroad in the Netherlands this fall.  It has been a pleasure having these two on our team, and we will pray for them in their new endeavors.  We are praying for more workers!

Oh, one more thing, starting this Sunday, Evergreen Ministries will be supporting our ministry through their Corners Offering.  This will go on for four Sundays: May 29 - June 19.  We will be there to share about our ministry on June 12 at both the 9:15 and 11:00 services.  We are very thankful for this opportunity and are looking forward to seeing many familiar faces there!  https://egm.org