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