Yesterday was really encouraging to me. I had quite a few good conversations about future stuff ministry related things. One of the conversations was with this guy named Jason who works for a ministry out of Florida that does allot of mercy ministry such as Laundry Love; which is were they take a group of people to a Laundry mat and pay for people’s laundry and through that, they develop relationships. Jason is bringing a mission team to Vegas next week to work with XXX church. They will be remodeling a brothel in a town a few hours away. He called me to see if we could do a few outreaches with his group. We will most likely take them downtown and give out free prayer and hot chocolate and hopefully have amazing conversations about Jesus! We also hope to join them with their laundry love project as they intend on doing one here in Vegas.
The other good conversation I had yesterday was with a guy named John Howard who is the housing manager of a government housing project that I really want to do outreaches in so that we can develop relationships with the low income families there. John really likes this idea just as long as the residents know that it is a YWAM thing and not at all associated with the housing development, which I assured him should not be a problem. It has come to my attention within the last few weeks that the source of physical poverty is spiritual poverty, a lack of Jesus in their lives. The reason why trying to solve physical needs only and never finding a way to bridge that to Jesus is that only when Jesus is in their lives, will they have the chance to get out of the physical poverty they are in. Our building, the Pier, is a community resource center, meaning we provide physical needs for people such as food, classes to teach them how to get a job, tutoring classes for kids, vaccines for kids. All of this is done without mentioning the name of Jesus. This is so that we can attract the community by serving them and not scare them away with the Christian-y stuff. However, we need to be strategizing ways we can be more intentional of bridging meeting people’s physical needs with curing people’s spiritual needs.
As it says in my newsletter, I have joined a church plant called the Verve. We are meeting in the Greek Isles at two different times, Sunday at 9:30 and Mondays at 6:45. This Monday was really convicting for me. Vince, the head pastor, had taken a poll a few weeks ago asking us how we were doing and how we though Verve was doing. Pretty much everybody said they were passionate about what Verve is doing and about Jesus, but almost everybody also put that they were weary about how the Verve Launch team is doing. The majority of people also said that they were struggling with daily spiritual discipline as well. Vince went on to talk about how as a church, we need to be abounding, meaning doing great thing in the name of Jesus and doing things that even amaze us because it is not us doing it, but Jesus. Just passion alone is not enough to abound, its just not! If you are super passionate about running a marathon, but don’t prepare, you won’t get very far. In order to abound, we need to abide in Jesus as it says in John 15. This means we needs to “live inside of Jesus” we need to be Jesus! The only way to do this is through discipline as well as passion, but we need both not one and the other. This was super convicting to me because I know that discipline is something that I struggle with. I am super passionate, but not so good about making sure I am in the word daily and taking intentional time to plug into Jesus. I do get several chances during the week to take time out to talk to Jesus and grow in him, but it is generally while I am running or riding my bike. I realized that I really need to be more intentional about reading my bible…Even if it means getting up early and reading for a half hour before work….aaah! Also I need to work on informing those that want to be involved with my ministry here about what is going on and how they can be involved, either through prayer of finances. So these are some things to be praying about.
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