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Archive for the 'Missions' Category
This week we are sending a team on a short term missions trip to Peru.
As you remember they just had a massive earthquake. This happened right in the area that our team is scheduled to go and minister.
The team is leaving this Friday and will be back the following Sunday night. I am asking for support for two reasons.
- There is a young man on our team of Peruvian descent who felt that he was supposed to go on this trip since its inception. His father met his mother while he was a missionary there.
Yet he has believed God for the finances. He is currently several hundred dollars short of the goal. His family has hit pretty hard times the last eight months or so.
This is the main reason for this plea. I really want to help send him. If I had the money I would gladly give it to him. He is the drummer of our youth worship team and has a great call on his life. He has done everything imaginable to raise this money and is still quite short.
- Our church has found a contractor that can deliver water and food together with a tent for a family for $45. If God opens the floodgates from this appeal, the remainder of the money will go to this.
You can send me an email to my personal email account at openheavens@gmail.com I can contact you via phone or email and I can give you the contact info of the church if you would like to contact them directly or if you want more information.
I am going to be so bold as to post a button to pay right now via paypal.
I will give a full accounting in this post of the donation amount and I can assure you, as God is my witness, that all funds will go to the trip, either for youth passage or goods for the earthquake victims.
Again, if you send me an email, I can give you the contact number of the church leaders or any other information you may need.
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This post is one part testimony, two part prayer request.
I have done lots of posts about a Tuesday night outreach I have been leading. last week a lady from my church wanted to come and see what was happening. She later confessed to me that t one point she was actually scared for her safety. I shouted Halleuijah! That means we are attracting exactly the crowd we feel called to reach. The young urban knuckle heads.
Last week we had almost 40 people in a living room and man did it get hot! I was there worshiping when the Holy Ghost said, “Why don’t you take off your shirt?” Mind you, I had on a t-shirt underneath, but I was thinking, “I am about to preach.” Thankfully it was a new shirt because I preached the Gospel that night in a wife beater to a group of young men who find that suitable attire.
Among the (many) people flopping around on the floor was a Mormon girl who missed her flight back to Arizona because of a traffic jam on the way to the airport. One guy who got saved was the roommate of a crack dealer that has been coming (we believe that this dealer is the gateway to nothing short of a revival so please pray for his deliverance and salvation).
This Saturday we are going to have a big blowout with performances and almost a real service. We are expecting over 100 to show up. Here are the flyers: (click them for a larger view)
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Would you please pray for the lost to be saved? We have gone into every hood we can find inviting people. We really need the grace of God in this thing and are hoping for a real move of God. This is not going to be some Billy Graham crusade. We are praying for the supernatural to manifest. We want miracles, signs and wonders. This generation has heard the Gospel but has never experienced the full Gospel. It is my goal to make that an unavoidable fact.
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I wish I had time to write of all the things that God is doing. I really am blown away by what I am watching around me. I try to start a new post but before I can write the whole thing there are new things to write.
Let me just get one down here.
There is a girl I am discipling that is about to be a senior in high school. She got a job at a large gym. One day her boss said that she could use the facilities if she wants to have a church meeting. The boss is not a believer and the girl had only been working there a few weeks.
I showed up to preach at this national chain gym at 10 a.m. this past Saturday morning. There were about seven people that showed up for her outreach and all got saved. I have preached lots of places. But preaching to a bunch of lost people in a XXXX’s gym on a Saturday morning had not been one of them.
When I finally had the “altar call” there were people bawling. I was simply amazed. I was driving home with a few of my disciples when I said to them,
One day you are going to be telling the story of the day you held an outreach in XXXX’s gym on a Saturday morning and a hlf dozen people got saved and one even got baptized in the Holy Ghost.
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I have taken a cadre of young revivalists to try and infect youth groups from all over Florida. While I am gone I have asked some of my friends to post for me. Here is the bio of today’s blogger:
Pastor Mark Hadfield: Mark of Made to Praise Him is Senior Pastor of Inverness Community Church. Mark is leading a church into the glory realm. His writings are challenging and enlightening. I enjoy watching as his church finds its footing in the supernatural. Beyond this Mark has been a friend in time of need.
Growing! Up!I’ve just come back from a morning on the streets in Inverness (Scotland), ministering healing. A group of us have been doing this for 3-4 months now, but this morning was extraordinary.It wasn’t extraordinary because we saw somebody leave their wheelchair, missing limbs grow, restoration of sight or hearing, or rejoice in the death of cancer. We saw none of those things today -
and how my heart aches and longs, with weeping, for these to be commonplace.It was extraordinary because God said two things to be me very clearly which broke my heart, and He said similar things to others in the team.
The first thing He said is “now, you take the land”.
Let’s rewind a little in order to understand that.
We’ve been blessed with this amazing sense of God’s presence on the streets ever since we started Healing On The Streets. Every Saturday morning we go to the busiest part of the city centre, set-up some simple PA, raise a 5 metre banner with the word “Healing” on it, and place 6 chairs for people to take if they’d like prayer. Then we all kneel in the busy street and pray, before inviting people to come for healing. The sense of His presence has been just astonishing. There have been times that some of us have been unable to stand under the weight of His glory and we’ve stayed down a little longer than intended. Then people come for healing - and they’re healed, either immediately or over a few weeks, but they’re healed, not merely comforted.
But this morning was different.
I g
uess it started last night. (Or maybe it started last week?)
A group of us went into town to pray and worship and we sensed an unusual spiritual oppression. We realised that it was outside of our immediate vicinity. I likened it to sitting in a bubble. We were in the glory, but not far beyond us it was oppressive. We walked around praying. We sat and worshipped. We sensed the bubble expanding and then we sensed a breakthrough.
Then this morning, in addition to the usual ministry, some new things happened. We had a teenage girl who was pregnant come along, wanting us to bless her unborn baby. I’m blown away that a girl that age doesn’t just want her baby on her own, but also wants the best for her baby. She’s precious and I hope we’ll see her again. We had a Muslim woman come for prayer, wanting her family to know God. Amazing! Finally, we had a really wholesome conversation with a kind-of-new-ager whose into reiki and has been preaching syncretism at us ever since we started. This morning he opened up a little. He’s actually very spiritually aware but still looking for a tangible connection with something higher. He talked about visiting our churches.
The “bubble” really had expanded!
God really impressed upon me that we need to keep stretching, pushing, expanding, taking new ground. He gives us an encouraging start and then asks us to build upon it. Isn’t that the heart of a good dad? To get you started, but then give you the experience of taking it further. Does God really need us to do His work for Him, or does He really love us enough to invest into us for our own joy and fulfilment?
Consider the parable of the talents, or the instruction through the prophet Isaiah to enlarge the place of your tents, and to sing for joy who are barren. He gives us the start (a talent, a tent, a promise). He gives us the equipping for the job (the supernatural anointing of the Spirit and His Son’s authority). He shows us what’s possible. He holds our hand. He says to us “you’re my children, you have the best possible start, now go and make something of it”.
I think there’s something squif with our view of God’s sovereignty if we just sit around waiting for blessing to fall out of the sky. There’s also something squif with our view of the Father heart of God if we expect to be jolted out of our comfort zones with an impossible and painful challenge, instead of taken by the hand, given a head start, and then encouraged to develop.
Come on church! How about it? What gentle prod has He given you and what are you going to do with it?
And the second thing God said?
I was standing in the middle of the street during a slack period when the chairs were empty, looking at the scene of people rushing by to do their shopping, and I heard the voice of the Father say very clearly “can’t you hear me calling to them, my orphaned children?”. I cried. I walked over to the PA, turned off the music, picked up a guitar and started singing “Come Through To Me” by Godfrey Birtill. And people came and sat in the seats and received healing.
He trusts us, He trusts me, He trusts you, with what’s dear to His heart. That’s staggering. So how does He feel if we shrug it off instead of doing something about it?
Come through to me … naked heart …
Come deeper … I know where you are.
Come through the storm …
Let it be still … Come nearer …
Leap into my arms.
So let go, let faith rise.
Have no fear, you will fly.
So let go, let faith rise.
Have no fear, you will fly.
Come through to me … broken one …
Come higher … My daughter, my son.
My family … I’m gathering …
Come closer … I’ll make you as one.
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In line with my decision to blog about all things mundane Acts 19:11, I had a fun time at The Mission, the outreach we are doing on Tuesday nights.
I worte in earlier posts about some young men that got right and are now doing some spirit filled hip hop. Well I am leading their home group as a missions base. Each week they try to get as many friends from their former life to come to a group we hold on their back porch.
The group starts at 10 p.m. and I leave around midnight. In those two hours anything can happen.
Last night we had over 20 folks there with about four who had never steped into a church in their lives. I preached on sanctification through the power of the Holy Ghost. Some real Keswick type doctrine (I am pentecostal you know). Then I had ministry time. This is when it gets fun.
Last week I cast the vision for the group. At the end, I said that everyone who was there was going to receive power to reach their lost friends and a burden for the lost. I told them that I was not going to have an altar call. The fact that they were there meant that they were in. If they did not want God to use them to reach the lost for His glory then they would have to leave. One girl did. I saw her through the sliding glass door a little later crying. Appearantly she was trying to get out of the house but she couldn’t. The Holy Ghost would not let her.
She said, "I kept saying, ‘I gotta get out of here. I gotta get out of here’ but I couldn’t." She showed up back on the porch weeping. She recommitted her life to Jesus, received deliverance and the Baptism in the Holy Ghost. Needless to say, she showed up back this week.
This week all the lost confessed their need for salvation and many were touched. To make a long story short, I left at midnight. I wanted to leave before the police shoed up. There were a half dozen young men rolling around on patio laughing and yelling under the power of the Holy Ghost. We could not get then to quiet down. The mother of the young men came out to try to get them quiet. Her nine year old son followed. We prayed for him and he hit the ground praying in tongues for the first time.
As Bill Johnson would say :Good stuff.
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I preached this last week on impartation. It is a subject that is addressed far to infrequently. Hebrews 6:2 and 2 Timothy 1:6 were my main Scriptures.
But I mainly told the story of Lonnie Frisbee. This guy got wacked by the Holy Ghost. After being radically saved, he got hooked up with Chuck Smith, who at the time had a nice church called Calvary Chapel and was curious about the hippie movement. Lonnie Frisbee came in and set the world on fire. Today the map of Calvary Chapel locations looks like this: 
Lonnie’s idea of church was a little too New Testament and not quite Greek enough for Calvary so he got the heave hoe. He wound up with John Wimber near the beginning of the Vineyard movement and now there are 800 of those.
Time went on and about 20 years later John Arnott’s Vineyard church began to have an outpouring when Randy Clark, another Vineyard pastor from St. Louis ministered. A few years after that 
a missionary couple from Mozambique visited. God turned their world upside down and since that day their ministry has planted 8,000+ churches in southeastern Africa.
Lonnie Frisbee was booted from Calvary. The Arnotts were given the left foot of fellowship by the Vineyard. The Bakers were unsupported from TSC.
See a pattern? If you really want revival you must decide in your heart that you want to be as popular as Jesus in Jerusalem, or Paul in Ephesus. If that is too abstract, become as popular as these folks.
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Here is the latest posting from a missionary team to Albania. They have been there seven years and the wife and mother of small children is dieing.
Lynette has begun to slip away from us. A few weeks ago when we learned that the cancer had begun in her liver we believed that it was at an early stage and that we would still have some time together. Since then, things have progressed very rapidly. 10 days ago a scan showed that cancer had completely taken over her liver and caused her liver to expand to fill most of her abdomen. Since then, she has begun to show signs of liver failure with these becoming acute in the last 48 hours. She is extremely tired, sleeping throughout the night and most of the day. She has begun to lose her motor skills; things like drinking out of a glass have become very difficult. She has spilled her water on herself many times in the last two days. It is becoming difficult for her to think and speak clearly. The doctors say that her time is now very short. Those who are planning to come and visit are accelerating their travel arrangements in hopes of arriving while she can still communicate.
We returned from the girl’s summer camp yesterday. The evening before we left Lynette gathered her strength and mental faculties to spend about one hour speaking to the girls about the end-of-life and preparation to meet our Lord. This was a beautiful time in which the work which God has done in Lynette shown out so clearly. Death is almost never talked about here in Albania and terminally ill people are not told that they are dying so we pray that Lynette’s testimony will help these young women to prepare for a Christian end to their lives.
We continue to be so grateful for the companionship of each one of you on this difficult journey. We have been so wonderfully sustained by you in so many ways. I asked your prayers especially for these last days and hours which we have with Lynette. Though we have known it was coming for a long time, the end has come suddenly and there are still many things which we would like to finish. Please pray that she will have at least a few hours of strength and clear thought and that we will use these moments well. Also pray that those who are coming to visit will arrive in time.
Pray for the children and I, and that we will have a sustaining sense of His presence. My eyes are full of tears as I write but I also have a strong sense of joy. The jewel which I have been privileged to hold a short time is slipping away from me, but I know that she will be held in far more worthy arms until we are reunited. I am so blessed in these days by her joy and her faith and her love. She is truly an icon of Christ to me which is sustaining me.
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Now, I am not putting down anyone called to the mission field. To pack up and move to a new locale, be it across the state or across the world, is a radical thing. But somehow, when I think missionary I think of Sumrall backpacking on a mule through Burma. Now please do not get me wrong. I have nothing but respect for those of you who have laid down all to follow the call.
But I read this article in Al Jazeera of all places. They talk about South Korean missionaries in Afghanastan. Now that’s radical faith. Didn’t they have to send that guy to France who admitted he got save 10 years ago to keep him from being killed?
I have written before about the United States abdicating its role as chief among missionary nations. In this case it makes sense. Americans are not exactly going to get the red carpet in the Middle East but still. I am provoked by this.
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