Week Four -- Biblical Ministry

Before I get into the teaching of this week, I want to talk about something YWAM Denver did last weekend. We had a 24 hour prayer room with live worship, which we called "Dwell." It was an amazing time spent with the Lord, where we got to soak in the Spirit-led worship led by different musicians part of YWAM Denver. Also last Friday night, two of my friends were healed! They received prayer because each of them had one leg shorter than the other, which was causing back pain, and the Lord grew their legs to the same length!!! Praise Jesus!

A collage of pictures my friend Sarah took from Dwell

So, I was especially excited for this week because our speaker was Donna MacGowan. Her husband Mark directed my Young People's Discipleship Training School last fall, and she is incredibly wise. So, I'm a huge fan. :) I love her practical teaching so much. I hope to apply everything she taught to my life!

The point of this week was to teach us how to do ministry well; how to minister to someone directly and by the Word of God. She shared life lessons and experiences that she learned the hard way, which I'm so thankful she was willing to share with us. How wonderful for my class to have the opportunity to glean from someone who has been in ministry for decades!

Here are some things I am taking away from this week :)

Tips in ministry:
   Listen more than you speak
   Open your heart to hurt with the person
   Voice your love for them
   Entreat the Lord together (pray)

"The process of change does not always look like progress." -Duffy Robbins
     This is important to remember, especially because the enemy so loves to attack us with discouragement and lies when we are in fact changing.

This is a really powerful video on how knowing Jesus reverses our thinking!
---> Reverse Thinking

Something Donna taught that relieved my heart a lot was that in ministry, it is not my job to:
-Heal the wound lightly     ~Jeremiah 6:14 & 8:6
-Set them free     ~John 8:32
-Convict of sin     ~John 16:8
-Judge (in a bad way)     ~Matt 7:1 & 7:16
      In judging a person, it is so important to NOT assume motives. "Just Ask" is something we say a lot at YWAM because so many conflicts can be resolved immediately by simply asking the person about it! If a person does or says something that offends you, the best way to deal with it is by the conflict resolution process set before us in Matthew 18:15-17. If we follow this simple process, most conflict will be resolved in that first step! :)

We looked a lot at the way Jesus did ministry because He is our ultimate model.
One thing we learned by doing this, is that it is vital to only do what the Father is doing. To be sensitive to what He is speaking to us. To not try to do things out of our own strength. I'm reading a book called Leadership Paradox, and I love this quote from it:

One principle alone guided Jesus' response to any situation: "The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases Him." By putting the Father's will above his own, Jesus dwelt in that serene place where ego, prestige, and position had no dominion (55).

"You cannot place the divine truths directly in someone else's heart. All that you can do is place them on the heart, so when the heart breaks, they will drop in." -Hasidic Proverb

In the same way that it's important for me to know what isn't my job, it is just as important to know what my job is:

-Know the Word     ~Hebrews 4:12 & 2 Timothy 3:16

-Lead the person back to God for counsel     ~John 14:16 & 26

-Help them in the job of sanctification     ~1 John 3:2-3

-Listen     ~Romans 10:8

-Invite them to see truth     ~John 8:31-32

-Pray for revelation     ~Ephesians 1:17-19

-Speak truth in love     ~Ephesians 4:15

-Ask God for wisdom     ~James 1:5

-Encourage     ~Hebrews 10:24

-Pray     ~James 5:16

In talking about God physically healing people, we don't want to miss emotional healing that needs to take place, too! We should be seeking the FACE of God more than the HAND of God.

There was much, much more that we learned on identifying problems often encountered in people's lives, and what the symptoms, origins, and solutions are. It was an incredible teaching, but too much to blog about! ;)

We finished the week with talking about boundaries in ministry. This teaching specifically was SO good to me because I've grown up in a ministry-oriented family and church. We identified that fear is actually what keeps us from setting boundaries. But we have to set them because it is what is most loving for us and the person we are ministering to.

Types of boundaries to set:

-Dependency boundaries--Be careful of needing to be needed and thinking that you're the only one who can help someone.

-Time boundaries--Don't tell people you're always available to them. That teaches them to depend on you instead of God. And, set a time boundary for how long you have a conversation.

-Place boundaries--Be wise! Think about the level of privacy, lighting, and the time of day.

-Topic Boundaries--Be wise about how much you share about your past/sin; our focus should be more on JESUS. Be willing to say something when the conversation becomes too intimate. Remember: intimacy is not always physical. It's okay to say, "I don't think I'm the person for you to be sharing this with."

A key to setting boundaries is setting them before you need them. :)

Thankful for a great week of learning about ministry and the opportunity to immediately put it to practice!

Week Three -- Peace Under Pressure

What a powerful week... I'll attempt to convey how impacting it was! ;)

Our topic of the week was "Identifying the Pitfalls of Leadership." The teacher was Doug Toller, who pastors a church in Winter Park, about two hours from our base in Arvada. He's an amazing man of God, who lives with incredible transparency and humility. Listening to his testimony and life experiences was really inspiring, and it has positively challenged me in so many ways.

One of the main purposes of this school is to train us to be leaders who LAST; to develop our character and help us learn how to avoid the pitfalls that so many people in ministry sadly fall into. I heard the statistic that only 30% of people in ministry make it through life without huge moral failure. And so many of those things could have been avoided by making simple changes early on. Most of the time, people fall away from the Lord because of pressures, not theological issues. So, the heart of this week was to identify the pitfalls of leadership and have peace under pressure.

The areas of pressure we covered were:
-Pressure of Confrontation
-Pressure of Personal Surrender
-Pressure of Compromise
-Pressure of Popularity
-Pressure of Liberalism
-Pressure of Being Misunderstood
-Pressure of Constant Resistance

There is good news! Romans 5 reveals that God has a purpose for us in times of pressure and that is the development of Christ-like character! :) Praise Jesus for that.

A couple things I'm taking away from this week are:
~My beliefs and convictions need to be based on Scripture alone, not feelings. This seems obvious enough, but life would be a lot different if Christians actually did this. There were several moments this week that Doug taught a truth that seemed uncomfortable, but every time someone would object, he'd say, "Well, that's not what I said. That's what the Bible says here."  It was great. It becomes easy to compromise truth when you get into the emotional realm.
~I need to embrace correction because it develops character. I think the church generally shies away from correcting people because we live in a society where people are SO easily offended. They view correction as rejection, instead of seeing it as a way to improve their character and become more Christ-like.
~I was also really challenged to start memorizing more Scripture. I was blessed to go to private Christian school my whole life, so I did this a lot out of necessity (for Bible class and memory verse quizzes). But I've been really excited to start doing this out of desire and a longing to fill my mind with truth. 2 Corinthians 10:5 says to "take every thought captive to obey Christ." This is because the enemy loves to feed us lies, so we have to be ready to capture those thoughts and refute them with truth from God's Word. Even when Christ was led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit for 40 days, the devil used Scripture to test Him! It's easy to manipulate Scripture by taking it out of context. We as Christians should literally train for times like this, so that we know the context, and know what the Word really says in times of struggle and temptation.

I'm incredibly thankful for this week and all that I learned about avoiding pitfalls in ministry. I'll carry these lessons with me throughout my whole life!

Week Two -- Community

Wow, this past week was a full one!

We began our lectures with our teacher David Clark from YWAM Minneapolis. The topic he covered was Worldview, and his focus was on “the quest for community.” He covered a lot of church history, but his main point was that because God is a communion (the Trinity) and we are made in His image, we were designed to have community with other believers. And this is something that is really lacking in the church today, because we as a society lean toward individualism, rather than the happy medium between individualism and collectivism. The pendulum always swings from one extreme to the other! We talked about different things that have influenced our individualism, and what we can do as followers of Jesus to show people genuine community. I really believe that community is one of YWAM's not-so-secret successes, because people get here and feel like they were created for this kind of living; where people are real with each other and love each other where they're at. It's a beautiful thing.

David Clark teaching my class

Friday night I had the opportunity to go to Kingdom Night, which is a night of local outreach that YWAM Denver does weekly. I went two times during DTS, and they were really cool. But this time just took it to a whole other level. About 50 of us drove to downtown Denver, and we always start the night with some worship and prayer at a church.  From there we split up into smaller groups. My group had 6 people total, 3 of them I just met. The plan was to meet back at the church at 10 pm. So we headed down to 16th Street Mall, each team going to whatever spot God led them to. We started out playing some worship songs, which was good. But I think we were all kind of bummed that we weren't having some insane experience. Little did we know what was about to happen ;)

In about the middle of our time singing, a group of adults walks by us. The guy sitting next to me, Anthony, saw them and says to us, "I think I know that guy." But he's from Oregon and didn't think it could possibly be him. Well, at almost 10 o'clock right as we are about to get up to leave, the group walks right next to us, and sure enough, Anthony realizes it really is this guy he knows from Oregon! The guy finds out we are YWAMers and says, "YWAM and I go way back." I didn't know what he meant by that at the time. So all of this group leaves except one guy, by the name of Chris, who sits down and starts asking us all kinds of questions (with a lot of casual swearing). :)

"So, what are you guys doing here?"

"You just come out here to talk to people?"

"No, really, why are you here?"

"You have no agenda?"

He then found out we love Jesus, and you could feel some tension. But he was curious why Jesus would have anything to do with why we were there. So this girl Kimberly in my group starts sharing her testimony about how she shouldn't even be here since she tried to commit suicide earlier this year. Jesus totally saved her life, and the doctors told her that half the pills she took should have killed her. But Jesus saved her! And so she was led to YWAM, and she is just sold out for God and telling people about how they can have a relationship with Him.

Chris was visibly moved at the several testimonies shared by my group. And he said, "You guys know what. While she was speaking, I looked around this group, at each of you, and looked into your eyes. And you guys....you are real. You really believe it." Turns out he's the CEO of a brewery in Oregon, and he was so astounded that our faith was genuine! We didn't just come out there to bash people over the head with a Bible. We came out to give people some hope and just love on them in whatever way we could.

He thought it was the coolest thing that YWAM is all over the world and we just swarm the nations to serve people however we can. He just kept asking questions and kept reaching up to his head like he was mind blown. He said he felt like he was in a movie. Haha!

We talked to him for about half an hour, and then he said,

"Listen. You guys keep doing this. This makes a difference."

He gave each of us his card with his email address. So Chris leaves, and Anthony starts to tell us about how the guy he knew in the group, is actually a YWAM kid. They're families are really close. Apparently this guy's parents were some of the first YWAMers to go to China, but he has really fallen away from God. So that night he was reminded of YWAM and how God still loves him like crazy!

AWESOME.

So, we just happened to go to Kingdom Night.
Anthony almost didn't go because he had homework.
We could have chosen any spot along a long strip mall.
And these guys who are from Oregon just happened to be in Downtown Denver at the exact same time.
None of this was a coincidence.
Talk about a Divine Appointment.

Week One! Bonding.

Well, week one has just come to a close! :)

I flew out early Monday morning after a not-so-great three hours of sleep and was picked up at the airport by some staff here from YWAM Denver. That Monday was mostly registration, getting unpacked, and settling into our rooms. I have five fantastic roommates! We get along great and spend a lot of our free time together.

Between my lack of sleep and the change of elevation, I wasn’t feeling good at all that first night. I went to bed just thinking to myself, “Okay, why am I here?” The next morning I woke up feeling the same discouragement. But that day, God just affirmed that I AM supposed to be here, and He’s with me every step of the way. We have had beautiful worship times and teachings on fundraising, intercession, and the flow of worship.

My school started having sessions, and our director was able to share his heart for our class. My director is Mark Davies, and his wife Maritza is my small group leader.

This school is all about growing your character and becoming a leader in ministry who lasts. Mark said it breaks his heart to see people, who have been in ministry for years, end up succumbing to junk the enemy throws at them. He also shared a very sad, sobering statistic that only 30% of people in ministry make it through without a huge moral failure.

Mark talked about the importance of being able to learn from anyone. No matter who it is, you can learn from people. Ask good questions. Glean wisdom from the things people have gone through. He also joked about how our School of Ministry Development (SOMD/Phase Two) is also called the School of Mastering Death and Weeping. Haha!

We went over class homework and projects we will be doing, such as public speaking, creating a “Vision Project,” and organizing a mock outreach to another country.

I know that the next three months will be challenging, rewarding, and worth it!

I’m so thankful for your prayers. Keep em up! :)

Enjoyment or Idolatry?

It's been five months since I graduated from DTS, and I’m officially on the countdown until I go back for a secondary school. 74 Days!

I've had an amazing time being back in ministry with my family, doing worship at churches and going to do prison ministry together. Every time I can hardly contain all the joy!

Something I've noticed lately is the barometer, or the temperature gauge inside me, constantly monitoring my relationship with the Lord.

There have been some moments since I've been home where I felt like I’d been a little bit stagnant in my growth in God. I knew something needed to happen, and I knew it was something I needed to do.

Then I read this...

"When we don't care if an enjoyment is making us more holy, we are moving into idolatry." ~John Piper

Hmm. Okay, I'm guilty. ;)

When I read this quote, I thought, "Ouch." It felt like a slap in the face, but in a good sense in that it got me back to thinking about all the things I might enjoy but aren't necessarily good for me. I started thinking about movies, music, even food. How often do I do something without thinking, "Does this please God?" Without even pausing to question, “Is this pushing me TO or pulling me FROM God and His plans for my life?”

I know, there might be some people who are thinking, "Come on, isn't that a little legalistic?"

Well, from what I have seen, I think that the church has gone from such strict rules, to nearly the polar opposite of encouraging people to do whatever makes them happy because “God loves you where you're at.” Yes, rules and commands have their place, and yes, God does love us no matter what.

However…

I think some people have succumbed to the idea that they can "follow Jesus" without making changes in their life post-salvation. Many in our society are so easily offended that correcting certain behaviors or calling them on sin would be taken as a direct insult to who they believe they are. But as the Bible says, "You shall know them by their fruit.”

Fruit.

The best proof of Jesus being alive and real is Him being alive in and through us, right!? That can't help but result in a changed life. I don't know if it's possible to have a radical encounter with Jesus and not want to change some things in your life.

Will it be easy? No, probably not.

Will it be worth it? Absolutely.

I believe God wants us to daily assess our hearts, minds, motivations, and growth according to His Word; to live in a state of learning and becoming the most outstanding example of Himself that we can possibly become.

That John Piper quote has just stuck with me. I couldn't help but think about it for weeks afterwards. So naturally, I started to think about those things that aren't growing me in my relationship with God. I've stopped listening to secular music whenever I’m driving, which I was doing quite a bit. Since then, I can honestly tell a difference in my thoughts and attitude throughout the days. I've also changed the way I eat, even though I was already conscientious about putting healthy food in my body.

"If it stops you from getting closer to God, then it needs to go." ~Unknown

I can truthfully say that I feel like these changes have really grown me and helped me grow in my relationship with the Lord.

I encourage you to just think about what those things are in your life that you know aren't helping you. Pray, and I mean really ask God, about what needs to change. What I changed might not be what you need to, and I don't think I'm done making changes. But I can tell the Lord is drawing close to me as I choose to be closer to Him.

Yes, it is worth it.

He is worth it.

Moments Like These

A couple weeks ago, I heard the very sobering message that a man by the name of Kenny passed away due to a motorcycle accident. He was instantly gone, and his wife was left behind... nine months pregnant. My family didn't personally know Kenny or Paige, but many of our friends did. Needless to say, our hearts were broken for this family. Paige had their first baby, a little boy named Liam, just days after Kenny passed away.

It's been amazing to see the body of Christ come together to support Paige and her son by starting fundraisers and such to raise support for them.

Every little bit adds up, so if you can, please donate here: Pellanda-Nair Family Fund

It's also our responsibility as brothers and sisters in Christ to keep this family in our prayers.

Pray for peace, comfort, strength, and added faith.

Moments like these are hard to understand... They can stir up confusion, but they can also stir up faith if we press in more instead of wanting to crumble and give up.

I know that God will never leave nor forsake us. He promises us so.

I know that He is always good.

I know that His plans are better than ours.

And I believe that.

Fall Afresh

First, click this link, and watch the video.

Fall Afresh~Bethel Music ft. Jeremy Riddle

I don't know about you, but this song puts me at complete ease despite whatever is going on; it fills my heart with joy.
I love the fellowship this video displays. God is such a good God for giving us beautiful people to do life with. He created us with the intention of us being in relationship with Him and others so that we never have to feel alone. Isn't that so good?
My prayer today is that the Holy Spirit would fall afresh on each of us. That today wouldn't just be another day. That He would re-ignite incredible, fiery passion within us to know Him more and lead others to do the same. Time to show extraordinary love. Build new relationships. Talk to people. Share what Jesus is doing in your heart and the lessons you're learning.
You never know how much what you say impacts other people... It might even change their life.