Over the past year or so I have been gradually getting out on to the internets, and attempting to network with other church planters and such through blogs and twitter.  I have also become more and more involved in facebook.  There are some that might look on these things as time wasters but they have been instrumental in planning this scouting trip.

Through facebook I contacted my cousins in Calgary, who graciously agreed to put us up for a couple of days.  Through facebook I reconnected with an old old friend, Tom, from High School – who just got back from a mission trip to Chile and is part of a church worship team in Lethbridge.  They also agreed to let us crash at their house.  Through blogs I met the Wilks‘ in Medicine Hat, and through twitter I made arrangements to spend the night at their place.  Through my long-time blogging relationship with Greg we have another place to stay in the Lethbridge area.  The only accomodation I didn’t use social networking for was my sister’s place in Edmonton.  I just called her.

I hope that even more opportunities will come of this, as I would like to meet some other local church planters and people like that in come of the other communities we are looking at.

So if you read this blog, you may well be one of them.

Heh.  Don’t worry.  We aren’t asking for money (yet!)  At this stage, we would like to build a base of prayer support.  If there is one thing to be learned from Philip and Beth’s experience with Community of Hope, it is that prayer support is one of your most important weapons.

Given the next big thing on our agenda will be a scouting trip to Alberta in March, now would be a great time to get prayer warriors interceding for us.  We will have a very significant decision to make in looking at a target community, culture, and people.  We will need wisdom and discernment, and we will also be begging God to make our sight clear and unclouded by our own selfish preferences.   We will also need prayer to direct us to those who we need to talk to locally, or even those who God wants to talk to us.  There are so many things that could come out of this trip, but we desire God’s handiwork to be all over it, and that takes prayer.

To that end, we are now compiling a list of people who would like to receive an emailed monthly newsletter updating them on our journey, and outlining our current prayer needs.  I have a number of people on a list now, but I haven’t actually asked them if they’d like to receive this prayer newsletter.  So, to that end, I want to ask all of our readers here if they would like to sign up to receive it.  If you come here and read this blog, then you already have some interest in our endeavours.  All we are asking for is that you consider committing to praying for us – daily, weekly, as often as you can, with a focus on our current needs.  If you would like to receive this newsletter, please sign up by dropping your email in this handy-dandy newsletter signup below.  Note, this is different from the email sign up on the right.  That one is to have the blog posts emailed to you instead of having to surf here on the internet.

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Issue 1 will be emailed in early February, and every month after that.  Thanks again, and God bless you for your interest!

But yes, that’s the big news.  We’ve set a week aside now.  March 22-28 we will be touring through the five cities (Spruce Grove, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Okotoks and Cochrane) we are considering for our church plant.  The really cool thing is that we have local ministry leaders we can meet with in two already, and I am hopeful we can meet with someone in each city to get the lay of the land from people right in there already.

Last night I had a very interesting conversation with Jason Wilks, who just started Pathway Church in Medicine Hat.  He had all kinds of things to say about his church planting experiences, and what’s been his challenges where he is.  He is also connected to a number of other pastors in various towns we are looking at so we may be able to mine him for more contacts to speak to.  It’s all very exciting to me, to network and try to congeal the best path forward.  (And yes, I meant to use the word “congeal” to what I want to do with a path!)

But I have a request of you, our readers.  Please make an appointment to pray for us both leading up to that trip and while we are gone – for safety, for discernment, and for God to reveal his will for us.

BC has been getting a record snow fall this year. We have broken records set in 1964. Shane and I have been shoveling snow. I shoveled twice and Shane has done it more than that. The snow just wouldn’t stop falling. It is now raining and it is nice to hear the water rushing down the gutters finally. We hardly saw any snow plows on the road which meant getting anywhere was difficult. I can’t remember ever seeing this much snow in such a short period of time…. probably because I wasn’t around in 1964.

This year was Dannan’s first Christmas. He enjoyed checking out the Christmas tree in the weeks leading up to the big day and loved to play with the non-breakable ornaments. He needed a few reminders to leave the lights alone but for the most part he was very good around the Christmas tree. As for gifts, he had no clue what to do about the wrapping paper. We tried to interest him in the ripping sound to get a picture or two of him opening his own presents but it didn’t happen. He wanted to see the presents that his brothers had already opened. Once his presents were opened though he quite enjoyed his brothers showing him how they all worked. I think Dannan enjoyed his first Christmas even though he didn’t have a clue what was going on. I wonder how he’ll be for his first birthday in January?

In other news, I finished reading the Bible finally. I finished just before Christmas. I started reading it in January a week or two before Dannan was born. I got busy doing my coursework and took the Summer off from reading. I finally got back into it this Fall and completed it. I don’t know for sure how many weeks it took me to read it but what counts is that I started in January and finished before the next January. I’m pleased with that.

After I finished reading the Bible I needed something else to read so I asked Shane what he would recommend and he suggested “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist” which was interesting. It makes me want to read more apologetics books. Usually any books that Shane recommends are written in such a way that I want to pull out a dictionary but this book wasn’t written that way and I actually understood and enjoyed it. The book took only a couple of days for me to chew through and now I’m onto another book.

The one I’m reading now is “Discipling Our Nation”. I’m about halfway through and while I don’t find it as interesting as the apologetics book I do find the statistics regarding churches in Canada quite fascinating. I’ll write more about this book later as I came across something last night that I found intriguing and want to discuss later on.

Last Saturday we got a call that my grandfather had two strokes in quick succession and was now in intensive care at the University of Alberta Hospital.  We quickly made the decision to travel to Edmonton in our minivan, risking wintery conditions in the mountains and spending money we don’t really have to be with my family and my grandfather in a time of crisis.

He’s an 84 year old World War II veteran, and proudly independent.  I knew he would take this hard.  But I also had some concern because while I know he grew up Catholic, and I know his second wife was a devout 7th Day Adventist, I don’t know if he ever truly made faith in Christ his own.  I also knew that I wanted to see him again, if these were his final hours.  I haven’t seen him since he moved to Alberta 2 years ago after Grace died.

God truly opened a number of doors for us to enable this trip, from providing financially for the expenses, to providing help to cover for us in our many responsibilites, to providing friends to take care of our two cats.  He cleared our path in front of us – we didn’t meet with any storms on the Coquihalla, and made it all the way to Revelstoke the first day, and even found a pet-friendly room for us all to bunk down in.

By Monday we were in the Hospital, and he was all hooked up to tubes and things.  He was unable to speak, the stroke having damaged the speech areas of his brain.

We spent a couple of days with Cheryl’s family in Red Deer, and then brought the boys the rest of the way to Fort Saskatchewan, to see my parents and brother and sister.  Friday I went back to the Hospital and saw Grandpa again.  He had improved again, but was groggy initially, and in considerable pain in his abdomen.  I prayed with my mother and him, and then we left him to sleep for a bit.  When we returned an hour or so later, he was much more alert than he had been and the pain was gone.  He wanted to go for a ride in the wheelchair, and we were excited to see him demonstrate his strength and mobility.  His coordination seemed very good in both hands, despite his still not being able to talk.

God definitely wanted to use us on this trip.  In Red Deer, we had a long talk with Cheryl’s grandmother and mother about churches and about why we do the things we do.  We had a great talk about honesty and transparency and community.  I think thay are typical in that most Canadians view church as something to do on Sunday, a quaint custom from a more superstitious time.  If they still even believe in God as a concept, they have never truly understood the kind of life that Jesus calls his followers to – a whole life of love and fellowship and support.

Then with my family, my grandfather, though he was limited in what he could understand, I believe he did get what I wanted to say to him, to just invite him to talk with Jesus as he recovered.  To remind him he doesn’t need to speak to speak with God and begin or renew that relationship once more.  At my parents’ house, we had several opportunities to talk with Steve, my sister’s husband, who claims a staunch atheism.  His inquisitiveness was enjoyable and revealed a desire to understand more about the faith we have.  I was very excited at the non-confrontational conversation and to learn that he had recently tried reading the Bible (to little success – he made the same mistake I did, starting in Genesis!)  I wish we lived closer so we could spend more time helping him to understand the message of the Bible and of the Word.  But it is a beginning.

Of course, I would be lax to not praise God once more for his watch over our travels home which we pushed through in one day – 14 hours of driving.  Strangely the cold weather followed us all the way to the coast – blowing snow and sub-freezing temperatures looked bizarre and prairie-like was we pulled in our driveway here on the coast.  It’s supposed to stay this cold for at least a week too!

Abstract: If you’re an Awana Commander, I highly recommend it.  Great teaching, great application, great networking.  Downside: Information overload.

The event was held at Camp Stillwood, a really nice retreat/camp destination in the Columbia Valley, up behind Cultus Lake.  I’ve been there several times before for Men’s retreats with Cedar Grove Baptist Church, but this one was slightly longer, so more enjoyable.

The main speaker was Dr. Greg Carlson, who has been involved with Awana for decades along with his wife, Donna.  He wrote the book that Awana promotes, “Rock-Solid Teacher“.  The local Awana missionaries, Harvey and Lil Fehr also spoke.  All four of them, along with one of the local Awana commanders, Karen Quan, were quite good – engaging and passionate about their subject matter.

The material covered was very in-depth, about the philsophy of children’s ministry, the importance of presenting the gospel to children, the importance of protecting the children from abuse, and many other subjects.  It certainly gave me a much better vision for children’s ministry.  I found myself renewed with enthusiasm for doing my job well and serving the children, their families, and the leaders I am leading.

I don’t have a lot to complain about.  However, I will raise a couple of beefs.  First, in their lesson on child protection, they used a short video, a series of monologues which were meant to express forcefully the ravages of an abuse situation – how it impacts the church, the family, the abused, and the community.  However, at its end, the video pinned the blame for not reaching the lost of the community on the failings of the club to keep an abuser from abusing.  This is an unfair framework.  To suggest that because the church is rocked by this trauma, they stopped evangelizing the community, so people died in their sin, never hearing the gospel, that this is the church’s or the Awana Commander’s fault?  That is way too much.  People die in their sin not because someone fails to tell them about the gospel, but because they have heard the gospel, and have no excuse for their ignorance of God.  If they didn’t hear it from that church, then it came to them in another form, and they rejected it.

Another issue I had was with the intensity of the weekend.  There were so many sessions, and there was little time to reflect and process what was learned.  On the plus side, I have never experienced a conference with such a vested interest in retention for the attendees.  They built into the program all kinds of opportunities to note down takeaways and direct application.  At the end of the process they even had us write letters to ourselves highlighting the most important things we don’t want to forget from the conference.  However, I would have relished more time for reflection on the content I was downloading, if for no other reason than to think through some of the issues I have in particular and how their information changes how I see them.  I mean, from breakfast through to bedtime on Saturday, we were going for 12 hours straight!  That is intense for a learning experience.

I have written a lot above about what I didn’t like, but read that last paragraph again.  This was a very good weekend and I got a lot more out of it than the last conference I attended.  I attribute that to the organization and effectiveness of the speakers.  And the Word of God was the beginning and the end of their subject.

Plane seats booked, rides arranged. Bonus: Westjet will allow us to bring a stoller or playpen with us as “carryon” in addition to regular carryon! That should help.

Don’t expect any blogging to be done while we are down there though I am still hopeful I will get a few minutes on the computer here and there.

If you’re in the Surrey area over the next couple of weeks, our Sundays should be very interesting.  We’re having the leadership couple for our Freedom Session program starting this fall speak on July 26, about their journey.  Then, on August 2 we will have the guy who started “Catholics for Jesus” come and speak.  Apparently he has a heck of a story as well.  I will be sorry to miss these two weekends.