Well, I did it again! I missed a month. I realize even more that God is both faithful to care for us and that I need to be faithful in communicating our prayer needs. There is the reality of God meeting our needs as He does for the sparrows and lilies of the field. There are also the realities of the power of unity in the Body of Christ, our need of one another, the way that God wants us to partner with Him and with each other in prayer, our specific call to help bridge the gap between the US and Europe, etc. So, with renewed purpose, here I am again to communicate with you!

What's happened...

To tie in a bit with what I mentioned last time, here's what's transpired in the last two months:

• Marriage Ministry - Angela and I met with the leadership of the church here to discuss our experience with the LAM Marriage Workshop and to try and figure out "what's next?!" This was very positive. There's a desire on our part and on the part of the leadership to move forward with bringing this workshop here but significant hurdles remain. More on that below.
• Church Building Purchase - Well, we thought it would happen in May but it looks like the final hurdles have finally been surmounted and it will happen in early July. Apparently, France is on of the countries with the longest mean-time for the changing of hands of property - an average of 90 days (compared to New Zealand's average of 4!). Welcome to French bureaucracy! (You can see a brochure created last year for fund-raising with some of the vision that we have for the use of the building in this PDF)
• Intercession Seminar - This was, I believe, a significant week of training on intercession here in France. More than just this particular week, however, was the whole intercession school. I don't have permission to distribute the teachings from the week I attended, but I have the teachings from another week in this school, where Martin Scott was the teacher. I'll be posting these soon on my blog. This is powerful stuff that helps to equip the Church to really take redemptive possession of the lands that God has put them in. They are in English translated into French, so if you want to work on your French at the same time, they'll be ideal. Hopefully I'll have these up in the next week or so.
• Finances/Work - I mentioned that I had completed my work at the end of April for a client of mine. My "retainer" ended at that time, but I've been involved since then in helping them with crises and getting new IT help in place. I put the end of June as the deadline in which I'd not be able to help them any more at all. That seemed to finally light a fire under them and I look forward to that being off my plate permanently. As I mentioned before, this "giving up work" is to prepare more space in our lives for what we see God doing in the near future, and it comes at a time when it doesn't make much financial sense. Both of those aspects are STILL true! ;-)
• Nuclear Plant - The time of praying at the Fessenheim nuclear plant was excellent! I think that it signals a new season for intercession efforts here in Alsace - from a season of
  "claiming the territory" (marked by various prayer walks, etc.) to occupying and stewarding the territory. This new season is marked by taking responsability in intercession for what transpires in the land that God has given us to steward and by further injection into the different spheres of society.
• Annual School Fete - Since 2006, I've been coordinating the sound at the end-of-year celebration at Collège-Daniel, the school we volunteer at. We've always seen God at work in this effort and have had a significant sense of accomplishement and satisfaction with the results. Unfortunately, it's also a HUGE stress and enormous energy drain on me. I simply don't handle it well and have not looked forward to it for the last few years. I'd expressed my desire last year to hand it off and worked on documenting the tasks involved. I got some significant help last year, but it was also the most complex year ever. This year, it looked like my pleas for help would again be for nought, but with two weeks to go, our pastor's wife arranged with one of our young men to completely take over the coordination. He was not well-versed in sound tech activity so I still had some involvement, but through a team effort that involvement was clearly limited and I enjoyed a fete-prep week unlike any I've had here and the day of the fete was really special for me...capped off by the ability to dance the night away with Angela because I wasn't tired and I didn't have any responsabilities afterwards either. Really a magnificent blessing from our Heavenly Papa and a chance to work as a team with younger folks (16-25 yr olds) and one great older guy, Rusty Richards, to create a day that hopefully wasn't too heavy on any one person. I'm a slow learner about teamwork, but it's certainly a fabulous thing!
• Language School - Don't know if I've mentioned this or not before, but there is a vision among several of us here to actually create a language school (intially teaching French but also later to teach other languages to the French!) Not enough space to go into detail on that, but one of the things that's happened in the last two months is that the language school has gotten some feet! The pastor's son is a young budding entrepreneur with amazing business savvy and administration skills...and I think he's all of 24 years old or something like that. Anyway, he's taken the baton from all us clueless visionaries and created a business plan, we've begun the process of advertising and at the moment it appears that the first section might actually start in October! So, if you're thinking about learning French or have a French-speaking part of the world on your heart, feel free to contact us about that and we can get you the details.
• Sozo Training - Angela and the small, 4-person Sozo team here have conducted some initial training to others who are interested in doing the ministry as well, and have had follow up meetings with with the trainees recently. All this is to expand the ministry and enable more people here experience real healing of deep wounds that they've simply lived with all their lives. This takes quite a bit of extra time on the part of Angela and the others, but the demand for Sozo sessions has been growing and with only 4 people, they can't keep up. So, it's a ministry that is crucial and must multiply and the groundwork is being layed now to multiply it.
• New Computers - Last week we tossed out 20 old machines at school and next week we're receiving a donation of 20 newer machines. I've enjoyed working on upgrading our infrastructure to something more robust and capable. To me it's a sign of a new day!

What's coming...

Good question! Man, if I knew the answer to that...;-)

Anyway, Angela were talking and praying recently and we both felt that this coming school year (yes, I know we JUST finished the last one!) is a year when we expect to see first fruits of many different things that God has been stirring in our community here:

• A real, beginning House of Prayer here
• Expanded Sozo ministry (larger teams, maybe in the school here)
• Language School
• Creche (Nursery School) ministry
• Expanded Clothing and food bank ministry
• More developing youth worship teams
• Band/orchestra ministry
• Marriage ministry (creation of a team to get the ball rolling)
• A finished, functioning building as an outreach tool

This summer we don't have much planned so we're really looking forward to preparing ourselves in more extended times of worship as we believe that our authority to act in this season will be directly connected to the level of intimacy we have with the Lord and with each other.

Please pray that we advance significantly in our level of intimacy with the Lord and with each other this month. This will be KEY for an active year ahead!