Seek Serve Follow - on the road

Last week I spoke at the first two of a seventeen date tour spreading throughout the rest of this year that will be raising awareness of Seek Serve Follow.

Seek Serve Follow is an exciting discipleship course that Viz-A-Viz Ministries has produced alongside Girls’ Brigade England and Wales. The purpose of Seek Serve Follow is to encourage and equip Girls’ Brigade leaders to become closer followers of Jesus thus enabling them to become more effective in reaching girls and young women with the gospel.

Both events were really encouraging with a really positive response and level of interest from leaders attending. Please pray that this initiative will play a significant role in helping many girls and young women to know Christ in the coming days.
http://www.girlsbrigade.org.uk/html/ssf.html

I also spoke recently on the east coast at Skegness at the Salvation Army East Midlands Area gathering. Several hundred attended the rally and I was able to speak about the power of changed lives in communicating the message of Jesus to people today.

The response was incredibly enthusiastic and I spoke with many regarding their commitment to take steps forward in making Jesus known.

As well as travelling and speaking, over the past few days I have been at meetings considering the development of Arise, our children’s ministry in partnership with Girl’s Brigade. It is our intention to begin 100 new ‘ALF’ clubs that will enable children with no knowledge of church to discover Jesus and become his followers. We are currently exploring partnerships with churches and denominations across the country to establish these clubs. Please pray that God opens the right doors!
http://www.ariseministries.org.uk/

This week I will be at Optimum training speaking to our first and second year students about such things as Hero’s of the Faith, The Spread of the Gospel by the Early Apostles, and even taking them out onto the streets to engage in personal evangelism!
http://www.optimumgapyear.org/

On Sunday I will be preaching locally in Billericay and then off to Northern Ireland for the second leg of the Seek Serve Follow tour and in the midst of all this there are some hugely exciting developments in the United States. I will keep you in touch!

Adventures in America

Somebody said to me recently that receiving my blog is a little like receiving an annual newsletter! I have to agree with them and apologise that once again it has been an age since I last blogged – I will try to get better at this!

I thought you might be interested to know about a few things I have been involved in recently.

A good chunk of my time over the past couple of months has been spent overseas. Back in February I was in Virginia at the 21C Evangelism conference.

It is a thrill to be working with the Baptist General Association of Virginia on ‘Causing Heaven to Celebrate’. A key aspect of this initiative is recruiting people who will engage in effective evangelism and 21C was a key part of this recruitment. The highlight of the conference for me was the evening when I had the privileged to speak to the conference regarding God’s passion for the lost. At the close of the evening the response was unquestionably God inspired. People were in the presence of God and kneeling, lying down, praying, rejoicing and weeping as they responded to God and connected more deeply with his heart for the lost.

Following a week back in England while I was able to spend some time with my wife Lynn and see something of Gregg, Scott and Amy, who are now pretty busy living their own lives, I then went back to the United States and on to South Africa where I was speaking at a number of Evangelism conferences.

Far too much happen for me to mention here but again some highlights:
at each conference I was speaking about how the church can reach out to people who have never been to church. The greatest memory for me from each of the conferences was the countless conversations I had with pastors and leaders following my sessions. It just seems like many of the people I spoke with actually got it and began to really understand the need for the church in the United States to do things differently in order to reach people outside of the church. I was also able to follow up on some exciting possibilities regarding long term partnerships.

An interesting development during the trip was a visit to ‘LifeWay’ (The publishing house for the Southern Baptist Convention). Of all the times for my suitcase not to arrive at the airport and for me to have to make a visit without being able to shave or even bring the resources that I had with me this was not the best one!

Further in spite of all this I had a great time at LifeWay and was able to speak at some length regarding ‘More to Life’, a combination of DVD training and an enquirer website that can help churches to reach out to the unchurched.

Following our meetings I submitted a proposal to LifeWay regarding their publishing ‘More to Life’ in the US. I should hear back from them by the end of April. This would be an exciting development and could be significant in helping many churches to reach out to the unchurched.

Following my time in the United States I then went straight on to South Africa to speak at the Baptist Union of South Africa National Evangelism Conference. Again my theme was helping Christians to reach the unchurched. As in the United States I spent much of my time speaking with pastors and leaders following my sessions.

My activities for the period since then will (hopefully) be in my next blog which will be posted soon!