Friends and family,
In this upcoming holiday season, Emily and I are reminded of how fortunate we are to have your support, encouragement, and prayers to come alongside us in our ministry in Boston. To say thank you is such a small statement to convey a greater feeling of love and thankfulness. Suffice it to say that we are extremely grateful in your faithfulness to pray for us.
Read below for updates from last month’s prayer requests:
1. Business Trick or Treat
This past Halloween was far more than celebrating a cultural holiday but was instead an amazing time to meet and serve our community. We served over a thousand people! We met local families and their children, invited those in our community to our upcoming winter festival in January, passed out information about our church, and deepened relationships with the local YMCA director and staff as well as with our friend from Brighton Main Streets (who orchestrated the Business Trick or Treat event). It was a fantastic day in the community, not to make our church’s name known but to ultimately make the name of Jesus known in Brighton. People in our area are beginning to recognize the name of “City on a Hill Church in Brighton” from community service projects we do and our movies in the park from this past summer. However, we have no desire for the “nice” things we do to be seen as more important than the God we serve. Please continue to pray for an abundance of opportunities to explain why we do what we do.
2. An Opportunity to Preach on a Sunday Morning
Each opportunity to preach is a reaffirmed call to start a church here in Boston and each opportunity is a training field to prepare us for weekly gatherings of our own church starting in less than a year. In the past month, I have had the opportunity to preach on Matthew 3:17-4:11 as well as lead worship with Emily at a local church plant’s very first preview service. It is a great honor to do what God has called me to do: to share the good news of Jesus from the truth of the Bible within a gospel-centered church in a city that is far from Christ.
3. City on a Hill Network Retreat
Emily and I moved fifteen months ago and immediately began a residency/apprenticeship with a local church called City on a Hill Church in Brookline, MA, which will end when we start our church in September 2019. This residency has allowed us to learn the intricacies of starting a new church in a post-Christian context like Boston. Yearly retreats like these re-center our focus on the good news of Jesus and challenge us in our faith. We “retreat” temporarily in order to regroup, cast vision, and take steps of advancement when we are sent out again. This network retreat was centered around gospel intentionality in everyday life. I had the opportunity to preach on how to be missional in the natural rhythms of our lives. It was a great weekend with our church and specifically our core team (8 separate family units) to strategize about the people we are called to, how to support one another in the ministry of natural rhythms in our lives, and how to challenge one another to be more dependent on Christ by taking steps of faith and action for the gospel.
4. Marriage Retreat
We believe that a foundational part of our ministry is our marriage and our family. If our marriage isn’t healthy, then our ministry won’t be sustainably healthy. With that in mind, the North American Mission Board’s gift of a short marriage retreat was timely and helpful. Emily and I had the opportunity to reflect on how our marriage has deeply grown since we’ve moved to Boston and in what ways we need seek God’s grace. We know that God’s strength is shown through the weaknesses in our marriage and that the strengths in our marriage show off His goodness and grace in our lives. Nothing in and of itself can be attributed to us outside of Christ and we pray everyday that our marriage would be a clear picture of the good news of Jesus and how He loves His people. We ask that you pray for us in that way as well and that we would build each other up with the truth of the gospel to love and serve each other in our marriage as Jesus has unendingly loved and served us.
Things to Pray for This Month:
1. Collegiate Conference
Emily and I head out today for a conference focused on college ministry and how to serve and love the college students we regularly have in our home. This conference is meant to encourage and equip us in the work we are doing on local college campuses. Pray for fruitful tools and resources to reach students. Also pray for continued reliance on the Spirit as we seek to bring the hope of the good news of Jesus into the lives of college for transformed hearts and minds.
2. Friendsgiving
This Friday, November 9 we will host a Friendsgiving to celebrate Thanksgiving early with our friends and neighbors. We will simply use the evening as a time to celebrate and spend time together over a good meal. Emily and I love our neighbors and are grateful for any time spent with them. Pray for many neighbors to come to our home to enjoy a meal together and tangibly see and feel the family and love that Jesus offers through us. We earnestly pray that neighbors and friends wouldn’t confuse our “morality” with the One we follow and that we will have many opportunities to share explicitly about the good news of Jesus.
3. Thanksgiving in NC
As a personal update, we are headed back to North Carolina for a brief visit over Thanksgiving. This will be K’s third visit to see our families and she will get to meet for the first time an aunt, uncle, cousin, and even her great-grandmother! K is intricately enmeshed in our lives and we love every part of it. Due to some appeals with her case, K’s official adoption into our family has been put on hold for at least another year unfortunately. This was difficult to swallow but we praise God that our day-to-day lives don’t change in the way we love and parent K. We eagerly wait for the day that we can legally call her our daughter. Whether “official” or not, she is certainly our daughter. Just last weekend on November 3, we celebrated our first anniversary of the day we met her! Please pray for her future adoption into our family as well as for Emily and I as we seek to parent in a godly way that shows K Jesus in every situation every single day. Our greatest desire is for our sweet girl to know Jesus herself one day and we pray earnestly to that end!