My Mission:

Engaging, Equipping, and connecting children and their families to their most strategic role in completing the Great Commission.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Global Growth

I want you to meet two very special people.



This is Tariku and Fré. I met them at our CMM staff retreat in    August. They are from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  Their passion is to mobilize the Ethiopian church.

Tariku shared that God is opening the eyes of Ethiopian churches to the role they can play in the Great Commission. As these believers start to see themselves as a mission sending force rather than as a mission field, God is calling them to begin church     planting among unreached peoples living within their own  borders.

Tariku and Fré believe that if they are going to mobilize the whole church, they will have to mobilize children and their families. They see great potential in launching Weave in Ethiopia!

Next Stop: Asia Pacific

 On November 29th, I will be heading to Asia Pacific for the Global Mobilization Consultation. I will be joining representatives from over 25 other nations. While there, I will be helping facilitate round table discussions on how we, the global Church, can better equip families to live with a God-sized vision. Tariku and Fré will be there with me, continuing the conversation about launching Weave in Ethiopia.

Up until now, we have focused solely on equipping North American families. God is expanding our ministry to include international training as we seek to launch Center for Mission Mobilization Hubs in other countries. Weave will play a big role in that. Our heartbeat is that all families, around the world, would be empowered to live out their unique role in God’s story. We've already been invited to South Africa and Thailand for 2014, and there may be additional trips that we don’t know about yet. This is a God-sized vision to see the task of the Great Commission completed and we see God leading the way.

In May, our team went to Bogota, Colombia and took our first steps toward international training.
I’m inviting you to partner with me again. Incredible opportunities lie ahead in Asia Pacific, and I want you to be a part of it. To partner with me, you can give online at mobilization.org/give.

Thank you for your part in  sending me to the front lines of  mission mobilization.

Monday, June 17, 2013

Pushing Through Fear with Purpose

There it is again. A deep, unsettled feeling creeps into my soul, wrapping itself around my heart.

The truth is, stepping into God’s purposes scares me. The vision is so grand that is seems vastly out of reach. It’s global, foreign and unknown. The unknown has never seemed like a wanted companion, especially when it affects the little lives I want to protect more than anything in the world.

A fear that God might call us to take big steps towards something later down the road can often paralyze us from making small, meaningful steps in the present. What if we start praying for the unreached? Will that mean God will one day call us to go to the unreached? If I teach my children about God’s love for all people, will that one day lead them to take risks for the Kingdom that an “ordinarily safe” life would never require them to take?

Embracing God’s purposes, His heartbeat to be enjoyed and worshiped by all peoples, is a process. A child must scoot before he crawls. He then learns to take a few wobbly steps, hands still raised for support, before he learns to walk and later run. Once he has learned to run confidently, earlier fears are erased. All that remains is the pure joy and exhilaration of the adventure before him.   
 
The children in our lives are watching us, learning from us. They are waiting to see if we will choose to scurry into a corner and hide from fear or if we will take bold, even if small, steps forward toward those fears. It is okay if we must first crawl before we learn to walk confidently. What matters is our children seeing us as people who use our fear to press into Jesus and fuel our passion to serve Him wherever He may lead us.

Be encouraged, even in your fear. We do not have to face it alone. Together, we are stronger. We can remind each other daily of our shared vision, both to see Jesus worshipped by all peoples and to see a generation of children loving and following Jesus all the days of their lives.


We at WEAVE are praying for you, trusting Jesus to do big things both in and through your family as you obey His voice saying, “Do not be afraid, for I am with you.”

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Against All Hope: Lessons from Abraham


I was walking through a back alley in Old Delhi, India. Electric wire twisted and turned above me like jungle vines. Street vendors stood in dark corners, trying to shade their raw meat from the blazing sun. Street children ran to and fro, some stopping to beg for any lose change we might toss their way before they ran off after their friends.

Pray as you walk. That was our instructions. But as the aroma of incense and human waste burned my nose and I watched a woman bow before a ceramic statue of Ganesh, an elephant with four arms, my heart shattered within me and words ceased to exist. All I knew in that moment was the most intense despair I had ever experienced in my life
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God’s unyielding passion for His glory and the excitement of being a part of His plan to redeem the nations had driven me to India. Yet, as the end of my third week in country approached, the heaviness of millions of people who had never heard the name of Jesus flattened my soul. Would another prayer for yet another person to hear and know Jesus really make any dent?

There are so many circumstances around us that can lead us to feel hopeless. Another school shooting, a beloved church family shattered by divorce, sick family members, neighborhoods wrecked by poverty. It’s all around us every day.

Abraham lived in a pagan world. He didn't know what Jesus would one day do. He had no track record of God’s character to read about. He struggled just to understand how he would start a nation still without a son of his own, let alone to see how God would bless all the families of the earth through him. Yet, against all hope, Abraham in hope believed.

Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’  Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised.Romans 4:18-21
There were no clear answers, no game plan to follow, no logic to rest upon. Yet Abraham, against all hope, IN HOPE, believed God would do what He said He would. Abraham faced all the impossibilities, yet he did not waver in unbelief. No, instead he was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what He had promised.

As our families engage with hurting and hopeless people in our neighborhoods, as we pray for far-away peoples who have no access to the gospel, we face soul-flattening discouragement. We can feel helpless in a giant world of need. Our children may feel it most, feeling too small to do anything that matters.

Knowing that the Savior of the world has indeed come, we can follow Abraham’s lead. We can demonstrate and pass on to our children a faith that is fully persuaded that God has the power to do what He has promised. He redeems. He restores. He saves.

And our families, though small in comparison to the world we are trying to reach, have the power and influence to make a difference…in the back alleys of India, in the suburbs of California, in the rural farms of the south. Why? Because in the end, it wasn't anything about Abraham that accomplished the promise God made to him. It was God himself, working through Abraham’s willing heart, despite human frailty and failures, to accomplish His purposes.

Friday, January 18, 2013

The Journey is here! January update

The Journey is here! Hear about this exciting new tool and how God is already using it around the globe!
Click here to watch now!