Greeting

Welcome to my first attempts at joining the blogosphere! I honestly never expected to be doing this. Not that I don’t read blogs, but my philosophy on them tended towards the quip below from despair.com:

However, a friend recently persuaded me to see the all the ways a blog and Facebook page could help me communicate about what God is doing in my life and especially my ministry. With than in mind, I’m jumping in. My priorities in these posts are the following:

1. Center the attention and glory on God above all.
2. Tell stories with substance.
3. Provide meaningful opportunities for readers to support our family and ministry.
4. Open a window into what God is doing to minister in the lives of the fatherless at Bethlehem Baptist and our communities.
5. Economy of words – as you can see in the posts below, that’s only a part-time priority (:

I’m setting the goal of two posts a month, so we’ll see what happens.  You can read the posts below for the back story to this blog. I’d recommend starting from the bottom post October 12, 2008: The Shake-Up to get the chronology right, but feel free to jump around.

If you have feedback for me, please let me know because I need all the help I can get! Thanks! God bless!

June 1, 2010 – Summer Contract Signed!

After two busy weeks of networking and searching for job opportunities for my summer break from seminary, I was amazed at what God had provided. A summer ministry position with Union Gospel Mission (ugmtc.org) came out of nowhere. Summer ministry positions are typically hard to come by, especially when your seminary classes end three weeks later than all the colleges. Because of this, I was spending most of my efforts with a temp agency and networking in the insurance world. rather than talking to ministries.

By the grace of God, I just “happened” to get pointed to Union Gospel Mission (UGM) by one of the leaders at the national Life Coaches for Kids® ministry. One of the contacts he gave me “happened” to be the leader of UGM’s initiative in Minneapolis, who I attended college with 10 years ago. He just “happened” to need a temp to hire person for the expanding Minneapolis ministry. He also just “happened” to have received approval to post the position a day ago, which meant it wasn’t an official opening yet. Knowing it could take all summer to find someone that way, he prayed about it and decided to propose changing the position to a summer-only contract with a view towards hiring someone else in the Fall.

Neighborhood BBQ hosted by UGM and partner Good in the 'Hood.

Bottom line: this 20 hour per week ministry opportunity in the inner-city is now a reality. My assignment is to help put together a strategic plan proposal for UGM’s work in Minneapolis and help with the UGM downtown ministry in Inner-city Minneapolis, among other things. This is a great opportunity to serve the poor by laying the foundation for ministries that touch the physical, spiritual, and vocational needs of the community...  all while learning from a gifted leader, and helping inner-city youth! Praise God!

April 13, 2010: Another Match Made!

Our newest mentor was just matched with a father-absent 3rd grader. When he met with his mentee for the first time, he discovered his mentee loved science and engineering activities. Since our mentor studies technology in the master’s program at the U, this was right up his alley. This was another evidence of God at work, since his mentee’s mother completely forgot to mention these interests on his application.

God recently raised up a group of 4 men as mentor candidates. Two more mentors are about to be matched. God willing, this will take our total of waiting kids down to 17 and raise our total number of matches to 17 as well!

The Opportunity of Life Coaches for Kids®

Here’s what motivates me to direct the Life Coaches for Kids® ministry at our church, and what motivates Lori and Howard, the two wonderful leaders who serve with me on our leadership team:

Life Coaches for Kids® targets father absent children who attend Bethlehem Baptist as well as children in the nearby community. Father absence is the leading indicator for almost every single social ill we know. Studies show that father absent children account for 70% of youths in prison, 72% of adolescent murderers, 63% of youth suicides, and 71% of high school drop-outs. It’s clear God has designed fathers to be an essential part of their children’s life.

Biblically, the place of a father in a family is critical. He is a unique provider, protector, and authority in the life of his kids. Fathers lead their family in a special way that can instill children with a sense of their purpose (for good or evil). Most of us know humble, Christ-centered fathers who have a profound influence on their kids and those around them. There is also a dark-side of father influence, however. It’s what happens when fathers reject their responsibilities, leaving a void in their vulnerable children’s lives. In Inner-city Minneapolis, where father absence is rampant in approximately 80% of households, many kids find refuge in the family of gang-life where many of the things they crave are provided. The gangs offer father-like protection, authority, material provision (usually through the drug trade), and a sense of purpose… all in violent and distorted ways.  Sadly this trend has been steadily moving into the suburbs and small towns over the years as our family cohesion continues to weaken.

One of our mentors enjoying a Twins game with his mentee.

Life Coaches for Kids® works to directly address the damage of father abandonment by introducing the voluntary embodiment of Christ-centered love in an adult mentor. We currently have 15 active mentors in the church with many powerful stories to tell. Another two are very close to being matched. We are hoping to make significant progress on the ambitious ministry goal of providing mentors for the 20+ children and youth on our waiting list. A major purpose of this blog is to promote and advance the work of God among the fatherless of our church and community!

One goal of this blog is to provide an easy way to make one-time donations to my financial need as an urban missionary.  Because I receive no salary from the church for my position, I raise financial support for the part time work I do as Life Coaches Director at the church (10 hours per week). Currently, I have a team of monthly supporters that meet about 55% of our monthly need of $1000 per month.  However, if 50 people give one-time donations of $15, that makes up almost all of the shortfall for two straight months! You can play an important role in finding mentors for father-absent children by being one of those 50 people. Just click here or on the sidebar where it says Give an Online Gift towards my Work as an Urban Missionary. Thanks for your consideration!

http://www.lifecoaches.org/

January 29, 2010: The Start of Missionary Life

Until entering seminary, I was serving as the Director of Life Coaches for Kids® at Bethlehem on a volunteer basis. But Julie and I were faced with a difficult decision. With the house sold, and most of the move into our rental home completed, I now had time to work. And I needed to work to give us any chance of making it financially through seminary. The question was should I leave Life Coaches for Kids® directorless? (After over a year of searching there was still no one on our leadership team that could take on that role.) There just wasn’t enough time to serve my family, work, do school, and lead a ministry. However, in the Fall, a new option emerged. A pastor at church recommended that I talk to the director of Bethlehem Urban Initiatives (BUI), an inner-city ministry of our church.

Link to BUI

I talked to the BUI director and found him very supportive of the idea of us working together. Most of the kids we find mentors for in the Life Coaches for Kids® ministry live in the inner city, so it was a natural fit. He proposed that I increase my hours from 2-4 per week as ministry director to 10 hours per week to help our team develop the ministry in new ways. I could do this by raising support as a part time urban missionary. This would allow me to expand the minstry instead of leaving it, and it would allow me to continuing serving father absent kids in the place of part time employment. I put in my application in the Fall.

On January 29, after a pair of interviews, we heard back from BUI. The board had made their decision. I was approved!

November 23, 2009: The Last Day at “Home”

One week before the expiration of the 2009 First Time Home Buyer’s Credit I was at the closing table with a happy young couple. After months of cleaning, painting, upgrading, landscaping, packing, organizing, hosting open houses, negotiating and navigating the for-sale-by-owner world of real estate, we reached the bitter-sweet final moments of home ownership.

Ironically, the day you leave your house, is the day it looks nicer than it ever has before!

God made it possible through the help of our wonderful friends at church, some pro-bono consultations from our neighbor and realtor Wayne, and what could only be described as God's sovereign hand in the selling process. Even with all the help, our house was still in a price range that was just a bit too high to be in the frenzied part of the market in Richfield, MN. We only had two showings in one month and less than five people at our two open houses. But by God’s grace, the second couple to tour our home hung in there for a second and third showing, and finally chose our place.

The closing went off smoothly, but now we had to deal with the move scenario. Multiple friends would be out of town on our moving date and another pair of friends were moving on the exact same date. However, God provided just enough people to help us move the whole household in one day with two little kids and a very pregnant wife – thank you Tina, Lisa, Matt, Howard, Alan, Dan, John, and Rochelle!

As expected, these months proved to be the hardest by far in our lives. A Thanksgiving spent worn-out and homebound, surrounded by boxes to unpack and papers to write was particularly difficult. But God was faithful to provide steady encouragement to keep our heads above water – and even A’s and B’s for final grades. As Isaiah declared, “they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles,” (Isaiah 40:31).

April 2009: Surprise!

My big question was answered in October 2008. But the questions of when and how to prepare for ministry took longer to sort out. By Spring of 2009, we both felt the coming Fall was the best time for me to start seminary. Full-time seminary looked like the best because evening classes would strain our family too much and likely cause the Life Coaches for Kids® ministry to end since I wouldn’t have time to lead it. A significant challenge for Julie was accepting that this would not be a good time to have another child with a move on the horizon and major career change for me.

She struggled for some time in the Spring, until she finally felt like she could let her desire rest with God. Ironically, one week after she came to peace about this, she noticed something wasn't normal. Sure enough, God had triumphed over common sense. We were now on the road to experiencing three major life changes in four months: new house, new “job,” and new baby!

As we were pondering our miracle child, we sat down to pray. A picture of a baby girl named Hannah came to my mind as we thanked God.

Now, I think we all have a number of meaningless random associations that come up at times like this. I assumed that’s probably what it was. That was until we sat down with Jeremiah for our evening Bible story-time. We had just finished Judges, so we turned the page to 1 Samuel 1, and of course, it was the story of Hannah and Samuel. We thought about the parallels, Julie surrendering her claim to have children immediately, and Hannah surrendering her claim to her firstborn, and we thought this was probably more than a coincidence.

Baby Hannah one month old, smiling for her grandma.

Eight months later, on December 14, a providential three days after my last final exam, a healthy Hannah Kristine made her first appearance. And maybe as a precursor to her successful survival with two brothers, she emerged from the womb in perfect shape in spite of her umbilical cord being wrapped twice around her neck. Praise God!

October 12, 2008: The Shake-Up

This was a landmark date for us. Our pastor, John Piper, interrupted his message with a last minute message God had impressed upon him just the day before.  His sermon focused on John the Baptist in John 1 and the implications of John’s ministry: (1) our calling is essential, (2) our calling involves the denial of ourselves. He broke from his notes to relay to certain people there who were wrestling with a sense of call from God that God had impressed the following message on him: “You can get off the fence. I’m calling you to this.” It rocked me.  This was the only time we have ever had a pastor interrupt a sermon with "a message from God" in our five years at Bethlehem Baptist.  That fact wouldn't have shocked me so much, except that I had been up till 3 A.M. just the night before, struggling in prayer with a strong sense that God wanted me to leave my job and begin training for pastoral ministry.

                                       Our artifact from the "Surprise Sermon."

This wasn’t the first time I had felt God moving me in this direction. During the summer, driving home from our families in Eastern Wisconsin, I prayed while everyone slept on highway 41 just outside of Oshkosh. A strong sense of need for more theologically deep, Christ-exalting churches in the leading cities of Wisconsin. I appealed to God to raise up more pastors to lead the church this way. Then to my surprise, a question popped clearly into my mind and stranger still it was addressed to me in the second person: “Have you considered whether you might be one of those pastors?” This happens to me on rare occasions, and usually includes insights that can only be attributed to God.  In this case, with the thought came a sense that I knew this is what God had been preparing me for over the years.

Over the following weeks, reasons to pursue pastoral ministry sprung to mind: Julie was interested, my missionary college and ministry experiences matched up well with pastoring, our family was doing well, and so on. By Labor Day weekend I thought I was ready to seriously explore this, so I set aside a morning to pray. The time came but in my enthusiasm to gain more confirmation from God I felt like I was only talking to myself. I asked God for grace to see what the problem was, and an awareness dawned in my mind.  Over the past two month I had begun to idealize the idea of church leadership. I wasn’t ready to think it through realistically. God’s message seemed to be:  "Don’t worry about it for a while… let go of your dreams and wait on Me.”

By God’s grace, I let it go and put it out of my mind for about six weeks. It was actually a relief as I started to consider more of what it would cost a family of four to pursue a mid-career call to ministry. I enjoyed many things about our situation. I loved leading the Life Coaches for Kids® ministry at church. Our finances were in good shape. And while I couldn’t say I loved my job in insurance, I knew there was still much to learn and co-workers who needed me to represent Christ in their lives. I happily put the whole idea of becoming a pastor on hold.

Then on Friday, October 10, I was praying the morning bus ride to work like usual. An idea popped into my mind that broke my focus: “This weekend would be a good time to pray about the pastoral ministry idea again.” It was a little unsettling, since I was starting to enjoy the status quo again. But it made sense. My romantic thoughts of ministry had been replaced by realism. It would probably be a good time to investigate the whole idea seriously. This might be God.

On Saturday at 10:30 PM, there was finally time to seek God.  When I started it seemed like a flood of affirmative reasons came to mind encouraging me towards the ministry. Then there was a surge of strong objections:  I'm too timid, I struggle too much with sullenness, I still get nervous in conversations with most people.  Then reasons not to be discouraged countered the objections, including verses like 2 Cor 12:9: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” The final outcome after four hours of wrestling in prayer was: God, I think you want me to do this, but if we go down this road and it’s a mistake, it’s going to be a big one. I need some strong confirmation whether the answer is yes or no. Please make it clear.

So the next day in church, October 12, I felt a bit groggy. I enjoyed putting aside all the thoughts about the future and resting in worship.  Let God confirm things in His own time.  I was happy to take a break from the internal debate.  You can imagine how it felt to hear our pastor interrupt the middle of that day’s sermon to say he had a special message to pass on to people in the congregation who were "wrestling with a sense of calling."  Julie and I were floored.  The next chapter of our lives had begun.