New School and Outreach Preparation

Here is the new DTS school!

For a week before the new school students arrived all of the staff were on base for staff training and preparing the base. There were 4 new faces from previous schools that joined the team that I have really enjoyed getting to know. I am living in a two bedroom house with 5 other staff guys and we are having a lot of fun, despite the cramped living conditions haha. I was also asked to lead the Revival stream with Morgan who was on my outreach team on my school.

We have an amazing staff team and they are doing incredibly well as servant leaders, coming under the students and raising them up both spiritually and physically. Things started off a bit slow and quiet but picked up and up and we are now at the halfway mark the fire is really starting to burn big and bright. We are seeing so much freedom and breakthrough both in the students and staff which is amazing to see and be a part of. Each staff member is assigned 1 to 3 1-on-1’s that we spend time with whether that be talking, praying or whatever else to help them grow and get as much out of their time here as possible. As I am a first time staff and also leading a stream I was only given 1 but what a privilege it has been to be a part of his life. Tim is an amazing Kiwi guy who has such a heart for God and is constantly blowing my mind with how open and driven he is. I even had the honour of baptising him at the beach one weekend.

The outreach teams have been announced and we are sending teams to Fiji, Rotuma (also Fiji), Philippines, Uganda and one team is staying in New Zealand. As much as I wanted to lead a team to one of these places (especially Rotuma as my birth family roots are from there) I have decided not to go and instead follow another path that God has put in front of me. I will be going on a staff outreach with two others (Douglas and Amber-Leigh) heading to Turkey for a YWAM 100 year ANZAC conference. Here is more information on the conference www.anzac2015.info. We will be at the conference for 5 days then heading over to Israel for 3 weeks to work with various organisations helping out where we can. We are currently in communication with our contacts there but are in much need of prayer for direction of what exactly God wants us to do in Israel and also funding for the trip. As I’m sure you are aware, being a full time missionary doesn’t pay very well… in fact we actually pay to do it and rely entirely on Gods provision from various sources whatever they may be. The three of us have worked out a budget of roughly $5,000 per person for the bare minimum and are starting fundraising for the trip which is in mid-May. If you aren't viewing this on a mobile device and would like to support us you will be able to see a paypal donate button on the right of the page. Donations can be completely anonymous through this if you wish.

On a more urgent note, the 3 of us need to book our air fares within the next 2-3 weeks which we still need roughly $8,000 to be able to book the flights.

I would really like to thank everyone who has been supporting me so far. Without you prayers and donations I wouldn’t be able to continue to do this amazing work for God.

Thank you all and God bless.

My DTS and Outreach

My DTS (Discipleship Training School) was an incredible life changing experience. Both the staff and students were amazing people and I have made a lot of lifetime friends from all over the world.

We all lived on a farm together for 3 months over the lecture phase where we all grew very close. We had a different speaker each week all teaching us on different topics such as; the character and nature of God, relationships, submission and authority and many more. 

On the weekends we do different things depending on which stream we chose at the start. Our choices were; surfers, outdoor pursuits, music and worship and revival. I originally chose OP because getting out and adventuring sounded fun. But when I prayed about it something didn’t feel right so I asked God and got answered with a question, “Why are you here?” My reply was to learn more about you and be pushed outside of my comfort zone. I quickly realised what that meant so I changed to the revival stream where we went out doing street evangelism, worked with churches, helped out families in need, etc.

Each student was assigned a 1-on-1 to talk and pray with. My 1-on-1 was an awesome guy named Aaron from Papua New Guinea. I also had the chance to get baptised in the creek along with a few others where Aaron and two of my close friends (Simon and Cameron) along with the speaker for the week (Mark Parker) baptised me.

Over the 3 month lecture phase we had 2 free weekends where we were all free to roam around the area. On one of these weekends me and 9 others rented a van and headed north. One of the girls had the name Russell in her head for a while so we decided to go there. When we got there on the Saturday night, we drove past a small white church with a red door. It turned out that one of the other girls had a vision a few days earlier of a church fitting that description with a group of people standing around it and she had even drawn a picture of it. We decided that God obviously wanted us to go to that church on Sunday morning. The people were so happy to have us there and we doubled the congregation. We felt like God wanted to do some healings so we asked if anyone needed healing. A man stood up who had been in a tractor accident several years earlier and was still in a lot of pain and had limited movement. A few of us prayed for him and he had no more pain and most of the movement back. There were several other healings that God did through us that morning and everyone left the church really excited and praising God.

After the 3 month lecture phase we go on what we call “Outreach” where we were put into groups of 9 or 10 people and sent out to different areas of the world for 2 months. We sent teams to India, the Philippines, two teams in Fiji and one stayed in New Zealand. I got to go to Fiji with this crazy bunch.

While in Fiji our time was split between the two main islands in the towns/cities of Labasa, Lautoka and Suva. The weather was really hot and sunny being summer and was about 35-40°C with the occasional tropical rainstorm with raindrops the size of golf balls that nearly knock you out. We spent most of our time doing street evangelism and door knocking spreading the gospel and showing God’s love. I was so surprised at how open and inviting Fijian’s are (whether Indian or Fijian), nearly every person we talked to was happy to speak with us about Jesus. We had some really encouraging conversations with a lot of Muslims and Hindus.

This family that we spent some time with use to be Hindu but are now Christian and a few hours before we showed up one of the ladies had been crying and praying because she didn’t feel like God was doing much in her life and needed something to show that he was there. She was so excited when we showed up saying we were the answer to her prayer. We prayed with them and they gave us an amazing lunch to thank us for coming.

We also spent some time at a prison and at two different hospitals which for obvious reasons we weren’t allowed to take photos. It was definitely daunting with the 10 of us being in a small room with about 30 prisoners and one guard but they were very open and interested with what we had to share. The skit we did especially impacted them when it was linked to the testimony given by one of the guys. They were very interactive with us shaking all our hands and singing us songs and some even cried.

Our time at the hospitals was my favourite part of the whole outreach. We visited about 5 or so times during visiting hours and talked to and prayed for everyone and anyone who wanted to see us. There were several healings that we got to witness and outpourings of God’s love on everyone. It never ceases to amaze me how strong God’s love is for all of his children regardless of them even acknowledging him; he just loves to love people. Whether there were healings or not I always walked away from the hospitals on a high. There’s just so much hunger and for God when people are put into a situation that they might not live through that they open right up and bare everything. People quickly realise the truth when they finally reach out to God in true desperation. When they do he’s always there for them whether that is in the form of a physical encounter with him or through answered prayers by someone like me being there when they need them most. One particular time I went and talked to a Hindu man who it turned out had been praying to Jesus because his god’s hadn’t answered him after months of prayer. He finally prayed to Jesus and I turned up a few minutes later to pray with him.

There is a lot more that happened on outreach but this post is getting a bit long so I’ll just bullet point the rest with a few photos.

• We worked with churches giving sermons and leading worship.

• We ran a fun day for about 250 kids between the age of about 4 and 12

• Spent some time at two assisted living homes

• Helped run a youth camp for about 60 teenagers

• Spent new years eve in the capital (Suva) preaching and performing in a park in town 

To end this post I’ll leave you with this. God is there whether you realise or even like it or not, he is always there. He is doing amazing things everywhere all the time and is giving me the privilege to both witness and participate in it and if you ask him he will use you too. God isn’t bias towards anyone, he doesn’t show favouritism or use some more than others. In fact all it comes down to is if we are willing to step out when he asks us to do or say something. The point I’m trying to get across is that although some people are called to it, the mission field isn’t just in far off places or third world countries. It’s everywhere, including right on your doorstep, in line at the supermarket or even in churches. There are people everywhere who need to hear the gospel and be shown God’s love. I really want to encourage you to reach out to your community if you aren’t already.

Mark 16; 15

And Jesus said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.”

My Testimony

This is the story of how God pursued a single man relentlessly for 29 years. Even though the man ignored God, didn’t want to know him and did his best to run from him, God never gave up. Because he had a plan and a purpose for this man, and nothing was going to get in the way of that plan.

This is my story.

I was born in Christchurch, New Zealand on the 2^nd of June 1985. My mother was 17 when I was born and felt that I would have a better life if I was adopted out. So I was adopted at birth into an amazing, loving Christian family who had already adopted 2 other children. Matthew (boy) who was 2 and Jodi (girl) who was 8. We left Christchurch and moved to Newcastle, Australia when I was 2 where we lived until I was 10.Then we moved back to New Zealand but this time we lived in Auckland. Those first 10 years I lived a pretty sheltered life attending church every Sunday and going to a Christian school. My teenage years on the other hand are another story entirely…

When I was about 11 I started skateboarding and playing guitar. Both of these became a major part of my life, with skating dominating my teenage years and guitar taking over in my 20’s. I met up with my birth parents when I was 17 which was just like meeting up with old friends. They are amazing people and I am blessed to have such a healthy relationship with them (below is a picture of me with both adopted and birth parents at my 21^st birthday).

But the skate scene led me into smoking cigarettes and marijuana in my mid to late teens. Of course my parents were unaware of this because at home and at church I was the nice Christian boy. I was living two lives, both kind of half way. I did everything I had to to keep my parents and church friends happy, but also everything to keep my non-Christian friends happy also. This resulted in me feeling like I didn’t really fit in at either place, so I withdrew into computer games. By the age of 18 I was drinking a lot and sleeping around and really mistreating women. I also started working as a builder which I love but I buried myself into my work also.

I knew about God but I had never had a personal relationship with him and I didn’t want to even try because in my mind church was boring and for people who were weak. I wasn’t aware of it at the time but what I was doing all this time was trying to fill the holes in my life with other things to find pleasure and satisfaction. Even though I had a good and healthy adoption and upbringing, there is still that sense of rejection that comes in. I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing with my life. Every day was the same boring life repeated over and over and over. But God was still there and he started to give me a few nudges.

After a long weekend road trip, while driving home I fell asleep driving at 110km/h. The car drifted into the steel wire median barrier which caught the front wheel and ripped it and the suspension completely out. Logically this should have spun the car around and maybe rolled it, but it didn’t. The car just continued grinding straight down the road on three wheels and moved off to the other side of the road and stopped (I shouldn’t even have been able to turn that way if at all). Over the next two months I broke up with my girlfriend of four years, got made redundant from my job and wrenched my shoulder causing me to be off work for six months and have a desk job for a further two years after that. Now of course the only desk job available that I could do was one at the same company as my dad as a video editor for a Christian television channel. It’s funny how God kept the Christian influence in my life by making me watch sermons and other Christian TV shows all day 5 days a week. But of course I ignored this and started up a heavy metal band where I was the rhythm guitarist/vocalist playing very angry music. Along with this came the rock star lifestyle of heavy amounts of alcohol, LSD, and speed/cocaine and more girls. After 2-3 years of living a mess of a life the 2010 Christchurch earthquake happened. It was time for me to get back into building and with the huge need for carpenters in Christchurch and with my birth dad living there (who was also a carpenter) I decided to move there. 4-5 months later was one of biggest most life changing days of my life, February 22^nd 2011.

At 12:51pm a magnitude 6.3 earthquake (only 1km underground) hit Christchurch city killing 185 people and injuring roughly 2,000 others. I had just got off a four story scaffold only minutes earlier and was crossing Manchester St in town walking to another job when it hit. Normally earthquakes build up (I had experienced many aftershocks prior to this one) but this one was like a bomb going off and lasted for more than 10 seconds. With all the previous earthquakes in the area a lot of buildings had been damaged and weakened and just crumbled under the force of this quake. I later found out that the scaffold I had just got off collapsed onto the tram lines (electrifying it) and was then crushed by the façade of the building falling onto it which would have surely killed me. I was knocked off my feet and a truck that was parked on the side of the road almost rolled onto me. A lot of bricks and other debris fell off surrounding buildings and narrowly missed me but somehow nothing did. I watched as a building collapsed onto people on the footpath and cars stopped at the traffic lights. When the quake finally stopped I grabbed the guys I was working with and we ran into a huge cloud of dust towards the collapsed building where we spent several hours digging people out. We got about 24 people out alive but seriously injured and 4 people that had died. Below are some before and after pictures of the building where we were (the 2^nd one was taken on the day).

I didn’t stop and think all day I just kicked into gear and did what had to be done. When I finally got home at about 6pm, I sat down on the couch and that’s where I stayed for the next three days in shock. I didn’t hardly talk, sleep or eat. I didn’t really talk to anyone about the details of the day and just went on with work and ignored the miraculous reasons of how I didn’t die that day. I knew that God was trying to get my attention but I didn’t want to admit it and kept pushing him away and decided to start a sleeve tattoo.

The earthquake made me look at life differently so I tried to fix my life by stopping smoking, drugs and cutting alcohol right back to only special occasions. A few months later I got back together with my ex-girlfriend who I had broken up with about 3 years earlier. She moved down to Christchurch and we were together for about 2 ½ years before we got engaged. Everything was going great, I had a great job as a project manager getting paid very well, we had a nice place and all the toys and we were planning our wedding. We were set to have a good future, but we both weren’t happy. Things got worse as time went on and we decided to call off the wedding and go our separate ways. This was my final low point, I was nearly 30, single, living alone and bored out of my brain because I had lost all my friends. So I started drinking again.

My birth nana had a word from God to go down to Christchurch and pray for the grandchildren. After watching a movie with her (God’s Not Dead), she asked if she could pray for me. I was hung over from the night before and just wanted to leave to go drink again and knew that I would be able to leave faster if I let her pray. So I reluctantly let her pray for me and God showed up big time. Within seconds I was on the floor having visions, speaking in tongues and pulling scripture references that I didn’t even know that spoke into my life. I also had words of knowledge for others that were there about things I didn’t even know about them. This whole encounter with God lasted about 2 hours and completely changed my life. I had very clear direction from God on what I was to do with my life. Within three weeks I had sold everything and started my DTS (Discipleship Training School) to learn how to better know God and make him known to the world as a missionary.

I know I am called to work with Muslims in Muslim state countries in the future but right now I am concentrating on what God has put in front of me right now. Getting to know Him and his word and learning how to disciple others to do the same.

Jeremiah 29:11

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.