Hello Everyone!
We hope you are doing well and that your month of February was blessed. Ours’ was packed, and we’d like to share the highlights and challenges with you.
We began this month with an outreach based around the Chinese New Year. It turned out to be quite a sweet time. We shared testimonies, great food, and fellowship. The idea was born out of our month of prayer and was pretty much organized by people in the church. We were encouraged by the community effort, and even if we had no non-Christians attend, it became a moment of strengthening, especially for the growing Chinese community in our congregation!
On strengthening, we’ve had some significant moments with the ministry team. Becky is exceptionally gifted in administration, and her schooling has brought this out in some powerful ways. For one of her assignments at Western, she used our team to do some analysis that taught us a few things and identified a few of our challenges that we were aware of but didn’t have words to put to it. Having seen these areas more clearly, we can begin to work through them. This is exciting because this month, we will start addressing some of these issues to reorganize as a team and work more on our strengths rather than our weaknesses. Everything begins this Thursday evening with a meal at our apartment. Please keep us in your prayers.
Speaking of our weaknesses, our accounting and treasury have become bottlenecks. Thankfully, we discovered that one of our worship leaders holds an MBA and teaches accounting! This could be a game changer because we were much farther behind than we had realized last month. We’d talked to a recommended contact who wanted to charge us 4000€ to fix everything… With the discovery of these new gifts from a person in our congregation, we hope to catch up in the following months at a much more accessible cost. This, however, also requires much prayer; please join with us!.
One of our greatest blessings was the timely visit of an old friend, Brian Campbell. Brian is a worship leader and songwriter who maintains an active home business. He doesn’t always make it out this way, so we jumped at the occasion when he told us he’d pass by! We initially thought of organizing a workshop with our worship team. Unfortunately, we couldn’t gather everyone together in time like we’d hoped. Still, we had instruction, worship, and time praying together, which we can implement in the next few weeks and months.
Perhaps the most unexpected blessing of Brian’s visit was that it coincided with a critical vote with Calvary Chapel France, determining how future and current Calvary Chapels become and maintain membership. Though the vote did not go in the direction we’d hoped for, having a friend to pray with was timely. Ultimately, Mike and our elder Max will step down from the board to allow other members to better represent the organization’s current direction. In the meantime, we need to pray as we look to the future of our local church.
On a more positive note, we will begin planning our Easter outreach this Sunday. For the past few weeks, we’ve invited all our creatives and organizers to a meeting after church to find out who is available. Typically, Easter is one of our lowest-attended Sundays because it’s a three-day weekend. In the culture of Paris, most people leave town for the weekend because that period of the year has some of the best weather. There is a reason for Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s version of April in Paris. If only we could get the Parisians to stay and evangelize! Easter, like Christmas, is an amazing open door for announcing the gospel. Mike will also begin preparing “the terrain” this year by preaching through Psalms 113-118, the Egyptian Hallel (“Hallel” from the Hebrew verb that gives us “Hallelujah”), and the Psalms traditionally sung during the Passover Seder. Please pray for our church and city so that we can put together something impactful for our community.
Thank you so much for your prayers and support. We are so thankful for you and hope your month of March is blessed!
In Jesus,
Mike and Becky