Praise: I have for a long time now been concerned about how slow our recruiting efforts have been going. I am starting to see that God has different and greater plans than I have had. There are two areas that I have begun to realize may be the places God is raising up laborers we seemed to have been seeking. One is Africa. The new indigenous missions program called SPARC is in its infancy but is already growing and fruitful. We are starting to have spontaneous contact with believers who have a strong call to reach not only their own context but to reach out cross-culturally. SPARC provides them a context to dream big dreams and have a peer to peer network for mutual encouragement to see those dreams realized. I am just now starting to learn about Asia. I have been reading and gathering as much information as I can about the "Back to Jerusalem" movement in preparation to visit Chinese house churches this fall to talk with them about how we can help them go to the Enterprise world of the Middle East and North Africa. Our contacts in those parts of the world and experience with helping Africans develop sending seem like a large part of God's response to our long standing prayers for laborers. I have no idea what will develop out of this but from what I am gathering it has the potential to see 10s of thousands of laborers going to the Muslim world.
Prayer
1) Pray for my time in June in Bangladesh helping with the ordination of the first 20 mbb church leaders for a new denomination forming there. Pray this would be a time of great encouragement for the church there to grow and for the Gospel to become more central in the life of its leaders.
2) Pray for arranging travel we will do in July and August to visit churches interested in partnership.
3) Pray for the start of the SPARC program. For God to multiply the resources and their effectiveness so that 30,000 Muslims will be reached there in the next five years. Pray for new leaders and countries we are starting to get to know and talk with about becoming part of this. (Gambia and Liberia).
4) Pray for my preparations for the visit to China this fall. Pray for providential connections, for wisdom, for humility, for God to connect all the seeming bits and pieces of things so we could effectively start to help in fanning the flame of this Back to Jerusalem vision.
5) Pray for improvement in our personal support. A number of churches and individuals are experiencing great financial hardship and we have lost about $1000 a month in support now.