Recently Noah, my four year old, has been a bit difficult at home. He is listening poorly, pushing boundaries, and at times willfully going against what we say. We were told the twos were terrible and the fours terrific, but it feels the opposite to me.
Yesterday I took my two kids to the beach and I told Noah he could play anywhere he wanted as long as I could see him.
What ensued was telling.
Do you want access to our training material we are using on campus and in churches? Have you wondered how you are going to personally release the APE in your context?
We have created a library with different training material (seminars, handouts, videos, etc) to help you do just that very thing!
This is a guest post by Chizu Shimizu. She is on staff with Intervarsity in San Diego and works with Urban Projects and Student Missions.
This is an incredible story of being committed to planting new works of God. Chizu, in many ways, was the least likely person in my mind that God would send to get this job done – her role on staff has nothing to do with planting new chapters. But I have known Chizu for almost 15 years and she has a heart that beats for the path of God. I love her obedience to a strange call of God (totally outside her job role) and her willingness to follow God’s planting scent all the way down the trail. Watch this video testimony of her telling the incredible story of a planting mission this last year.
By Eric Rafferty
Of all the gifts in the body of Christ, prophets above all appear to function just fine on their own. The Bible is full of examples of independent prophets who were sent alone with a message or a task from God. They challenged leaders. They rebuked nations and societies. They stood alone in the gap between God and his people. Maybe this is why so many of the prophets of scripture responded to their initial prophetic calling by basically screaming, “NOOOOOOOO!”
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By filling out this survey you will ultimately be helping you as a reader of this blog! Why? Because your answers are going to help shape the content that we post going forward.
By Beau Crosetto
Something interesting is happening in my neighborhood – a new wall is going up.
A high school teacher that was arrested three months ago owns the house on the right. He was pulled from his house in hand cuffs – I watched it all happen. Bad stuff went down that day. Furthermore, he throws loud parties into the night and to say the least some really fishy stuff is happening over there. It’s also not the first run in with the law he has had.
By Linson Daniel
This was an interesting year for me. My leadership was really stretched.
I went from planting new chapters to planting new areas for InterVarsity/USA in North Texas and Oklahoma. Four years ago, my team started as one area with 390 students in 7 chapters. It has since grown to become 707 students in 16 chapters. Now, my area has multiplied into three new areas each with its own area director.
I’ve reflected back on the past four years to figure out which steps nurtured the apostolic impulse needed to generate this growth. As a leader, you can help foster apostolic impulse in every team member! I’ve distilled it down to these three steps:
By Beau Crosetto
Evangelists bring an un-quenching intensity to see people not following Jesus start following him. They want the community of faith the reach far and wide and if people that don’t know Jesus are not being reached, then the community is not in a healthy spot. Evangelists not only do evangelism themselves and lead others to faith, but at their best this person is creating vision for the community as a whole that is evangelistic where everyone is active in working to see people come to faith. Called evangelists are responsible to train the believers in witness, proclaim the gospel boldly and shape the community of faith to be a place where “sinners” draw near as it was said about Jesus in Luke 15:1
“Then all the tax collectors and the sinners drew near to Him to hear Him.”
But every gift casts a shadow and the evangelist has two clear dimensions.
As you can see our site has been redesigned! Eric Holmer did it for us and I’m really happy about it!
Two New Features
By Alexia Salvatierra
When I was speaking at an Intervarsity event this week, one of the student leaders expressed some doubt that prophets after the coming of Christ are called to include a social justice element in their message. That is not an uncommon stance in many of our churches.
