Praise Reports from Jaco

(Jorge is on the left & Alejandro is on the right. Both got baptized!)

The Lord has been doing some cool things in CCJ this week so I thought I would take a minute to tell you about them. First let me tell you about Palmera. This is a guy who works on the streets of Jaco making things out of palm branches and selling them. He truly is a talented guy. Sadly, he is also a troubled guy. He struggles with different vices and has a history of cutting himself… a lot. One time he was asked why he cuts himself so much and he said the devil tells him to do it. He has scars all over his body from this. Recently, life took a turn for the worse for him. We were told that he was in the hospital about an hour away. Thursday, Daniel, Gabe, and myself decided to go visit him. It was a really cool time of just ministering to him and sharing the love of Christ. We gave him a bible and asked if we could pray for him. He gladly accepted our offer. As we prayed over him he began to sob heavily. As we finished praying he told us that he wanted to receive Jesus into his heart… he wanted to start living a new life! You can only imagine our joy as we witnessed him pray the sinners prayer. Please pray for his recovery and for his spiritual growth. Living in Jaco won’t be easy for him spiritually but all things are possible with God!

The next praise report is about the Baptism / Superbowl potluck we had on Superbowl Sunday. We decided to have a potluck with everyone from church and to offer to do a baptism during halftime of the Superbowl. Praise God we were able to baptize 4 people. The people we baptized were people in whom we have seen God do really awesome things. We baptized 2 of the young girls from Kid’s Club that Revae has been ministering to for over 3 years. Revae was blessed to be able to lead them to Christ just that afternoon and then we got to baptize them that night… Amazing! We also baptized Jorge, who got saved during our BWO missions team this past summer. They reached him and lead him to the Lord. Now he is faithfully attending CCJ and God is growing him.

The last person I want to tell you about is Alejandro. You may remember him from a blog post last year. He came to us for help 9 months ago. He was seriously hooked on drugs. The Lord opened the door for him to get into a Christian rehab about an hour away that is run by missionary friends of ours. The rehab is called “Casa de Amor” (House of Love) and they have done an amazing job with Alejandro. He has been clean for 9 months and is being taught God’s Word daily. We were so blessed to see him this weekend and how God has been answering our prayers concerning him. To be able to baptize him was like the icing on the cake!

That Baptism was the best Superbowl half time show that I’ve ever been a part of! Please continue to pray for all of them. God is so good!

In His Grace,
Mike

Crazy Ride pt.2: Focus & Priorties

In a previous post a few months back I talked about “The crazy ride of life” that God had taken us on throughout 2009. I also promised to write a series of post to give you more details on how God has been working in our lives. Well, I’m here to make good on that promise! I hope that you will enjoy hearing how God has been working among us in Jaco, but more than that, I hope He will use these post to encourage and challenge your hearts as He did mine.

Where to start… have you ever felt like you were just “spinning your wheels”? You know what I mean, you are doing a lot of stuff in life… family, church, work, and yet when you slow down for a moment you wonder if you are making any real progress in any of these areas. You might even be experiencing a measure of success in life, but you are not feeling like your progressing towards the goal. In fact, you may not even be aware of what the goal is that you are working towards. You’re just busy working, serving, living! Of course there is always the ultimate goal of glorifying God, but often times we get busy and do not really know what exactly we are working towards. Jesus did not say that busyness in life would glorify His Father in Heaven. In fact, Jesus said that it was those who do the will of His Father who would enter the kingdom. You see, we can’t just be busy with “spiritual things” and expect that we are glorifying God. We must be doing His will. I believe this refers to His specific will for our lives.

Last year, God began to get us to refocus… to re-prioritize our lives. We were busy with “good things” but we began to feel like we were spinning our wheels. We weren’t exactly sure how the things we were doing were accomplishing our goals. On the outside we were busy trying to plant a church, but in our hearts we were feeling like the church we were planting was not all that we believed God and His word wanted it to be. We had lost sight of our goals and therefore we weren’t making progress towards them.

Yes, one of the main goals we felt like we were called to Jaco to accomplish was to plant a church and yes we were doing that. But… there is more to planting a church than just getting people together to worship and study together. We had goals for the type of church that we believe God wanted us to plant. We believe that the people who make up the church should be loving, faithful, giving, passionate about the Word of God, servant hearted, Spirit filled, dedicated to prayer and growing more like Christ every day. Now, when we stopped to look at all we were doing, were we reaching that goal? Not as effectively as we felt we could be.

It was time to refocus! The first step towards refocusing was to take a hard look at things and decide if they were or were not working. That’s not always easy but it is beneficial. Because of economic circumstances, we were really struggling to make our payments for the church building. The overhead was taking up 100% of our small church’s income. This limited what we were able to do in other areas of ministry. On the mission field in a developing country, it is easy to forget that we are called to give, not just receive. The tough financial situation made us dependent on provisions from the States just to stay afloat. This also made it impossible to be a giving church. Sadly, our prayers, attention, and focus became about the Lord meeting OUR needs and not about how the Lord wanted to use us to meet the needs of others. Being a self centered church was never our heart or goal.

We had been living by faith already so we decided to take some BIG steps of faith. Steps that, on the outside, would appear to be taking us backwards. But in reality they were huge steps forward towards our goals. We decided to do whatever the Spirit led us to do in order to produce the changes that we needed. We wanted to be a ministry that was glorifying God so we refocused and re-prioritized our finances, our giving and the ministries we were doing. We decided to live sacrificially in order to give more generously, so we moved out of the building with A/C and now meet outside under a covered soccer field. We realize that our God is a giving God so we decided to model giving to those around us by committing to work towards giving up to 50 % of our church’s income away to other mission fields. We evaluated our ministries and how they fit our goal of “Reaching people, Making disciples, and Loving God”. This meant placing a greater focus on discipleship and helping people go deeper in their walk with Christ and thus become more like Him. We started our “Core413″ bible studies to accomplish this. We decided that it was better to focus on a few things and do them with purpose than to do a bunch of things without any real direction. God has blessed our steps of faith!

Bold moves? Definitely! Scary? Absolutely! Living by faith? Always! Progressing towards our goals? Blessedly! In the next few posts I’ll talk more specifically about these changes and how the Lord led us to make them so that we could glorify Him.
How about you? Have you stopped lately to evaluate what you do in life and where it is taking you?

In His Grace,
Mike

Blessings Abound

Check out more photos from the event.

December was our annual Christmas Outreach to the poorest children of Jaco. We have held this outreach for the last 4 years in the park where we hold our weekly Kid’s Club. This year we felt led to branch out and bless even more children. We have had the opportunity from time to time to minister in another bario where the people are almost all Nicaraguans who have simply “squatted”. They have no “rights” to the land and have erected make shift homes from salvaged materials one on top of another . This bario has its own set of winding alley ways where we have found hundreds of children. We have built some relationships with a few people from this bario, and we wanted to do more to help build trust in this community. We traveled to a town about an hour away to purchase the gifts. Then, held a wrapping night, and in about 2 hours we had 200 gifts packed and tied and ready to go thanks to our wonderful volunteers! Each child received a Capilla Calvario (Calvary Chapel) T shirt, a toy, a gospel coloring book, crayons, and a bag of candy. We found a Missionary Clown family from San Jose to perform. We started with our first outreach in the morning in the neighborhood we work in weekly (INVU). This is also the bario where we lived for the first 3 1/2 years here in CR. The park is just 2 doors down from our old house where the church began. After the outreach in INVU, we took a break and all had lunch together. In the afternoon, we drove over to our second location (Copey) for the second show. The clowns performed first and then I (Revae) told the Christmas Story with large picture cards. Next, was refreshments and finally the moment they had been waiting for…the Gifts! The volunteers were so touched to be a part of giving a gift to so many children who would have not have otherwise received a gift… and best of all to be sharing with them about Jesus Christ who is our greatest gift of all! We are still praying to see how God wants us to work in this bario in the future. We would love to see a regular Kid’s Club just like the one we host in town each week.
In His Grace,
Revae

CCJ 4 year anniversary & Baptism

Late Post Alert!

(View photos of the baptism / celebration)

In October we celebrated our 4 year anniversary as a church. Time sure does fly by! We celebrated by having a potluck and a baptism. We were blessed to have 6 people get baptized! Some of them have been with us for a long time and others were new to the fellowship. It was such a blessing (and quite humbling) to see how the Lord has been working in each of their lives through CCJ. God truly is doing neat things in this community.

In His Grace,
Mike

Our Newsletter Archive

Here you will find PDF copies of all our past and present newsletters. We have also added a link to our newsletters in the right side bar for quick access. As we write future newsletters we will add them to this page. I hope you enjoy them. If you would like to join our mailing list, then visit our web page at www.ccfjaco.org

2009
1. December 08 – March 09
2. March – May 09

2008
1. January – March 08
2. May – August 08
3. September – November 08

2007
1. Summer (1) 07
2. Summer (2) 07
3. September 07
4. October – November 07

2006
1. Spring 06
2. Summer 06

2005
1. January 05
2. June – August 05
3. September 05
4. October – November 05

In His Grace,
Mike