brazil

What an awesome church!!  Abba Church is located in a city called Curitiba --- a city about 5 hours south of Sao Paolo, Brazil.  The pastor's name Pio and he is an aboslutely outstanding leader of the church of about 6,000 members.  I had the wonderful priveledge to go to Brazil and speak at his church for two nights describing what God is doing in New Vintage Church.  They have a ministry called "Friends of God" that invites friends to come and talk about what God is doing in their part of the world.  What a great idea. The concept is that friends tell friends what they are doing and friends try to help friends become better and grow stronger.  Isn't that what friends do?  I thought I was going to Brazil to help a friend but the opposite happened to me.  Wow did they encourage me and help me get a bigger picture of what a church could be.   Abba Church has built into its cultural fabric a process of developing leaders and mentoring one another.  That is what friends do -- they help each other.  Let's be friends.  Check out some more pics here. 

 

Sign

I did not realize what an impact a sign can make.  I started getting phone calls and text messages letting me know that we were on the big sign on 101.  Traffic was stopped for miles and people were forced to look at it---God has a sense of humor.  

thankful

This past week I heard from my good friend Michael Mozley.  I've known Michael since my college days and we have become good friends over the years.  I was talking to Michael on Tokbox this past week to figure out his his plans for the summer (he will be at NVC the last weekend in June) and he told me what happened to him last week.  Here is his account from Facebook.  I am so grateful God protected him and his family.  God is good.   Check out his account of the events and keep praying for them.

On Wednesday night five armed robbers pushed through our gate and our night watchman to demand all the money we had on us and in our house, as well as every electronic thing they could put their hands on. Claire and Maggie had just returned from an evening program at Maggie's school and it was 8:30 p.m. When they pulled into the gate, armed robbers folllowed close behind and made their way into our compound. They took Claire and Maggie's phones and dumped their purses on the driveway looking for money then made their way inside to look for me and all of our money. I was in Luke's room about to have prayers with Luke and his spend the night friend Seth. Claire walked in looking frantic and saying, "I need help." Just behind her was a young man not more than 20-25 with a shot gun and another young man holding a machete (cutlass). They ordered us to sit down and then asked where all the money was. We told them to leave our son's room so it wouldn't frighten them. Claire and I showed the two robbers our room and gave them all the money we could find....thankfully it was no more than a couple hundred U.S. dollars and about $600.00 in Ghanaian cedis...then they started picking through all of our belongings taking cameras, every laptop available, four of them and lots of incedentals...watches, earphones, ipods, i-touch that Maggie got for Christmas...the most devastating loss was my laptop and all my PhD work gone...most of which has been backed up but some of it was backed up on another computer, which they also took. After 20 minutes they were gone. At one point I said to one of them, you know I'm a pastor and I love Jesus and He loves you. He said, "Oh I know, I'm a Christian too, He's my savior." I said, My friend you are not a Christian or you wouldn't be doing this to our family.

Maggie was probably the most traumatized because she was left in the front lot of our home while Claire was taken inside being held at gun point.

I'll write more later, but in the mean time, just pray for our family, our memories, and our healing...