The Discipleship Training School (DTS) started just over a week ago now, with 21 trainees from America, Canada, Germany, England, New Zealand, Israel, and South Africa. After the new year, we have felt like we’ve really hit the ground running – first in terms of preparation and continuing staff training, and now in all the little details of organising a group this size for activities, housing, food, ministry, etc. We’re glad for Saturdays like this one where we can take time to just breathe and be with each other.

The experience of staffing a DTS in Belfast is new for us and offers some unique opportunities and challenges. The variety of ministry possibilities for the DTS is abundant, and hosting the DTS on the Shankill Road (where we live) connects the trainees directly to a lifestyle of outreach, where we live in the same places as the poor, addicted, and bereaved. As you may know, we don’t have a central ‘base’ in Belfast, and our staff are housed in various flats in the Shankill area, and the trainees are in two different houses about a 15 min. walk apart. Our lecture space is rented from a local church. The challenges, therefore, that are most different than in Closkelt are in managing the community aspect of DTS. We think it’s going quite well, but it’s a lot of work to get meals organised and have people show up at the same place at the same time.

Our DTS staff team are these people: Jonny Clark, the Belfast and Ireland director, is leading the DTS; Mikael is assistant leading with Jonny (as he is also busy with other responsibilities); Renee is staffing and helping train the new staff; Rob is a pastor of many vocations – from prison chaplain to hospital chaplain – and is staffing a first DTS after many years in ministry; Stephanie is a talented artist and graphic designer staffing her first DTS; Bless is helping with the DTS part-time after moving with her husband and son from Thailand where she is from and has been with YWAM for many years. Other YWAM Belfast staff are helping when possible.

The group is strong and talented, but we are a bit stretched after one of our DTS staff had to return home suddenly the day the DTS started.

Yesterday, we announced that our outreach phase locations will be 1. Ireland & South Africa combo and 2. Ireland, Israel & Palestine combo. The trainees have until Tuesday to pray about where they feel they should go, and then we will form the teams.

Locally, Renee and Steph are leading a small group which will be doing children’s ministry in a school on the Shankill and with a church working in a socially deprived area across town. Mikael is leading a small group that will be working in the Feed Cafe on the Shankill doing ministry from there, as well as ministry around town (the group is quite musical, and we’re excited to get them involved in open mics, etc.). Jonny and Rob’s small group will be working with teenagers.

We appreciate your prayers very much.

If you want to stay better updated, you can:

• Follow us on Twitter for insights into our daily life.
• Follow YWAM Ireland on Twitter , where insights and pictures from DTS activities are often posted.

(Someone actually gave Mikael a Blackberry phone before Christmas – quite an upgrade from a phone that was just a phone. After a month of figuring out how it works, he’s trying to use it to communicate while on the go – such as posting pictures from lectures this week via Twitter).

Ok. Enough words.

Thanks for all your love.

• In parts of June, we’re in the USA.
• Between 4 – 20 July, we’ll be in Galway, helping facilitate Creideamh, a festival involving teams from around the world (totaling about 100-200 people) for creative outreach simultaneous to an arts and a film festival in the city. This gig was organised with Tine and connects with local parishes. Check it out at the Creideamh website.
• Preparing for the DTSs next year.

What’s on for the rest of YWAM Ireland (visit the ywamireland.org website for more info):

• A venue at the Summer Madness festival in early July, titled the Yak Shak. Check out the website for more info and a schedule of events.
• An outreach to Israel and the Palestinian Territories 23 July – 6 August
• And of course everything else that normally happens year round (and whatever else we forgot)…

The latest YWAM Ireland newsletter is available for download here, with updates on schools, events and outreaches in 2009, as well as a cool testimony from one of our staff, Lidia from Argentina, who’s currently leading an outreach in India.

YWAM Ireland website & Facebook group
For more information on YWAM Ireland, you can visit the updated YWAM Ireland website, or even join the YWAM Ireland Facebook group, where you can stay current with our events and outreaches.

New YWAM Northern Ireland website

In other news, YWAM NI has just released a new website (and replaced the old one). It’s got a simple, blog feel, and has basic information available at the moment. Keep posted as more information on YWAM NI’s ministries and happenings are updated.

A number of weeks have passed since we’ve sent out an update email; however, we hope you’ve been checking out the blog at www.nakedicame.com, where we’ve tried to be faithful in posting blurbs about our ongoings regularly (usually about once every five to ten days). If you have an feed reader, our the blog’s RSS feed is available via feed://nakedicame.com/?feed=rss2. Subscribe today!

This relatively quiet weekend springs up in the midst of quite a bustle in our community’s schedules. The DTS that started in January is about half way through its lecture phase right now, and has just returned this Friday from a week in Belfast working in the city with our sister base. About a week and a half ago, the outreaches from the October DTS returned to debrief and graduate, and by today, most of those students have left to go wherever they’re going next. The times that our DTSs overlap (in this case, two consecutive weekends) is usually somewhat of a hectic and strange time, marrying combinations of goodbyes and greetings and nice-to-see-you-again-s.

As for us, we’re doing quite well. Mikael will be leading the DTS starting in September, so he has put a lot of work towards that over the past week, reviewing applications and getting ready to book in lecturers, etc. Renee, who has been quite deeply involved in the spiritual leadership of the current DTS, as well as the pastoring of the DTS staff, had the opportunity to take some extra time last week while the school was in Belfast to draw up plans for a more formalized programme of DTS staff training for the coming schools. The work is good and has kept us busy.

We’ve also started to be involved more over the last month on a leadership level at the base and within YWAM Northern Ireland. Just over a week ago, we went with others from the leadership team in Closkelt to join leaders from Belfast and YWAM Ireland in Dublin for a time of prayer and discussion as to our joint future. We all understand that God is opening up the opportunity for us to be more involved in other parts of the Island, so we are considering the possibility of a mobile DTS for sometime next year that would give the vision somewhat of a start. The school might spend a couple weeks of its lecture phase in several different possible pioneering locations around Ireland and Northern Ireland.

This coming Tuesday, Renee will be traveling to Amsterdam to meet with some of the other prayer warriors of YWAM in Western Europe for an event called Prayer Shield. They will be meeting to spend some extensive time in prayer interceding for YWAM, YWAMers, and YWAM ministries, as well as for an event starting a week from now called the Western European Leadership Consultation (WELC). Saturday, Mikael and some of the other young leaders from YWAM NI will join Renee in Amsterdam, then travel two hours north by train for the WELC. The WELC will be a gathering of about 200 leaders from YWAM in Western Europe, mostly young ones, to map a path for YWAM in the future. For more info, read about it on our blog; we won’t take up precious email space to describe it in length.

In other news, we’ll probably have a car sometime in early April. Praise God! I must remind you we are about 10 miles from the nearest town when in Closkelt, and we’ve been borrowing someone else’s car to go grocery shopping. Last week, we got a call from a trusted mechanic regarding a car he has for sale at a good price, and we went and saw it yesterday. Looks good!

Furthermore, regarding prayer, please petition the Lord to bless us with DTS staff for the Fall DTS. At the moment, Mikael does not have any confirmed staff. However, this isn’t particularly out of the ordinary at this point, and Mikael is hard at work trying to recruit more to the cause. We would love to have eight staff for the school, four full-time and four part-time, the latter being prepared and trained to staff full-time on upcoming DTSs or the mobile DTS. And we’re faithful God will provide the right amount and, more importantly, the right individuals to form the right team.

Thanks for all your prayers and support so far. We’re grateful to have such a wide, diverse community surrounding us with their encouragement and sacrifice.

In His Peace,

Mikael & Renee Kristiansen

Amongst continuing to paint and patch our new apartment, the two of us are enjoying getting back into the fray of what’s happening within YWAM Northern Ireland and the YWAM Closkelt DTS programme. We will be joining a team of five others as a base leadership and management team to represent the different ministries and needs in planning for YWAM Closkelt’s future. We’re also feeling out our role in the Discpleship Training programme and are busy, this week especially, meeting with past and present DTS staff and gathering ideas and experience. For now, we’re taking an active role in the support and development of the January DTS staff and their school, all DTS related administration and communication duties (emails to speakers, student registration, etc.), and also taking steps to present and develop new initiatives and structure to evaluate and preserve experience from past, present, and future schools.

Next week will be a particularly intense period of DTS staff training, so we will appreciate your prayers. We will be involved in that process as well; in fact, our main involvement with this school will be from a position of accountability and development of the staff. We’ll be helping and guiding them throughout the school in their interaction and leadership of the students, in addition to preparing them for outreach. Renee will actually be in the classroom for at least the first month, modeling staff leadership and offering input. (For clarification: we’re not leading the January DTS; it’s being lead by a colleague called Jessica (from Montana, USA), and staffed by Cheryl (USA), Sharayah (Canada), and Francis (Sierra Leone), as well as some one-on-one discipleship help from other staff. These individuals’ ministry will be to the students; our primary ministry will be to them, though both of us are taking one student for one-on-one discipleship.)

The January 2008 DTS starts on the 28th of January.

We’re excited to be in our new home and are anxious to settle in.  However, we’ve a lot of work ahead of us.  Besides just finding a place for our stuff, we need to do a fair bit of patching and painting, as well as working on the bathroom and carving out an office space somewhere.  Also, one of our immediate priorities is also finding an automobile that will suit our needs.  Now that we’ll be cooking, and therefore shopping for ourselves, we need to establish reliable means of getting into town, the nearest of which are 8-10 miles from our rural homestead (the only proximate amenities are a pub and a hardware store, neither of which sell bread and cheese).  In the mean time, we’re unpacking and cleaning and hoping that jet lag will pass us by, though yesterday was really the difficult hump in the road. 

As far as YWAM Closkelt goes, everything looks about the same, minus and plus a few faces.  The current Discipleship Training School (DTS) have enjoyed a week’s break over Christmas and are now entering the last week and a half of their Lecture Phase before splitting heading out on outreach, one team around Ireland and No. Ireland, and the other to Serbia.  We’re also looking ahead to the start of the next DTS at the end of this month.  Though we’ll not be leading or staffing this school, we’ll be involved in its maintenance.  We are hoping to sit down sometime soon with the school’s leader, Jessica, and see how she is doing and what needs to be done.  But more on the DTS and changes in YWAM Closkelt later… 

All in all, we are well.  Thank God for a smooth and safe journey (with all our luggage this time!), as well as for the past five months of sharing the vision that God has given us with our communities, of being continually blessed, and of time spent with friends and family in the United States of America.

In short, the wedding and all the fixings went very well. The last week before the ceremony saw the usual amounts of business associated with such events, coupled with the fact that we would both leave Colorado soon thereafter, so all details concerning packing and earthly possessions were dealt with in the midst of the final bouts of wedding preparation. We were joined a few days beforehand by Renee’s family, as well as couple of our friends, who did a lot to help us with last minute shopping, picking-up, and decorating. As the big day approached, we were surely ready to finally get to the actual business of getting married.

We had a small ceremony of immediate family and a few friends (numbering about 30 in all) at Boulder Valley Christian Church on a snowy Friday evening on the 7th of December. Our friend, and student ministry pastor of the church, Matt Carlson officiated over a candle-lit ceremony enclosed by a semi-circle of our closest in the glass foyer of the church, which would have lent a beautiful view of the Rocky Mountains during the day. The ceremony was about 20-30 minutes and was followed by an intimate dinner in an adjacent room. We were both very happy with how everything turned out.

The next evening, we made our way slowly across icy highways towards the airport for an early morning flight that Sunday on US Airways. Unfortunately, our flight was delayed due to an unexpected TSA search on account of a razor found on board, so we missed our connection in Phoenix, arriving in Los Angeles slightly later than planned, which was no problem, although we were without our baggage (When asked, US Airways promised our baggage late that evening from the next flight that Sunday afternoon. When it didn’t arrive, subsequent phone calls and long hold-periods helped us to learn that the airline wasn’t really sure where our baggage was or when we would get it. Repeatedly, we told them it would be in Phoenix, at which they would respond that it would be on the next flight; finally, we were able to have one of their operators actually call the airports in question and put out an alert. We received everything in tact that Tuesday. We’ve lost baggage numerous times, but never without such a lack of information about its actual location; turns out, US Airways has one of the worst records in permanently lost baggage. But God was looking out for us, and all went well…).

We spent a joyful, sunny week in California, completely blessed with a honeymoon we would not have been able to afford on our own. Our friend Candice spent the past few months in collaboration with her church in Camarillo, California, and they were able to give us the gift of a wonderful one-week stay in a three story house right on the beach in Ventura. Someone from her church even bought us tickets to Disneyland; the rest of the week, we did little to nothing, except hang out and enjoy the sunshine (we left Denver at 1 degree Farenheit and arrived in a week full of sixties and seventies and endless clear skies!).

In any case, pictures will speak louder than words. We’ve been able to download pictures from our time in California, as well as the reception we had here in Pennsylvania a couple days ago for Renee’s family and friends. We’re going to hold off on uploading those to the website until we have photos from the wedding as well. Rest assured, however, that we will notify everyone when those pictures are available on our website for your viewing pleasure. That will hopefully be next week.

We arrived in Pennsylvania this past Monday after an overnight flight from LA. We will be here until the 30th of December, spending Christmas with Renee’s family, as well as taking care of paperwork details such as name changes and banking.

We’re looking forward to getting back into our work in Northern Ireland next month (actually, just over a week!). God has been so good to us and blessed us with an incredible amount of comfort and rest in this time. We’re certainly using our time over Christmas to reflect on that… we can’t express how thankful we are to everyone in our extended community and especially to Him, who makes this marriage adventure so sweet and worthwhile.

Please, take this time over the next week not just to pump numbers into the economy, but to really reflect on the incarnation of Christ – the salvation, the blessing, the suffering, and the calling that is grafted into our lives as a result of His life and death amongst us. This is a time for excitement that our God has come and is coming the be in the midst of us all.

God bless,

Mikael & Renee

Update (15/01): Pictures are now available in the Wedding and Honeymoon photo gallery. Thanks!

Dear friends,

First of all, welcome to our newsletter community (to all of those who’ve signed up in the recent month or so; don’t forget to exempt us from your spam filter!). Renee and I are excited to have so many new people involved and updated in what we’re doing.

Since the last email, we’ve been hard at work trying to expand our support community, and God has been extremely faithful. On both fronts, in Colorado and Pennsylvania, we’ve been presenting what we are involved with through YWAM – Northern Ireland to individuals and families in our communities, and we’ve seen a bunch of people prayerfully join with us in this mission. So far, the Lord has brought us to about 72% of our monthly financial support needs, as well as some one-time gifts, and we continue to trust him to complete our team. We’re excited to be able to have so many different people involved; sharing with people and trading questions and perspectives has been a learning experience for sure and a huge blessing.

And the ducks are coming to order… Soon, the website shall be online – hopefully by the end of the week, so make sure to check that out. It will have a nicer interface, as well as pictures and a streaming video player, at the same location (www.nakedicame.com).

Also, the wedding plans are moving along quite nicely, with some details still to come into order. We will have a small ceremony here at Boulder Valley Christian Church with mostly close relatives and a few friends (about 35 people total, max) and a larger reception out in Pennsylvania about a week later. It’s getting close!

Our schedule is somewhat like this:

• End of Nov.: Renee comes to Colorado for final wedding prep, etc.
• 7 Dec.: Wedding in CO.
• 9-16 Dec.: Honeymoon
• 17 Dec. (might be 18th… I forget): reception in PA
• Christmas in PA, packing, final moving prep.
• 30th of December: fly to Dublin, bus to Northern Ireland

And we’re almost there! Pray that we’re able to maximize our time before the wedding to do everything else that needs to get done without being stressed. Also, I’ll be going to Missouri to see my dad for the first time in a few years for Thanksgiving, which I’m really happy for.

Anyways, thank you all once again for your prayers and support. We love you. Check out the new website when it’s up.

Peace,

Mikael

However, an index of links to old e-mail newsletter .pdfs can be found here:

2007

• 04 Mar 2007 September DTS returns from outreach
• 02 Feb. 2007 February in Closkelt
• 11 Jan. 2007 Start of a New DTS

2006

• 16 Dec. 2006 Catching up with the Holy-days
• 09 Nov. 2006 Onward Balkans
• 22 Oct. 2006 October of Waiting and Making
• 09 Sept. 2006 Planes, Trains, and Automobuses
• 10 Jul. 2006 A Few More Hours
• 01 Jun. 2006 Packing. Unpacking. Packing. Etc.
• 08 May 2006 Back to the North
• 19 Apr. 2006 Back in the South
• 17 Mar. 2006 Happy St. P’s Day from…here!
• 28 Jan. 2006 Facing the January Sun

2005

• 27 Nov. 2005 Finally! A fall update…
• 11 Sep. 2005 Convenor
• 24 Aug. 2005 Arrival (The first newsletter of this chapter!!!)
• 06 Apr. 2005 Reflections on DTS: One Month Later
• 07 Feb. 2005 The Chinese New Year is Approaching…
• 09 Jan. 2005 Happy New Year From South-East Asia

2004

• 26 Dec. 2004 I’m Alive!
• 21 Dec. 2004 Greetings From Thailand!
• 10 Dec. 2004 Leaving on Jet Plane…

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