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.

Here are some photos I snapped with my new phone (gifted to me just before Christmas by someone upgrading – the first time I’ve had a phone that can do anything but make phone calls), mostly from windows in our flat:

Before…

In the middle of it…

After…

Christmas Eve at St. Anne’s

We continue this as an effort to integrate faith and a vision for reconciliation to make a real-world impact in places of conflict. The sponsored trainees are recommended by partner ministries in countries of conflict where we send outreach teams. They come to Belfast to receive Christian missions training coupled with a perspective on reconciliation and peacemaking given context in the environment of post-Troubles Northern Ireland. They will then return rooted in their faith to their countries with an ability to build bridges, having ministered alongside YWAM in Belfast on their DTS.

2010
—-
For the DTS starting on 21 January 2010, we are hoping to have 4 sponsored trainees. One is from Israel. One is from Lebanon and has been volunteering with us since the summer. The other two are from South Africa, currently working with two of our partner ministries outside of Durban – World Changers Academy and Light Providers. These organisations are involved in a variety of community projects in their area (links: WCA website and Light Providers website).

If you want to know more about these outstanding individuals, please contact YWAM Belfast directly.

Our needs for them are:

• To cover basic living costs – apprx. £2150 minimum for lecture and outreach phases, per person
• To cover travel costs for the South Africans – airfare and visa costs, apprx. £750 per person.

Will you help us raise up ambassadors for Christ in broken places?

Consider making a donation for this cause – any amount will go a long way.

Donations using PayPal are quick, easy, and safe.  For other methods, please contact YWAM Belfast.

Also, join our cause on Facebook and invite your friends to participate.

You can also check out the ywamireland.org blog post of a similar nature (well, I wrote it, too).

‘Redemption & Reconciliation: Heart of Christian Worldview’ Peter Adams from YWAM Ireland on Vimeo.

We were about twenty five people that week, meeting in a couple different locations on the Shankill in Belfast. Usually, this annual conference is held in the summer, so our group was perhaps not as diverse as normal, since most people would be busy during the weekdays in November. However, we were a nice combination of YWAM Belfast staff and volunteers, YWAM Harpenden School of Humanities, and Sword of the Sprit gap-year volunteers. In all, we represented the nations of England, New Zealand, USA, Rwanda, Cameroon, Turkmenistan, Norway, Central African Republic, Lebanon, the Netherlands, and Ireland. A good mix, anyways.

Jonny Clark (Director, YWAM Ireland & YWAM Belfast) led us through a brief but meaningful examination of Irish history to set a practical context for our surroundings and the teaching we would have. Our primary guest speaker was Peter Adams (http://www.reconciliationtalk.com), who is involved in reconciliation work in England and overseas. He spoke at length about peacemaking as part of the Christian mission, as well as God’s plan for the reconciliation of all things, and how we participate in that – in relating to people and in speaking about Jesus. He used many stories about his work in Luton (England) with the Muslim community and his work in places like China and the Middle East.

In the afternoons, there were field-trips to community projects around Belfast to see how various groups engaged with the needs of this city. The purpose of these outings were to inspire and spark ideas, as well as connect the teaching with practical application.

[The video at the top was taken at the conference, and I pieced it together from a 75-min talk Peter Adams presented on God's plan of ultimate redemption for all of creation and our call to participate in it (Vimeo - about 30 min.).]

Peter’s blog: reconciliationtalk.com

This past Thursday was another of YWAM’s monthly global prayer days, when YWAMers from around the world gather to pray around a central theme. This month’s topic was China, and I took a carload of my colleagues from Belfast to a little Carmelite convent in North Dublin to join a handful of the other YWAMers, representing Dublin and Banbridge.

Each month, a newsletter [1] is sent out from YWAM Int’l with the prayer day topic and usually a collection testimonies, as well as a suggestion on how to pray. This month’s newsletter featured a selection of stories from missionaries in China, as well as some statistics on the number of Christians in China (130 million, or 11-13% of the population, according to the newsletter) and a history of Christianity in China. This history is rich and complicated – not just the story of 19th century missionaries trudging their way up the Yangtze, but reaching back to 7th century Nestorians, and being presently and significantly rolled into China’s relationship with the West of the last couple hundred years.

In the West, we have confused the political pursuits of various nation states with the mantle of the Church for many hundreds of years. The banner of Christ has flown alongside campaigns for power consistently across Western history – through colonialism and Manifest Destiny, present and past. In many areas of the world, Christianity has been and is often still seen as a Western religion, going hand in hand with the other ideals of the states and cultures that employ its vocabulary. The colonized, formerly colonized, and non-Western countries have often had the understanding that our own nation’s present values, be they representative democracy, capitalism, materialism, colonialism, etc., are part of the package that also includes Christianity. This fallacy creates a tremendous problem for overseas missions: someone may reject one of these Western -isms and thus be averse to the gospel because they came in the same package. However, Christianity is the Kingdom of God, not Christendom, which is a kingdom of someone else with a bunch of religious vocabulary thrown in.

I will not delve into 19th and 20th century Chinese history, which saw both the Boxer Rebellion and the Cultural Revolution as reactions to foreign influence, into which Christianity was lumped with violent consequences for both Chinese and foreign followers of Christ. Today, Christianity is on the rise in China, in a mix of underground house churches, a regulated state church, and student movements. Despite the historical stigma on Christendom, people are being drawn into a meaningful relationship with Christ and community within the Church. Loren Cunningham, the founder of YWAM, postulates that Church growth could come to some sort of ‘tipping point’ at around 300 million or 25% of China’s population (what this ‘tipping point’ would then lead to is still unclear to me, but I think some sort of large-scale societal transformation is implied, or maybe mass conversion).

At the same time, China’s political and economic power is on the rise. In my understanding, it’s unlikely that they somehow ’supersede’ the United States as the world’s leading economy in the next couple decades [2], but nonetheless China is certainly the top three economies, and some foresee a future where China is the world’s leading superpower. Loren Cunningham recently said:

In 2000, I felt God saying that China could become the leading power this century, providing they continued to move towards God and His Word, and provided the West continued to turn away from God and his Word. I can’t see any nation close to China to become the world leader after Europe and North America lose their leadership, which they will do unless they turn around. The West can return to God. It would be wonderful if both the West and China came in peace to evangelize the world, but this looks unlikely.

There’s a lot about this quote that I won’t unpack or comment on, because it would take me in a completely different direction, but as we prayed together last Thursday, and as I thought about this statement, I realized what a fascinating and precarious situation the Chinese Church is in. With the increasing economic and political power of their nation, as well as an increasing number of Christians with increasing sense of legitimacy and influence, they have very important decisions to make. Indeed, if this ‘tipping point’ of Christians came about as China became a superpower, they might be somewhere near where our Christian forebearers were in the early centuries of the Church, first under a hostile empire, then with increasing power in that empire.

Of course, I welcome and pray, as others, that the believers may start to exist with more freedoms, less state interference, and have more influence in all aspects of society. But my most earnest prayer for the Chinese church is this:

• That they would feel and exist united to a global Body of Christ, and would not feel isolated.
• That they would hold first their citizenship in the Kingdom of God before their citizenship in their nation.
• That they would remain pure and dedicated first (if not solely) to the purposes of Christ, not the purposes of power and wealth.
• That they would learn from our mistakes and our history – the violence, the materialism, the emptiness of power over others, the idolatry possible in our nationalism.

Moreover, this is my prayer for all Christians living in a place of power and wealth – especially where our influence is heard, if not accepted, by the powers that be.

Links/References:

1. Prayer Day website – November 2009: China. Loren Cunningham quotes came from the recent Nov. 2009 newsletter, which is available if you sign up.
2. NPR’s Planet Money Podcast Episode 103: Here Comes China.

Sunday, 4 October 2009, between 7-10pm.
Drop in at the Heisey farm for a good time playing games, eating food, navigating a hay tunnel, or just socializing. Everyone’s welcome!

Any donations will go toward Mikael and Renee’s ministry in Northern Ireland over the next year.

Need directions? Follow our link to Google Maps

Please, invite your friends. If you’re able to RSVP (including numbers of people you might bring), that would be helpful to us. You can RSVP or find out more info using our event posting on Facebook, or send us an email using our contacts page.

Heisey farm
2059 Sunnyside Rd.
Manheim, PA 17545
USA
717-665-2284

We had made our way to the cafe up the Shankill Road that afternoon on foot because of the parades of marching bands and partying onlookers crowding the street. We hopped over cases of beer, ducking the blinking tips of cigarettes, and parrying precariously strewn lawn chairs. Someone told us later that eighty bands were on the street that day, all of the protestant flute & drum variety. From the sky they might have looked like neatly sorted jelly beans in their uniforms, escalating through the neighborhood according to color, village, and slogan.

When we arrived, ice cream and popcorn were in full demand at the cafe, and there was a man asleep on the sofa – a well-known, neighborhood alcoholic and a sort of cafe refugee who feeds the fish in the cafe aquarium. The bands and the party, we were told, were for his brother, an alleged paramilitary who was gunned down by the SAS (British special forces) while sitting on his bicycle. And while the crowds drank themselves into double negatives, and the local strongmen divided their praise, our friend slept through the day, unnoticed and unbothered.

We set up our little village in the car park behind the cafe. Our establishments were those of inflated castle, inflated football goal, facepaint station, balloon sculpting station, and friendly guides, bearing encouragements, prayer, and hot-dogs for the kids. Somehow the merriment and binge drinking down the street faded into an inaudible blur, and we had our own good time.

Throughout our celebration with the kids that day, I was impressed by how little the general occupation of the neighborhood affected them. In one way, maybe they had simply grown accustomed to drunkenness and revelry; however, I largely think their ability to play, laugh, apologize, bounce, kick, run, trick, and cry are a testament to a child’s ability to be true to their own playfulness and curiosity no matter their situation or environment. I’ve seen this around the world: minus food, minus bouncy castles, minus face paint, minus shelter, they are children the same (I remember a slum in Thailand where the only open play space was amongst graves…). No wonder Our Lord challenges us to become like children. If somehow we manage, perhaps our imagination and sense of self will not be oppressed by our present occupations.

Please pray for Ramy and Roula in their work through the cafe. In the midst of the practicalities of serving, cooking, and cleaning, they are ambitious in their outreach. They’ve recently started a homework club at the cafe for kids after school, where they can come and be helped with their exercises. The government recognizes that there is a gigantic void in progressing past basic levels of education for kids on the Shankill versus kids in middle-class or wealthy areas (check out this Belfast Telegraph Article). The homework club aims to aid kids in learning, to encourage them, to pray for them, and give them a safe place to hang out. Please pray for this new venture and for general opportunities within the community for the cafe ministry.

During all of this, we had some good ideas cooking about DTS that we’re excited to develop, and we’re glad for this extra time to give it more thought, planning, and action. YWAM Belfast is smallish in staff numbers, and so we need to run the DTS in a way that it comes alongside everything that the staff are already doing. So we’re looking at how to do that… and we think it’ll be good.

Another idea that has come up is to develop a volunteer programme that runs before the DTS that some of the attendees can apply to come early for. We’re now in full swing of putting this together, hoping that the earliest of them could arrive in mid-November. We want them to get some input on reconciliation and Irish history, but primarily to link them with our ministries and our contacts based on needs. We’ve launched this under the name of Mission Belfast, and it has generated good interest.

The next few weeks will get us a solid foundation for putting structure to the coming year.
]]> http://nakedicame.com/2009/08/new-ideas/feed/ 0 http://nakedicame.com/2009/08/yans-straight-jacket-escape-creideamh-video/ http://nakedicame.com/2009/08/yans-straight-jacket-escape-creideamh-video/#comments Sun, 02 Aug 2009 13:13:39 +0000 Mikael http://nakedicame.com/2009/08/yans-straight-jacket-escape-creideamh-video/ Here’s a video I took during Creideamh, as an example of some of the ministry.

Creideamh (pronounced something like kray-jiff, the Irish word for faith) was dubbed the Festival of Faith and hosted a couple hundred people from around Ireland and the world for an outreach in Galway for fifteen days this July. We came along with several other people representing YWAM Ireland to help with the facilitation of the festival and its events – our members doing everything from planning and administration, to electrical work for setting up the festival gazebo on Eyre square, to hosting the various artists who came to perform for the festival.

Renee and I primarily took over the management of festival operations at a local restaurant after its normal closing time, feeding all the festival teams each evening and helping run the festival’s public entertainment venue there, where we hosted musicians, magicians, mimes, and testimony-tellers every night.

Creideamh seemed to have largely been a success. The volunteers got on well and feedback from the community was positive. Teams met in the morning for services, followed by lunch and training, and then would spread out across Galway according to their ministry – ranging from engaging people in discussions about faith to kid’s ministry in local parishes. The artists would perform around town, sometimes on the street, and sometimes in a handful of festival venues.

Well, I could go on, but I suggest you just check out the photos I’ve uploaded to this site (which were also put on the YWAM Ireland Facebook Page, I think), as well as the YouTube video of a member of YWAM England escaping from a straight jacket during Creideamh.

Also check out some of the artists who worked the festival:

• L’Angelus – cajun roots band from Louisiana
• Flip Francis and Sammy Blaze – hip-hop artists from Dallas, TX.
• Crossing the Jordan (CTJ) – band of musicians from four continents, based with YWAM in Harpenden, England.
• Yan Nicholls (E-team) – magician, escape artist, and evangelist based with YWAM in England.
• Collin and Halie (E-team) – acoustic music duo based with YWAM in England.
• Steve Murray – mime artist.

More info at Creideamh website.

• 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)…