Next time, a more informative entry…

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.