I took a van full of boys and bags from Belfast on Wednesday morning while the girls took the train, and we’re now in Cork. In the next couple weeks, we’ll be helping with a couple local ministries, including the Haven – an interdenominational ministry of a coffee shop, bookstore, and prayer room. We’ll also be on the streets busking for money for homeless ministries, praying for people, and leading worship and services in churches.

We’re back in Belfast for a few days mid-May, then we’re off to South Africa for the remainder of the outreach.

Our team will be working with a variety of ministries in the Durban area, primarily helping with discipleship, evangelism, and helping empower people in practical skills. I’ll tell you more about these ministries later…

We certainly appreciate your prayers. We’ll be leading nine trainees from this DTS – four guys and five females; five Americans, one English, one South African Zulu, and one Israeli Arab. They’re a great group with lots of talent.

This update is coming a bit later than I intended, but I had no hard drive space to download pictures from my camera, so I had to wait until I could remedy the problem.

YWAM staff from around Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland met in Dublin over the night of Friday 7th of November and the following morning to pray in a new era of our operations in Ireland. In short, on the 8th of November, the works in both the North and the South became united in leadership and vision as YWAM Ireland.

Friday evening we had a time of sharing from Rob Clarke, who has been leading the work in the Republic for about 25 years, reflecting on the ministry of YWAMers and the hand of God during that time. We also had the opportunity to pray in the new leadership, as Rob Clarke passed directorship over any work in the Republic to Jonny Clark (no relation), the director of YWAM in Northern Ireland. The food and craic was great – hospitality provided by the Clarke family – , and having the chance to hang out with other YWAMers we don’t get to see too often was nice as well.

During our time, we had the pleasure of the company and input of Stephe Mayers, the director of YWAM in Western Europe. In the morning, he shared about how to engage in new opportunities (counting the cost, committment, etc.) in relation to being YWAM in Ireland and looking around the island at places for new teams.

We’re excited for the future, and there’s a sense that God has good things in store for our YWAM community – especially good challenges and potential to do new things.

Check out more pictures from the YWAM Ireland event in Dublin in our photo gallery album.

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.