Wednesday, 10 March 2010
Leap of Faith!
Last night I was at Oakwood Youth Challenge for the monthly youth event I’m involved in speaking at as well as standing alongside the team who are running the place. Essentially it is a hugely well equipped and vast outdoor pursuits centre with a strong vision for reaching and winning youth people to Christ. It’s a hugely impressive place. I’ve been involved there for the last year and half with a heart to put my hands on the plough with Tony Pudner and the team there and help push it forward. The vision is to see 10,000 young people, across the region won for Christ. With the kind of numbers through the place each week and the passion in the team, they may well achieve it! The plan is then to reproduce it across the UK.
I have say how disappointed and frustrated I feel to have failed again in our request for permission for the Mainstage to be positioned on the Normandy Beaches this June on the weekend that coincides with the anniversary of the D-Day Landings. I really felt we would be successful this year but the battle for Normandy Bridgehead seems as difficult as ever! We are still strongly pursuing it with the conviction that Europe will open up to us in a new way with this objective achieved. I’m over there again next week to meet and pray with the leaders and we have various thoughts to consider. One idea is to do a more covert prayer initiative that weekend followed by a large evangelistic festival a week later with the Mainstage. Permission is currently being sought for that over there in France, please pray!
Next week I’m speaking at a men’s breakfast and also a kids and family event. Coming up are a number of indoor and outdoor events which I’ll tell you about soon and my next trip to Madrid!
Friday, 19 February 2010
Town and Country!
The spiritual temperature around us feels very hot at the moment. We are making big plans for 2010 in the UK and France particularly, at a time when there is significant opposition to what we are seeking to achieve. I’m carrying a strong word from God at the moment about evangelism and church planting initiatives in Cornwall, particularly around the disused chapels in the rural areas. It impacts me greatly that so much of what we have in this country in terms of strategies that take the Gospel to unreached people are very urban in their nature. Of course the inner cities are desolate places but the rural places also need reaching in a different way. I wrote to my friend Don Double last week who is a man with decades of spiritual battles behind him having been used by God across the earth to bring multitudes to faith in Christ. Don lives in Cornwall and there seems to be a connection between us fore that place. My plan is to travel down there soon to push the doors.
As I wrote a couple of weeks ago we were in the middle of an extraordinary series of events that resulted in a £5,000 bill on the Mainstage trailer and its tractor unit. What followed was the steady and unexpected flow of resources to meet the costs. Thank you to all of you who were prompted to give to this need, as always we couldn’t have got through without your partnership.
This last couple of weeks have thrown up a number of opportunities for me to communicate the Gospel to young people and adults in a variety of contexts from a big youth event to other smaller gatherings and meetings with many responding to Jesus. Next week I go to Normandy to further build on the plans for June and July.
Monday, 25 January 2010
Pipe Line Under The Ocean
Thanks so much to those of you who prayed for me for this latest trip to Normandy. We met with the growing network of people who are building with us for the events we are creating over there this year as we seek to establish a bridgehead for the Gospel and for the church into Northern France, the scene of a previous bridgehead of liberation in the dark days of the Second World War. Our vision is to create a platform for the Gospel of Christ in those places that carry a spiritual imprint caused by a catastrophic loss of life.
Over these first three months of 2010 we are running the PLUTO Fund appeal to raise the funds to cover the costs of creating these events and getting our Mainstage and Mobilestage ready. PLUTO or ‘Pipe Line Under The Ocean’ is a breathtaking historical account. In the wake of the D-Day Landings in 1944 the Allies faced the toughest of logistical challenges of getting millions of gallons of petrol over to the European Mainland from the south coast of England at a time when all the French ports where occupied and tankers were continually falling foul of attacks in the English Channel. Some courageous engineers were laughed out of the room as they suggested an audacious plan to sink an unbroken 100 mile long flexible fuel pipe under the sea from Shanklin on the Isle of Wight to the Cherbourg Peninsula, but it worked! It laid there undetected by the enemy until it was too late.
In one single night two cable laying merchant ships commissioned by the Royal Navy as HMS Ridley and HMS Latimer carried out the task right under the nose of the enemy. These two ships were named after the two Bishops who famously burnt at the stake in Oxford. As they died for the Gospel, Latimer shouted across to Ridley. “Be of good cheer for today by God’s grace we will light a candle in England that will never be extinguished. That inscription was welded to the hulls of those two ships and it became the war cry of the innovators and the implementers Operation PLUTO. As the liberators moved further into Europe the pipelines were extended over land and eventually crossed the Rhine into Germany itself.
With this as the backdrop we have launched the PLUTO Fund within Miracle Street to create a conduit for those who want to help us light a candle in England for the Gospel into Mainland Europe.
