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So… you have visioned, prayed, applied and been accepted to serve as an AIMer. Now what?
Now you start the check list (…the dozen or so checklists, if you’re anything like me), you know the one… the “I-have-so-many-things-to-do-and-I-don’t-know-where-to-start” checklist.
See… I knew you had it too. Continue reading
Last week & this, I kind of wanted to run away and hide under a rock. I did… sort of… but I’m coming back out.
The month of January is flying by at an incredible pace and we have a lot of “fancy footwork” to do, if we can survive the bureaucracy! 🙂 Continue reading
Over time, my own STM involvement has required that I do my share of fundraising, and I’m by no means a specialist. It takes ideas and today… idea generation often begins with a Google search.
I want to save you a step and share some of the resources that I’ve come across and particularly like:
(note: Books & blogs come from various doctrinal confessions with great best-practices in the area of fundraising.)
Both sites below have premium product or content for sale, but the links provided take you to free content (articles or blog-posts).
– Support Raising Solutions
– People Raising
– Financial Partnership Development
Find the titles listed right at their Amazon store:
– The God Ask (Steve Shadrach)
– People Raising (William P. Dillon – *haven’t read this one*)
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As a rule… Communication is key with any relationship building exercise related to raising financial partners.
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In a series of upcoming posts, I’ll share how I applied the ideas above into our own fundraising efforts leading up to France and since we’ve been here.
BUT… if you’ve been accepted by a sending organization and already have a time frame for your STM trip, start now!
– start reading
– start preparing
– start building resources
– start pulling together a communication strategy
Time goes quickly and the more you do now, the less stress & scrambling you’ll experience at the last minute.
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STM involvement is an incredible opportunity. If God has called you and men have affirmed you (sending organization), you are well positioned to live an extraordinary life. If you have questions, leave them either in the comments section below or email me via the “E-Mail” button.
God bless your preparations!
I think it’s fair to say that, with the exception of taking down the Christmas Tree… this was the week that we officially “wrapped up” the holidays. Today I’m teaching at Bible School but here’s the rest of our week.
On Monday morning, we packed up the car and headed north. The first 3.5hrs got us as far as Melun where we dropped off Jacques, our “over-the-holidays Collie-dog“, after which we drove another 4hrs or so to Belgium where we spent a night with friends before surprising Liz’s parents – who did not know we were coming. Liz had prearranged it with her brother. They were well & truly surprised!
While there, the kids got to eat “mitraillettes” which they love! Why are they called mitraillettes (which means “machine guns”)? Lemme explain how they’re made & you’ll understand why:
– take 1/2 baguette
– insert sausage / meat of choice
– fill to overflowing with french fries
(or bullets)
Voilà! …another Belgian treat.
(besides the more commonly known waffle)
On our way home from Belgium, we took a 30-min side trip to see the Canadian Memorial at Vimy Ridge, commemorating the 60,000 lives lost during WWI. It’s one of those places that I think every Canadian should see at least once.
More often than not, Canadians are seen as understated on the world stage, but this sprawling monument of grand proportion defies that stereotype.
6,000 tons of glistening white limestone tower 27 meters above the highest point of Vimy Ridge, overlooking the Douai plain.
It was Canada’s victory on this critical battlefront that established Canada’s nationhood on the world stage… it was no longer just another British Colony.
The last photo above is one of Liz and the kids in some of the trenches at Vimy Ridge. It’s a fitting image of how we see ourselves here… in the trenches & on the front lines. We see the fighting in the spiritual realm around us, we stand just as much chance at seeing shrapnel fly by as we do to take new ground.
We, just like you, are in a battle… Lord help us to maintain the ground that has been won and to follow your direction to take new ground as well.
The UPC of France is joining with UPCI churches all around the globe in making the month of January a month of prayer and fasting in an attempt to refocus our attention on the Lord and on the building up of his kingdom. The theme of the month is: Follow… for if we will follow the Lord Jesus, growth with result: personal growth and church growth alike.
New monthly partners needed in 2016
As I mentioned last week, we need to renew and expand our financial base as we look forward to the Brochu’s return in March.
Will you support us financially in 2016? … Click here.
Also… if you’d like to receive our two special eBooklets (Top 15 in 2015 & Building Engaged Youth, Building Missionaries, through Short Term Missions), Click Here. I’ll send them to you immediately when you subscribe to our monthly newsletters.
Thanks for stopping by today. Let all that you read inform your prayers for us and for the work in France.
Since we’d done a fair bit of visiting over the past week, we opted for a quiet New Year’s Eve as a family watching Mary Poppins (since we forgot to bring “the Sound of Music” with us).
We spent New Year’s Day preparing a nice meal that we would share with friends from the community… complete with foie gras, leek soup, duck and Italian panettone, topped off with a game of turkey foot over coffee. Lovely way to begin the new year & Liz outdid herself as the hostess with the mostest.
Tomorrow at church we’ll be kicking off the new year with a fresh call to grow in the Lord and reach out beyond our walls to those around us.
We’ve purchased calendars for each of our church members with a daily Bible verses to help each one discover some of the major themes of scripture. In addition though, we’ve also given everyone a second, gift-wrapped calendar that they can in turn give to a friend that they’ve been praying for. The goal… to bring others closer to Christ. Please keep this particular outreach in prayer this week.
Many of you know that our missionaries return to France in March – six months ahead of schedule thanks to #IAmGlobal. That being said, we’d like to continue on here for a while, working with them after their return.
Need: While on furlough, their budget covered several of our expenses which, when they return, will become our responsibility, increasing the amount of required monthly financial support.
I’ve put together the following 3-min video to outline “our Beginnings, our First Year and beyond.” It will generally reside elsewhere on the site, but I wanted to give you a sneak peak at it first.
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Subscribe to the monthly newsletter
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In the video I mentioned a special newsletter and article as my thanks for subscribing to the newsletter; spreading & building awareness. Here’s a quick overview:
I credit my current involvement in ministry to extensive Short Term Missions (STM) involvement beginning in youth. Missions truly changed my life. In this 6-page eBooklet, I detail:
– My STM experiences & their impact
– STM expectations & outcomes
– Positive outcome influencers
– UPCI STM opportunities
If you want to see young people impact the world and be impacted by Short Term Missions, this booklet will give you an overview of what’s possible.
This 4-page eBooklet is simply a quick overview of the Top 15 moments of Ministry involvement and Family Life during our first eleven months as AIMers (or volunteer missionaries) here in France.
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Both are .PDF documents, optimized for reading on your iPad, tablet or computer, but could be printed as well.
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Both of these eBooklets are my way of thanking subscribers to our Newsletter. If you’d like to receive them, simply click here to subscribe and you’ll immediately receive download links via email. (Newsletters are published bi-monthly or monthly at the most – so don’t worry, I won’t flood your inbox.)
In the month of March, our expenses will more than double. Below is a minimum breakdown of what we’ll need in new monthly financial partners:
If you or your church are not currently supporting us financially, would you consider doing so this month? Click Here for instructions on partnering with us.
Thank you for stopping by today. God bless you richly and help both of us to become more and more like him. Happy New Year!
Pass the tissues please! Not so much because we’re emotional about the holidays (yet), but because we’ve all been fighting colds this week.
As a Canadian living in France, the lead-up to Christmas has been a bit different as many of the visual cues that help you “get into the Spirit” have been missing.
Add to that the fact that we were away last week and it seems like just as soon as we land back home, Christmas had somehow snuck up on us. Before we could really think seriously about that however…
Eleven kids had a blast last Saturday as we hosted a games day with Franck & Marion Nowacki from Melun. Marion is the national Sunday School director and together with her husband, has ministered both in France and North America.
It’s amazing how much fun 9 boys and 2 girls can have with 5 Nerf guns a big yard & some pallets for “cover”! They enjoyed a 1/2-dozen other games before ending the evening with a bonfire and marshmallow roast.
The goal of the afternoon was to allow the kids to connect with the Nowackis through fun before they ministered to the kids the following morning, where everyone became child-like and enjoyed their team ministry. The Lord touched young and old alike… we are grateful!
We don’t have an Elf on a Shelf but we are sharing Christmas with a collie named Jacques. Friends Justin & Caroline Ward are spending Christmas in Texas and needed a dog-sitter; our kids were only too happy to oblige.
It’s noteworthy that Jacques is a well-travelled dog. Justin got him while he was an AIMer in Romania then returned to the USA with him before moving to France. Way to go Jacques!
Christmas eve day was fun & kind of unique! The city built a temporary ice skating rink right in front of city hall and the kids had been dying to go. We got together some friends and headed down. When temperatures are 13 (55) degrees though… it’s pretty hard to keep ice… well… hard. There were puddles all over the place and within minutes, after a few falls, the boys were rather wet! … but they had an absolute blast!
We walked through the Christmas market and had a hot treat to warm the insides before heading back to the house.
Normally at home, my mom’s seafood chowder is on the Christmas eve menu, but given the distance, we settled for corn chowder in stead. We started it off, however, with France’s famous foie-gras on baguette with some apricot jam as an appetizer (Oh… my!) and ended the evening by watching “The Nativity Story“ a 2006 depiction of Jesus’ birth… great show!
I love it that our kids are getting older. We weren’t awakened until 8:30ish! There may have been some Nerf-gun wars, some colouring & some new pyjamas.
We were able to find turkey (unlike at Thanksgiving – it’s mostly a Christmas meat) and Liz had some lime jello to make cucumber salad; so dinner was a hit!
After supper, since we’re dog-sitting a collie, what else was there to do but to watch Lassie before having a game of Apples to Apples & hitting the hay.
In the New Year, rather than publishing our monthly – bi-monthly newsletter here on the blog, I’ll be relying on Mailchimp to publish it via email… meaning you can receive it directly in your inbox…
If you’d like to receive our newsletter
Click Here to Subscribe
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Next week I’ll be posting a video for you and newsletter subscribers will receive a couple of bonuses as well… but more on that next Saturday (when we’ll be in 2016… can you believe it?).
Thank you for walking this road with us! We are here because of your generosity and see God’s hand at work because of your prayers. Merry Christmas friends. God bless you today!
As you’re sitting down with your morning coffee, I’m serving you up a few pics of our time away last week along with a few bullet points of the week that was:
Before France was ever in the picture, we began exploring Timeshare ownership. It was fairly onerous and a bit unfamiliar at first, but it paid off last week because we had a two bedroom apartment that cost only the gas to drive there + any visits & groceries on site.
We drove through 115 tunnels to get there… we counted. The shortest was 40m (120′) and the longest over 11.6km (7.2 miles)… hence today’s title.
Though within 45 min of Pisa & Florence and a bit more to Rome by train, we spent most of our time in the apartment relaxing, with the exception of a day in Pisa and two afternoons exploring nearby hill-top villages. Liz & the kids were ready for their first break from school and I did virtually nothing on the computer. What a great break. Monday morning we left for home, stopped on the Italian side of Mont Blanc for a ride up the mountain then made a final push, arriving home at 2am Tuesday.
We are hosting the National Sunday School director and her family for an afternoon of kids & youth activities at the church followed by a Holy Ghost rally tomorrow (Sunday). Pray for the youth that will be present! Because of your prayers & support, you are part of every victory here!
God bless you as you prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus with friends and families this week!
Here are some pictures from the other side of 115 tunnels!
(click for larger versions)
Since we’re away from Châtellerault for a few days of family vacation, I’m trying to minimize “screen time” so for today’s post, I’m serving up what Sophie, Dominic & Timo said recently about being AIMKids…. see below.
Just before that though…
Note: This was recently published in the November issue of the Pentecostal Messenger (monthly publication of the Atlantic District).
If you find it difficult to read:
Click the image for a larger version
Click here to download a PDF
Thank you for reading & praying!
God bless your day!
City Hall in Tours
It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas, minus the snow… mixed feelings about that:
Jury’s still out!
We’ve just published our latest partner newsletter. If you are a regular reader of the blog then you will be pretty much up to date.
If you know someone who is interested in or has a burden for France… feel free to print it for them or forward them the link. It will give a good snapshot of the past couple of months.
Click here to read the newsletters:
For those who haven’t seen it yet, we launched this 2:48-min video on Monday. The 3-fold goal:
1. Offer 3 verses to encourage people in uncertain times.
2. Direct them toward our Facebook and web pages.
3. Offer them a Home Bible Study
In the next 2-3 weeks we’ll distribute 2,500 cards in an attempt to cast the net wide. Please join us in prayer for this undertaking… souls are in the balance.
(Note video is in French)
(*unapologetic commercial alert*)
Soph and Dominic each have a blog and are “occasional bloggers” – they don’t blog often, but when they do, it’ll give you a window on the missions world from a kid’s perspective.
Click the images to check ’em out & SUBSCRIBE
(You’ll get an email each time they publish)
Aside from all that good stuff… it’s been a productive week, albeit fairly heavy on administrative tasks:
…looks busy when you sit down & list it, but it’s just a mix of “life” and “ministry”… not unlike you. You balance work, family and involvement in between… God bless & strengthen you as you do! The only difference is, you allow us to do it in France and help grow the church while we’re here. Thank you.
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As many of you read this, I’ll be at Bible School in Melun. I head home tonight for service tomorrow and then we’ll hit the highway for a few days of rest & relaxation.
Kids in French schools had a 2-week break in late October and will get another at Christmas. Our AIMkids haven’t had that luxury; along with Liz, they are really looking forward to a week off before return & hit the road running in the lead-up to Christmas.
Note: We’ll be hosting a special guest this Christmas… details to follow)
One more glimpse at Christmas preparations here…
Christmas Market in Tours
AIM Long 