Pastor Roberto Bastante, Senior Pastor of Alianza Cristiana Igelsia de Miraflores in Lima (http://www.alianzacristiana.tv/site/) is preaching through Unit 1 of the Person of Jesus. They have 100-150 small groups who will study each lesson during the week. We trained 50 leaders last September and 100 leaders last month to lead Person of Jesus groups. The church wants the Person of Jesus to be a part of who they are as a church and the churches associated with them. They have 3,000 who attend the 6 worship services. 

Here is the link of Pastor Roberto preaching Lesson 1 Compassion this past weekend:

http://vimeo.com/41593663

We look forward to sharing more about our recent visit to Peru in the weeks ahead!

In our A Praying Life material, we talk about approaching our Heavenly Father as freely as we’d approach our earthly dads. This can be a helpful comparison for people who’ve enjoyed good relationships with their dads, but for people who have had more complex experiences, it’s often a stumbling block. Bob Allums, director of A Praying Life Ministries recently asked Mark Moody, a pastor and volunteer with seeJesus, to share from his own experience how God fathers the fatherless...

My father passed away when I was 12 years old. It was a time of deep grieving and loss for me; my father had been my hero. Complicating the matter was the means of his death: suicide. I felt as though I wore a scarlet letter on my shirt wherever I went in my small town. Dad had been well-liked and known in the community. How could our family (and me, specifically) ever recover from this? It was a season of shame, a season where I believed that something was wrong with me that was NOT wrong with everyone else. This is a definition of shame from Sandra Wilson’s book, Released from Shame, which is referred to in the A Praying Life seminar.

Growing up in the church, I was aware that God was a “Father to the fatherless” – a reality that, in some ways, was hard to know; it would have been easier not to be aware of this promise. How is God going to be a Father to me when not having a father was my new reality? How would He be my Father in the midst of all this shame and sadness?

We often find ourselves living in the tension between the hope of God’s promise and the reality of our situation. It isn't easy. We can’t see how the two—God’s promise and our current reality—will come together. After my father’s death, my temptation was to think, “It doesn’t do any good to hope. It doesn’t do any good to live in this tension; just give up hope and it will be easier to live in this reality.” Giving up hope seemed easier and safer, but I was on the quick and slippery road to despair.

As we look at the Old Testament, it is out of these kinds of stories that God’s activity emerges most clearly. Often, the bigger the gap between God’s promise and the situation we find ourselves in, the more beautiful and richer the story of redemption God weaves.

As I have learned through A Praying Life, this gap (referred to in the seminar as the Sadness Gap) is illustrated biblically as a wilderness or desert. In the desert, human hope dies. Human dreams die. Our best plans die. We feel completely boxed in and the only open door to us is God. This is the place where we learn to pray; this is where we learn to connect with God. Who went through this desert experience? There are many examples of people learning to trust God in the desert for a promise that did not match their reality—think of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and David.

So why does God take us through these desert seasons? It’s hard to say. Possibly to help our prayers focus less on changing the circumstance and more on trusting Him in the circumstance. God’s agenda may be much grander than changing the situation, but without experiencing the difficult circumstance, we will never experience His provision. What we know for sure is that even in these dark seasons, God is taking advantage of these moments to shape us into the image of His Son, Jesus. And yet, we are not to lose heart; He is also actively working on the situation. This is why He tells us to come to Him as children and ask Him for specific things.

A year after my father’s death, I had just finished up a very unsuccessful freshman year of high school. In a phrase, it had been a train wreck; socially, spiritually, athletically, and academically, I was barely keeping afloat. I needed a change. During the summer of that year, I attended a Christian camp in Western Massachusetts. One afternoon, I was at my cabin enjoying the afternoon when a thought came to me. Why not see if I can stay at the camp this next year? I could go to school in this community and have a fresh start at life. The thought was bold and came from nowhere but it seemed like something that I should at least inquire about. I decided to act.

I went to talk with the camp director about this idea. After some brief discussion and a phone call to my mother, the camp director and his wife decided to take me in for the year. Looking back, it was just what I needed. God used the camp and program director to father me through a very turbulent time. The year away from home gave me just enough space to “breathe.” It was then that God began to do a work in my heart to “normalize” me, so I could go back home and not feel like I was the odd guy wearing a scarlet letter.

So God kept his promise to be a “Father to the fatherless” through a camp. Three years later, as a 17-year-old at a staff retreat for the camp I called home just a few years earlier, I sat on the banks of the Quobbin Reservoir in Western Massachusetts and prayed, “God, I don’t know what you can do with me, but if you can do anything, I am yours.” How did God move me from being a lost, floundering 13-year-old to having a heart for God to do whatever He wanted in my life? In part, because I had observed through this camp, extended family, and other mentors how God could use these people to father me and I knew I could trust Him to be my Father. I could trust Him with my life.

As I have better understood my story through the life of prayer, I have understood that in the desert years of high school, God was shaping me as a person. There was a story being woven in my life even though I was unable at the time to understand it. It was a time where I was learning to abide with Jesus. As is said in the A Praying Life seminar, it’s in the desert where you learn to be with God’s heart.

Are you in a desert? If so, remember this: God has not led you into a wilderness to die. God is weaving a story in your life as you journey through the desert. The wonder of what He is doing can only be experienced as we trust Him in the middle and look back with faith when it ends. That may happen in this life, it may happen in the next. God does not promise to resolve all our prayer stories this side of eternity. But He does promise us Himself as we journey through the desert. So cry out to Him. Ask Him for help. Join with David who cried out in Psalm 63:1, O God, you are my God;  earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. Let God be a Father to you in the desert.

By Richard Eckhardt

We have a passion for Peru. A month ago, we received the Spanish translation of the Leader's Manual for the A Praying Life Seminar. Last week we received the Quechua translation of Lesson One: Compassion from The Person Of Jesus manual. We can't read a word of it except "Jesus" who is throughout the whole lesson. This week we received the Spanish Participant Guide for Lesson One from The Person of Jesus, with more lessons to be completed in the near future. Bob Loker (seeJesus board member and trainer) and I will use these discipleship tools in Peru over the next two weeks. Our goal of this trip is to equip lovers of Jesus in several cities and towns, from Lima to the high Andes to northern Peru. We ask for prayers that everyday believers in Peru will become extraordinary followers of Jesus through the work of the Spirit on this trip.

Dear Praying Friend,

Our team to Australia had a great time doing both the A Praying Life and the Person of Jesus seminar. It was the fourth seminar we've done in the last six months in an English speaking post-Christian culture: Ireland, England (2x), and Australia. In all four locations we were struck by how the church had made significant shifts in adapting to a post-Christian world. They loved the Person of Jesus study, which was written for a culture that is losing its memory of Christianity. It does that in two ways: for Christians, it drives home the need for an authentic life that reflects Jesus; and for non-Christians, it shows them the heart of our faith, the beauty of Jesus.

This quote from Skye Jethani, the senior editor of Leadership Journal, really captures what we are doing:

"The primary purpose of the church, before mission, before healing, before transforming the culture; the first purpose of the church is to give a ravishing vision of who Jesus Christ is and let him draw people to himself. But we are not presenting Jesus Christ, we are presenting mission, or we are presenting transformation, we’re presenting healthy marriage or healthy family. And so people come for reasons other than Jesus himself…Until we get the Gospel right, we shouldn’t be surprised that young people are walking away…Before we are called to something, before we are called to somewhere, we are called to someone.”

While the historically Christian underpinnings of our American culture are breaking down, Christianity itself is not. Nor is Jesus. We just have to learn to do things differently. We need to dig deeper into Christ and the depths of his love. The old ways aren't working.

A team (Richard Eckhardt, International Coordinator and Bob Loker, Board Member) is heading off to Peru this week to do our first ever A Praying Life Seminar in Spanish along with testing our new Person of Jesus Quechuan translation. Jonathan Winfree is heading off next week to Uganda to do training or prep work with three of our Ugandan partner organizations.

Finances are still very tight. If you haven’t already done so, we continue to encourage all of our praying friends to become official “Friends of seeJesus.” http://seejesus.net/friends

I'm thankful for your prayers for our work. I'm about half way through the first draft of the book on Ruth, centered around love. I write in the mornings and do everything else in the afternoon.

Paul Miller

seeJesus team members Julie Courtney, Lyle Caswell, and Bob Allums recently returned from a week of training in “the land down under.” They led both the Person of Jesus and A Praying Life seminars at Christ Community Church Central in Brisbane. The team was delighted to hear that people came away with “eyes open to looking at Jesus in ways they never had before and excitement towards having a tool [in Person of Jesus] to use in their evangelism ministry.” Thanks, Christ Community for your wonderful hospitality and Mission to the World for the invitation!

Dear Praying Friends,

By Lydia Erin Leggett

In January, I went with Bob Allums, Julie Courtney, and Jeff Keiser, a fellow trainee, into a Muslim country to teach A Praying Life and the Person of Jesus at a conference. The fifty attendees, mostly British and American, have given everything for the sake of the Gospel, settling their families down in foreign and sometimes hostile territory in order to share Jesus.

My task was to love, and to learn; to teach, and to be mentored. I was to teach one lesson from the Person of Jesus. Here’s what happened.

Before we left, I studied several sections of the 48-lesson material, unsure what to teach. “I don’t know these people. I have no idea what they need to hear,” I kept thinking.

Throughout the flights (and there were four!), I wondered what to teach.

My prayers were simple: “Jesus, what should I teach? What do they need in this limited timeframe?” ‑ is unrest continued after we arrived; my prayers got shorter: “Lord, what do I do?”

Finally, at dinner on the first night of the conference, I told our seeJesus

team that I thought I should teach the lesson on Sadness (Lesson 39). I couldn’t tell them why, because I didn’t know. It just seemed right.

An hour later we were in sitting in the session, listening as several teams gave their reports. Our team was there to get to know the people. That’s where God spoke... and lowered the boom.

A husband and wife filled their fellow workers in on what was going on in their country: “Sadly, this year we lost six friends.” What?

That’s right. Six of their Christian friends had either been martyred in country or died of carbon monoxide poisoning. A simple, matter-of-fact sentence. The aching heart was there, but sadly familiar.

These people have seen suffering. It is a daily part of their lives. And I had solid confirmation that we needed to look at how Jesus encountered sadness.

Later, when I taught the lesson, I wish you could have been there while they watched Jesus model sadness. I wish you could have seen the quiet and subtle, “ah ha!,” I saw as a worker based in Asia marveled at Jesus heading toward the cross. The Father gave me quiet calm while teaching, when I would normally battle a racing heart and shaking speech.

This is what we do. We help people see Jesus. We want to go where we are

called, and help connect people to their lifelines: Jesus and prayer. We equip as well as encourage, opening up the material to them so they can disciple others in their own contexts. Several of my new friends from the conference want to bring the Person of Jesus study back to their fields.

So, I cannot say it enough: Thank you for enabling this ministry. Thank you for believing that God would do wonderful things wherever he takes us. And thank you forhaving the confidence that he’ll continue to work.

Lydia is the assistant to A Praying Life Ministries and a trainee with seeJesus. She and her husband Aaron live in Cañon City, CO.

Our team had a great time in England. I've been to Britain several times but it has always been with Americans. This time we were immersed in British culture. We loved their sense of humor. If I added these six words to my vocabulary, I might pass as British: brilliant, lovely, fantastic, proper, cheerio, and really. As in, "that was a brilliant seminar, really lovely, just fantastic".

In our debriefing, I asked our team for their highlights. Bob Allums (Director of A Praying Life Ministries) said it for all of us, "British Christians responded so warmly to our material and seminars because they are living in a post-Christian world, a world that no longer has a memory about Jesus. Our material fits better in England than America because they engaged with that gap." It is the world that America is becoming.

The British immediately picked up on the style of our material as well. Jonathan Winfree, our African Director, who did The Person of Jesus track with me, was struck by how many in our track were ready to move ahead into more advanced training. They needed very little training in an interactive style.

What a surprise...a small budget surplus at fiscal year end. Thank you Lord and thanks to all of you who gave! Your generosity is appreciated!

It was a "harvest year" for seeJesus.  A leading evangelical publisher in Brazil just finished translating A Praying Life and Love Walked Among Us into Portuguese.  I sat at the edge of my seat for most of our lunch meeting, fascinated by his descriptions of Brazilian culture. It amazes me how the "prayer side" of our work is pulling the "Jesus side." This publisher heard seeJesus through the book, A Praying Life, then got interested in Love Walked Among Us. Now they would like us to send a team to provide training through the Person of Jesus Seminar. The church is exploding in Brazil.

When I first read as a child about early Christian martyrs, I was fascinated but puzzled. I was fascinated by their willingness to follow Jesus to death, to witness (the meaning of martyr) through their deaths. I could see the necessity and even beauty of martyrdom, but I was puzzled by the early church’s treating it as a prize, as a kind of Academy Award, something to be sought after. It is one thing to have martyrdom happen to you, it is entirely another to prize it. That I didn’t understand. Oddly enough the only place that preserves this early Christian attitude to martyrdom is Islam.