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