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Psalm 57:1-3
Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me,
for in you my soul takes refuge;
in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge,
till the storms of destruction pass by.
I cry out to God Most High,
to God who fulfills his purpose for me.
He will send from heaven and save me;
he will put to shame him who tramples on me.
God will send out his steadfast love and his faithfulness!
The last year, but especially the last few months, have been a mess of constantly changing plans and negotiations with legal, family, and ministry issues. I have known for awhile that, due to the time I have spent on the field, I have had a pending tax obligation to come back for a 6 month stay in the US. Trying to negotiate how and exactly when that would take place, especially with the recent transition of me from Josiah Venture to GlobalOne80, and considering Natalie’s job at the embassy, was complicated. In the end, we realized we needed a reset all around to gear up for this next phase of ministry so here is the current situation:
Although it pulls us out of our ministry context for a time, this tax requirement comes at a crucial and divine moment considering a lot of the changes that have taken place in our life and ministry. Due to C-19 travel restrictions, Natalie has not been able to visit the states for 5 years and has not been able to connect with many of you or my own family. Due to many of the spiritual attacks and personal familial loss we have experienced in the past 18 months, we are going to use this unique time to get counseling and get spiritually filled back up so we can return to the field healthy and prepared for the next leg in our missional journey. Since I have not been back to my home base since my transition as well, this time will enable me to further flesh out the vision for my media ministry in Czech and Europe with the help of Scottsdale Bible Church and my new organization (based in Mesa). We plan to set up a few open houses during our time here and will be reaching out to you all to set up individual appointments when we can reconnect and better layout our plans for the future. In the mean time, we look forward to seeing many of you around the church and at other events in the valley.
If you are from out of town but will be visiting Phoenix during the holidays, we would love to connect with you in that window when you are in town, please email back to this message or call me so we can prioritize those meetings.
All the logistics of the past few months have prevented me from focusing much on language, but I am getting increased practice helping Natalie translate for her mother and plan to continue studying while in America. Natalie, as you may remember, has been studying German and passed her CEFR C1 test right before coming to the US. She will continue studying in preparation for passing her C2 (top level) during our stay in the states and will start looking for jobs utilizing that new skill in preparation for our return to Europe.
In September, I joined a MetaVerse church online conference put on by TheChurch.Digital, GACX and The Jesus Film Project to help train and encourage people to start and develop metaverse churches and ministries. During the four weeks of the conference, we were broken up into small groups and were tasked each week with developing concepts for adapting the Jesus Film into metaverse experiences. My cohort worked really well together and we ended up winning the top prize for our concepts. That resulted in a $3,000 group prize we were able to use to purchase materials to continue to pursue VR ministry. We used the money to get some of our group headsets who didn’t have them. I used my portion to purchase a course to learn how to use a popular game graphics engine called Unreal Engine so I can start developing the experiences we developed.
If you missed it, I wrote the monthly newsletter for GlobalOne80. If you missed it, you can read it here.
In partnership with a former colleague in Czech, I started fleshing out my summer camp film discussion guides for an evangelistic film club he is doing with his local youth group. We are doing one a month. We have already done How to Train Your Dragon and Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse. We are doing Love, Actually this month for Christmas. I am working on hosting these on my website for broader access and use but you can download and reference them on dropbox for now, if you are interested. I still plan to partner these with youtube video analyses of the films in future but haven’t gotten there yet.Natalie and I will also be working during this elongated home assignment on the Czech translation for the Gate Zero Bible video game and a documentary about the life of John Wycliffe called Morningstar that a Scottish filmmaker friend of mine recently released.
One of my group members in the Metaverse Church conference was a missionary. He originally went to serve in Russia but was exiled when the war started. We immediately connected on our visions for how the metaverse and gaming can be used to reach the lost. We have been in regular communication. I feel our meeting was a divine appointment and I think he will be a critical point of encouragement and sharpening for me in developing this area of ministry in Europe.
Although connected, my media connections in the US have gotten a little stale and I intend to use this extended time to reconnect with media industry and ministry contacts to retool.
