Living An Honourable Life

On January 10th I had the privilege of preaching in my home church in Burnley. The message – taken from Luke 1 & 2 – is about how we can live honourable lives before God and impact the world we live in.

If you’d like to listen to the message then click on the link.

You can listen to more great teaching from Life Church Burnley by subscribing free with iTunes or directly from the church website www.lifechurchburnley.com

2010 Winter News Online

Click on the newsletter image below to download the latest Faith Partnership news pdf. Some great articles and news updates…

Ukraine Revisited

It’s always so encouraging to hear about thriving churches, and even more so when I’ve visited these churches in the past. I recently heard from a couple of pastors in Ukraine, and thought it would be great to pass on their news.

Marganets

In my pre-NLI days, back in 2004/2005, I was involved in a couple of short-term mission teams from my home church, Life Church Burnley. The main focus of the mission was our partner church in Nikopol, Ukraine, but on both trips we visited their mother church in Marganets, about 20 miles from Nikopol. We had some great times with Pastor Oleg Lugovs’kyy and the church community in Marganets and have fond memories of our mission endeavours there.

I was impressed with Oleg’s vision and passion to see the church impact the Marganets community. He was willing to push the boundaries. One year he gave us a chance to appear on local TV!! (I still have the evidence!) What’s more, Oleg also had such a refreshing attitude to women in ministry. He treated his lovely wife as an equal  partner in leading the church. What’s more, Marganets was the first Ukrainian church I preached in!

So, imagine my delight to reconnect with Oleg again on Facebook recently. This is what he had to say about current church life in Marganets.

Marganets church building - a renovated factory

“We’re fine here in Marganets in spite of different difficulties around. The church is growing and praying. Praise God nowadays we pay attention on evangelism. People from the church evangelize personally and it’s the main thing that helps to bring other people to the church.

Celebrating miracles!

Also we make a lot of printed advertisements and newsletters that contain testimonies. We have made our own TV programs on the two regional channels. God has opened this door for us and it’s a great miracle for us. Impossible is possible! PRAISE GOD!!!!! We conduct healing service for unbelievers once a month. That’s all we live with.”

Inside the church building

Great to see what God is doing in Marganets these days.

Poltava

The first NLI church planting project in Ukraine started in 2004. As well as the church in Nikopol, 11 other churches were planted, including one in Poltava, led by a great young couple, Andrey and Natasha Zibrov. In my role as STM coordinator with NLI I spent 4 days on a site visit here in August 2006. Andrey had organised a 5-day camp for local kids. The STM team played a key part in the camp program, as well as engaging in ministry in the church plant itself. You might recall the incredible testimony I shared from this mission, when young Stefan became a Christian, got baptised and filled with the Holy Spirit all in the space of 24 hours. It was certainly a memorable few days for us all.

Just before Christmas I received an email from Andrey. Not all the news was good, but Andrey & Natasha’s faith and passion shines through.

2009 was for us not easy, but fruitful. Hard, because we lost a child. Natasha was pregnant and in August we lost the child. Emotionally it was not simple to endure this event, but the Lord was with us and gave forces (strength). Thanks you for your prayers.

This year there were as many remarkable events. As usual, in the summer, we did children’s – teenagers camp. It was remarkable time both for children and for us. In the evenings there came parents of children and their unbeliever friends – all of them spoke about unusually warm conditions in a camp. It turned out fine!

Poltava youth camp

The water baptizing event followed. 11 persons from church made the decision to follow the Lord. This time we have made it more festive, with a path made from flowers on the water. After the baptisms we had entertainment and memorable gifts: the Lord gave us blessed weather!

Last month we had celebratory service – a Harvest holiday. Our hall was full. We leased a projector and made a presentation of all the events of church in a year. We had very good responses from visitors!

One week in church there was a wedding of two couples. It turned out to be a very beautiful evangelism service because there were many unbelievers, relatives and friends.

A double wedding!

This year we have started to have family video seminars. It is a success. Families enjoy participating and testify to changes and successes. We plan to continue seminars next year and to develop family services.

We pray about our own building for the church. The site we have, near Poltava, is not convenient, as not many people have cars. We pray and search the city as the prices for real estate have fallen, and we trust in a miracle from the Lord for our church. We have started to donate already, believing for the finance on building. Pray please for it together with us. With love in Christ, Andrey, Natasha, Vera, Grisha.

Czech Republic – Serving The Vision

Radim Čapla works as mission coordinator and administrator for the NLI Church Planting project in Czech Republic. We’ve just completed the first full year of this project, so what better opportunity for Radim to reflect back on his first year…

Radim Capla

NLI has been in relationship with a group of Pentecostal churches in the Ostrava area since 2005. In 2009, six new churches were launched in target cities that are mostly without any evangelical church at the moment. I joined NLI in January 2009 and have already learnt a lot. My scope of responsibility is to assist the church planters in communication with NLI, with the overseas partner churches and to help with organisational matters.

The idea of planting new churches as a way of a church growth is excellent. There are so many lost people, maybe even looking for ‘something’, but no church is available in their neighbourhood. I’ve been humbled by the church planters’ attitude. Their way of serving the Lord is amazing. The sacrifices they bring as families are sometimes enormous – small babies, full time jobs, serving in their mother church and on the top of that, starting a new church in another community! For some of them it is a real sacrifice for the Kingdom. I love these people.

Church Planting…

The NLI commitment to actively support the church planters works very well: really a good vision. It would be much more demanding without such a support: for some planters perhaps even impossible. Now you can see how visions and dreams, which some church planters have had for a long time, are becoming real! Isn’t it awesome? The permanent NLI involvement also creates the feeling that the church planter is not left alone somewhere in space! It is very encouraging. The church planters can see that there are many people supporting them – their mother church, NLI, and brothers and sisters from the partner churches.

I can see how demanding the task is to start a new church. Without God’s blessing it is impossible. However, the importance of other people’s support, faithful brothers and sisters, is to be emphasized too. Church planters need another people to support their hands. What is great about this project is that there is real teamwork. NLI creates a bridge between overseas partner churches willing to support the missions here, and the Czech church planters who are called to do the job. It is really nice to see this kind of cooperation and commitment. The partner churches are doing a great job in faithfully supporting the planters with prayers, finances and mission teams. I applaud it! It is a strong help for the project!

Mission Teams…

The mission teams did a great job here this first year. I realised how vital the short term mission teams can be. They can make a real impact on the community or on a group of people, especially when the mission is well prepared in advance. It was encouraging to see the effort of teams helping the church planters to impact their community. Contacts and friendships were made and I am really looking forward the next few years, as I believe we will see fruit from the mission. I was nicely surprised that all the teams came with a humble attitude – “What do you want us to do here? We came to serve you. Tell us what you want.” They even came with a willingness to do manual (practical) work to bless the local community.

The soil in Czech is not that soft, but we can see how things are moving forward. We read testimonies from the field of how God is opening doors and how people are responding. It is a long race and we rejoice in every small success. We cannot see multitudes coming yet, but each soul given by God is a miracle. I think that at the end of the project we should have a big celebration of what the Lord has done! Please continue to pray for us, as the opposition is often strong.

Thank you all who support the church in our country in any way. May the Lord reward you in abundance! God bless you real good!

Thanks Radim. You’re doing a great job!!

Please pray for Radim and his family. He does a great job in helping us support the church planters and in organising the mission teams in Czech Republic. I know from personal experience that the job can have its frustrations, so pray particularly for smooth and effective communication with the church planters, partner churches and project staff.

To find out more about Leadership development, church planting and mission teams in Europe, check out the ‘mandate’ and ‘mobilize’ pages on this website… then get in touch with NLI.

Mission Impact

“I’m passionate about sharing the Gospel and reaching the unreached! One of my passions is seeing God work in the darkest places: seeing him use people to impact the world in which we live. God has given us all talents and abilities to shine in a dark world! He looks for people who will stand in the gap for their friends and families. He wants us to be willing to go to the ends of the earth to share His love. I’m privileged to have God as my Saviour and feel it is my responsibility to bring the love of God to those who don’t get it and to share it with anyone and everyone.”

These are not the words of some seasoned evangelist or famous preacher, they come from an 18yr old lad from England…Chris Budhi is from Yorkshire, (UK) a county not known for its passionate men, but as you can see, Chris is clearly bucking the trend. He’s passionate about mission and about serving God. This Summer Chris took a 6-week break to invest his life into mission in Ukraine. Here’s his story.

Chris Budhi

“I learned Russian at school for 3yrs. Why? Because I believed God was going to call me to a nation where they speak Russian. I actually felt called to Ukraine at the age of 14 when I went on my first mission there (NLI mission to Poltava). I fell in love with the country and the people. At the beginning of 2009 I had an opportunity to get involved with a church in Kiev during the summer break. I prayed about it and God told me as clear as anything that this was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down and that I was to go and serve the church. On 27th June 2009 I went to Ukraine for 6-weeks, to the ‘Light of the World’ church in Kiev, where Igor Stepchuk is the pastor. During my 6-week stay I was involved in loads of different church activities.

With some of the kids on mission

I went on mission to Nikopol with a team from Kiev. We spent time with the young people in the church, including some relationship seminars. We also held evangelistic events, including a concert with a Christian rapper! We played games, had water fights, and held competitions with the children on the streets.

After a week back in Kiev, I helped out at a camp with about 100 children. One of the things I helped with was the Bible study group – I had 6 lads aged 14-18… and an interpreter of course! We prayed together in our groups and did crafts and fun games with the kids. Every evening we met together and had a camp fire. On the final morning in my Bible group I had an opportunity to preach the gospel to 4 of the groups (about 45 youth). At the end I gave an appeal and 15-20 people asked God to be their Saviour! This was the highlight of the whole time I was in the Ukraine.

Finally we went to a church in Pitihatki. We did a lot of practical work – cleaning, gardening, chopping wood, and decorating various buildings on the church site. It was hard work! We had some fun too – competitions with the kids, relationship seminars for the youth, youth meetings, visited local families, and held a tennis tournament at the church. We also held an evangelistic event and took the Sunday school. I had the under 5s. They were great.

Doing crafts with kids

What impacted me most was the camp. Some of the kids were from backgrounds where their parents beat them or shout at them all the time. Others have been brought up to believe they are a mistake, because their parents tell them that all the time. They were lovely kids. They were so happy to be part of the camp. Because I’m from England a lot of the children were happy that I was there and wanted to spend lots of time with me. This was cool in itself, but the best thing was seeing these kids come out of their shell and start to join in the fun.

We noticed that some of the kids wouldn’t join in the fun because of their backgrounds. It was like their past was holding them back, so it was great to see them start to open up and allow us to pray with them. And then on the last day when those youth responded to the gospel and accepted Christ into their lives, you could see that the camp had affected their lives so much that they didn’t want to go back home without God. It’s an awesome experience to see how the Word of God has such an impact and changes the lives of young people!

Sharing the gospel

I love to see God at work in people’s situations and see their lives change when they let God take control. I believe it’s our job as Christians to share what we have (God) with everyone: to love unconditionally so that people will see this God we preach about!! God is an awesome God. He always has been and always will be. In John 10:10, Jesus says He has come to give us a life of abundance. This starts when we start to share this life with others, giving people a glimpse of the awesomeness of God, showing people that God is in control and that when we ask God to be our Saviour He gives us this totally amazing life – giving us stuff we never thought we would have or doing stuff we never thought we would do. It’s our responsibility to share this life with others. Freely we have received, freely we must give!!!”

Maybe one day Chris will be a famous preacher. He certainly has the heart and passion of an evangelist! Chris is back serving in his local church, working at McDonalds and raising finance for future mission ventures. He plans to go back to Ukraine in 2010 and then attend the Planet Shakers College (Australia) in 2011.

Looking Beyond 2009

Next Level International (NLI) has been built on a solid foundation of partnership.  In the past eighteen years we have seen over 7000 leaders trained, over 130 churches planted directly and hundreds more indirectly, and thousands of individuals mobilized into frontline evangelism. Europe is an ever-changing landscape, particularly evident in this last decade. We have seen the European Union (EU) continue to stretch its borders, as they include more post communist nations.  The often volatile Balkan region is now being welcomed into the EU family and the first Muslim nation is being considered for candidacy.

For NLI, what this all means is that we need to change and challenge our thinking and actions. In a post-Christian Europe where many countries number the evangelical witness at less than 1% there is much more to be done.  We know that the post-communist hunger that existed for many years is waning, but we continue to see the deep spiritual need for the power of the Gospel. We are called to see the creation of movements. Addition will not get the job done . It will take exponential multiplication.

With this in mind, and a strong desire to build on the past, NLI has developed a regional focus. We are currently training leaders in 5 of the 6 regions of Europe.  As well there are church planting and short term mission initiatives in 4 of the 6 regions. Our aim is to expand our ministry initiatives in every region over the next two years while adapting our training/projects/teams more specifically to each culture. We believe this will enable us to move closer to the goal of a ministry relationship in every nation of Europe by 2020.  The nations currently being targeted for new ministry initiatives include France, Italy, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Hungary and Albania. (Doug Watson: Nov 2009)

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News Update

A pensive moment!

The other prayer request was for a 3rd trainer at the forthcoming ALTC in Crimea. The great news is that we have secured both trainer and sponsorship. The sponsorship has come from one of our awesome partner churches and the trainers are… me and Greg! When we looked at the remaining two subjects for the module, we felt that we could cover them between us. So, Greg will be teaching about ‘balancing ministry and family’ and I will be teaching about ‘problem solving’. This is ideal, because it means I can pilot some of the new DNA curriculum on solutions-oriented leadership.

Thank you for your prayers. Please continue to pray for us over the next few weeks. As you can see from the newsletter, we do have some busy weeks coming up. We’ve also had some recent challenges in Crimea, so our time out there in October is going to be very crucial.

Get A Revelation

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of preaching at Calvary Pentecostal Church, Dudley (UK). It’s a great church and I had a really blessed time with the folks. As well as updating them on current NLI initiatives and showing a couple of DVD, I brought a message about how revelation leads to passion and response. I would highly recommend you listen to the message as it’s been a bit of a ‘revelation’ in my thinking and I believe it will challenge you too.

Click on ‘Get A Revelation’ and you should be able to listen directly to the message.

(You can also subscribe to Calvary Church podcasts through iTunes)

Hot off the press – Summer Newsletter

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