2024, Let's Go!

The final stretch of 2023 was super eventful and rich with ministry opportunities (got some highlights for you below)! We also cherished time with our famililes over the holidays and are very excited to have celebrated our little girl's 1st Birthday. Can't believe Avonlea is already a one year old and close to walking and talking! 

Now, we're back in LA and bursting with excitement. We're ready to keep going, keep serving Jesus in this city in 2024! We've already been busy attending ministry events, having strategic meetings with our key people and leaders, and building new relationships. We'll have lots more updates soon! Suffice to say, 2024 is gonna be awesome. 

But for now, we want to share a few highlights from our last couple months in 2023. Thank you for making these things possible! 

Thanksgiving in the Park ☀️

By now, you've likely heard us talk about our ongoing homeless ministry in MacArthur Park—a consistent and beloved way we serve our city each week. One of Los Angeles' most grim realities is its staggering number of unhoused people. On any given night, between 40,000 to 60,000 individuals can be found in tents and on sidewalk benches sleeping without shelter in LA County. Given this constant suffering, Thanksgiving brings a special opportunity to break the monotony and give love to our homeless neighbors. Across the city, numerous organizations coordinate efforts to ensure unhoused people get to enjoy a warm meal and fellowship. 

We were happy to be among those out and about in the city on Thanksgiving Day. We teamed up with some of our local ministry friends to bring a hearty Thanksgiving breakfast to our homeless neighbors in MacArthur Park. This year, we brought cheesy potato casserole, turkey, soup, pastries, coffee and juice and were able to serve breakfast to around 50 people, while also sharing the gospel through a message on the love and mercy of Jesus. Avonlea joined us too, and people were thrilled to see her. Their kind and affectionate reaction to our baby daughter that morning was special for us not just as missionaries, but also as parents. It's beautiful seeing her small presence bring comfort and a timely reminder of God's goodness in this world to our homeless brothers and sisters. It's humbling that they know her by name and ask about her on a weekly basis. 

Also exciting is that, in this messy yet beloved place, we've witnessed several individuals recently embrace faith and commit their lives to Christ for the first time, as well as dozens of others growing in their discipleship on an ongoing basis. 

All of these things remind us that the gospel is made for hard places. And that despite our society's incessant social narratives of tension and angst and division, genuine relationships are in fact possible across class, race, culture, and other socioeconomic barriers when the generosity and love of Jesus is felt. 

Arise in Prayer West Coast 🙏

In November, we attended and served at the Arise in Prayer Conference, a gathering that brought together our extended IPHC family on the west coast. The event served as a powerful source of inspiration and encouragement. 

Jon helped lead worship for the conference with Pastor Mark Hammond, and we prayed and connected with many leaders and friends throughout the conference, strengthening existing bonds and creating new ones. As always, relationships and collaboration are critical to the success and fruitfulness of ministry here in LA. These kinds of opportunities are powerful investments in the future, as well timely boosts of courage in the present. 

Online Learning Community 💻

In an age of noise and competing stories, developing cultural discernment and faith familiarity are as important as ever.

To that end, in November we launched our second online learning community, this time diving into one of the most important theological / cultural topics of our age: homosexuality. Each week, we meet to study and discuss a book that focuses on responding to 21 of the most common secular arguments against the historically biblical Christian view of sexuality and marriage. We learn to navigate secular arguments like, "Love is love" and "the Bible is harmful to the LGBT+ community" and "Jesus never talked about homosexuality." Stuff like that. 

Our commitment to navigating these discussions stems from our goal to help the emerging generation of disciples understand their own faith and be able to articulate that faith powerfully and thoughtfully to the post-Christian secular world around them. By immersing ourselves in these conversations--by looking into the hard questions--we aim to enhance both our comprehension of and our ability to embody the teachings of Christ in a way that reaches the contemporary world.

Our plan is to contnually be leading these kinds of tight-knit online learning communities, covering more hard topics and training more young people in cultural discernment and faith familiarity. 

Emerging Leaders Summit in Hungary 🇭🇺

Just after Thanksgiving, we embarked on a 9-day mission trip to Europe, fulfilling a long-held dream of ours to visit our Awakening Base in Hungary. While there, we aided in the weekly operations of our base's coffee shop ministry, strengthening relationships with the local youth who visit our shop for brownies and espresso each day on their breaks between school classes. 

We also helped organize and lead the Emerging Leaders Summit -- an event bringing together young leaders from various parts of Europe for encouragemenet, training, and networking. The event was a brilliant success. Leaders from Poland, Israel, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, and The Netherlands came to spend 5 days with us in our Awakening base where they enjoyed a much-needed spiritual retreat combined with a training / prayer conference. We built relationships with them. They built relationships with each other. Everyone was refueled and reinvigorated to return to their ministry contexts, a few extra friends stronger. 

Efforts like these are all about discipling and equipping leaders in the emerging generation. To invest in these young people is to invest in the future of the Church. These are future missionaries, church planters, pastors, educators, etc. The importance of such an investment cannot be overstated, particularly in the modern West where churches are dying and struggling. We are so humbled and happy to have been part of it all. We hope to organize more events like these on the west coast in the coming months and years.