September, 2011

How are my donations used in Christian Challenge?

- You are creating a position in ministry that would not be there without you.

- You become part of a team that reaches students for Christ who are not being reached by a typical church.

- You allow there to be light on a spiritually dark campus of 15,000 students.

What type of donations are the most helpful?

- A regular monthly donation helps provide a consistent salary for this huge ministry task.

- One prompted by God. He is the Provider, and He does so through His people.

- One which you want to see make a difference all over

Strategy for success!

If you were praying with us for Grand Canyon University and its role as a strategy to reach all the college students in Metro Phoenix, thank you because God has answered our prayer!

We have formed a partnership with GCU and we’re requesting ten students who will act as Christian Challenge interns! These students will be serving across the Valley on various campuses. Three Christian Challenge staffers (including myself) are serving multiple campuses.

The goal is for these students to serve Christian Challenge for the four (or five) years that they are students while we train them to lead Bible studies, disciple other students, evangelize and lead missions. They then will have had such a positive experience that they will want to step into a staff role with Christian Challenge and help reach the dozens of other college campuses with absolutely no evangelical presence on them.

As the campus and program grows, we will soon have a pool of people with experience and a heart for college students to choose from to reach the campuses that our staff of seven doesn’t have a chance to reach yet.

This has been such an answer to prayer and makes the goal of reaching the 350,000 college students in Metro Phoenix that much closer to happening.

Please pray for us as we serve at two campuses. We are still very much involved at ASU Downtown, where some great things are happening. We have a new Bible study leader stepping up this year, and we’re very excited to see how her life experience and personality color the Bible study.

We are also taking more people to Mexico to visit the kids at the orphanage that we love so much. We just got back from there with some students who had gone before and were missing them too. We’re taking more students down in October.

Helping a church get started!

Planting Sanctuary Church taught us the pressures and difficulties of getting the initial group together and every step along the way as the church plant grow. This problem is multiplied when you are doing an urban church plant in downtown Phoenix.

There is a church planter moving just a couple miles from our campus and we met and hit it off instantly. We were finishing each other sentences on what we felt with our experiences with church planting, we both drive impractical 4x4s that we love and we have become friends already.

Since we have a strong group downtown already, we are going to help him get started. He’s going to lead some Bible studies downtown for our group and in a partnership with him we will help evangelize downtown Phoenix as his home church network grows.

Powers Update

Our “Big Boy,” Dallas started Kindergarten and he loves it! It’s hard to believe that he’ll be gone so long each day for so many years! We miss him! But he loves being a big kid. J

The “Little Boys” are growing so fast. This month they will turn TWO! Our little men have given us a “run for our money” the last couple of months, with DESTRUCTION!!! They found new ways to destroy their room after every nap. We had to turn their dresser around (the knobs towards the wall) because they climb on it (using the “child-locked” drawers to get up!). While up there, they threw their CD player onto the floor and ripped the antenna completely off of it. They broke the straps that kept their closet doors shut, and the next ones we bought. Then when Bryan drilled some straps into the wall, the pushed the closet off of its rails into the closet. They pulled down an over-the-door shoe rack SO hard…that it broke the hinges of the door! That is to just name a few! Thank God they are gorgeous, hilarious, SWEET little guys and are a gift from God…because all of that could get pretty irritating!

How God Used You;

We could not do this ministry without our team:

§ A new campus!

§ Great trip to Mexico!

§ New Bible study leader!

Thank You for Your Prayers!

Please pray…

§ Maria, our new Bible study leader

§ Ryan and Kelsey

§ New church!

§ Healing with losing Madison Grace

§ Handling two campuses

§ Kids in Mexico

§ Us to train our boys up in a Godly way.

§ Our support

§ Sanctuary Church

§ More salvations

How can we pray for you?

Summer 2011

How are my donations used in Christian Challenge?

- You are creating a position in ministry that would not be there without you.

- You become part of a team that reaches students for Christ who are not being reached by a typical church.

- You allow there to be light on a spiritually dark campus of 15,000 students.

What type of donations are the most helpful?

- A regular monthly donation helps provide a consistent salary for this huge ministry task.

- One prompted by God. He is the Provider, and He does so through His people.

New Campus in the Fall!

We will be starting a new campus again with Christian Challenge. Sanctuary is still going strong, ASU Downtown has solid leadership, and now we will be at Grand Canyon University, the college that I left Kentucky to attend.

We will still be at ASU Downtown as well, because we do not have a staff member to turn it over to. That’s one of the huge hurdles that we have to deal with in college ministry. There are FAR more campuses and students than our staff could ever reach. There are 300-350 thousand college students in Metro Phoenix spread across dozens of campuses. Christian Challenge at Grand Canyon University (GCU) will be instrumental in reaching the other campuses, by recruiting Christian Challenge leaders and staff.

We are in the beginning stages of partnering with GCU in an internship program. There are students who come in on a large scholarship provided by GCU, and they are required to spend time with an outside ministry which they choose. We are praying that Christian Challenge will be one of those ministries. Please pray with us in that. We think it is going to go through, because up to now everything to start Christian Challenge at GCU has been provide, including some student leadership.

This will be strategic in reaching other campuses, because these students will be serving with our staff like an intern would. Our plan is for these students to get connected to college ministry with Christian Challenge and to come on staff when they graduate. At that point they would have four years experience with us would help accomplish the task of reaching the college students of the sixth largest city in the nation.

Jamie and I met and started dating at Grand Canyon

in 2001 and now ten years later we are going back to start a ministry there!

Training our very own evangelist!

It is always surprising to hear what kids have to say. We were talking as a family about how good Dallas was with two of his friends. He prays for them all the time because "they don’t have Jesus in their heart." While we were talking, Dallas piped in and said that he had asked one of them if she wanted to have Jesus in her heart. She did and he led her in a prayer!

Dallas had been in Vacation Bible School this week and this is what he had been learning. So, all on his own, he asked her to pray with him to invite Jesus into her heart. They were spending time together and God was at work in a little six-year-old through a five-year-old. We couldn’t be more proud!

Dallas "show boating" at VBS Family Night.Dallas is in the black shirt.Colton and Hendrix in their VBS class
Colton and Hendrix in the wagon that the Children's Minister got to transport them around!

Powers Update

Summer has been busy. We helped at VBS this year, Jamie was the missions teacher, and it was the first time that the twins were able to participate. I went into Kentucky for my grandfather’s funeral and to move my mom back to Arizona. We drove a moving truck back from Kentucky to St. Louis after packing the truck that day, then from there to Albuquerque after being on the road for 15 hours, then finally home.

Before I left, we asked Dallas if it was okay with him for me to be gone for week as long as I brought his grandma home. He said, “Yes!” and was excited to see her.

We’ve been doing foster care meetings and lots of preparation for that. We are getting closer and we are looking forward to the day when we have a little girl in the house. We are hoping and planning that this will happen before Christmas. Dallas has been praying for the kid who will come to our house and that we can make "her feel comfortable."

Colton and Hendrix are both talking more and more. Every fruit or vegetable that they see is an “apple.”

Back in Arizona at her birthday party!

How God Used You;

We could not do this ministry without our team:

§ We have a new campus starting in the fall!

§ Awesome discipleship.

Thank You for Your Prayers!

Please pray…

- One of our girls who has slowly come out of Mormonism

- New campus at GCU

- Wisdom & God’s Will with fostering

- Healing with losing Madison

- Handling two campuses

- Heading back to the orphanage in Mexico

- Us to train our boys up in a Godly way.

- Our support

- Sanctuary Church

- More salvations

We thank God for you & pray for you. How can we pray more specifically for you?

May 2011

Well, Bryan wrote this at the beginning of the month, but all five of us have been hit with some bug or another (and then sharing them!), so I'm way behind. =(

How are my donations used in Christian Challenge?

- You are creating a position in ministry that would not be there without you.

- You become part of a team that reaches students for Christ who are not being reached by a typical church.

- You enable a light on a spiritually dark campus of 15,000 students.

What type of donations are the most helpful?

- A regular monthly donation helps provide a consistent salary for this huge ministry task.

- One prompted by God. He is the Provider, and He does so through His people.

- One which you want to see make a difference all over Arizona.

How God Used You;

We could not do this ministry without our team:

§ We have a recruit who has said they want to go forward with the process of becoming a Christian Challenge staffer at a new campus! More to come as that process takes place.

§ Awesome premarital counseling.

Thank You for Your Prayers!

Please pray…

§ I’m going to be discipling "S" over the summer.

§ One of our girls who has slowly come out of Mormonism

§ Healing with losing Madison Grace

§ New campus starting in the fall

§ Us to train our boys up in a Godly way.

§ Our support

§ Sanctuary Church

Pray for Healing

Be in prayer for my friend who called me on a five hour drive to Phoenix in the middle of a family emergency. He was on the way to my place in need of some prayer and comfort. Jamie and I listened to a heart wrenching story of what has been going on in his life almost as if it had been pulled out of a movie. We ended up talking and praying until four the next morning, which was when he needed to go to the airport. Pray that God continues to work in his family. Some good things have already happened, but he is at the beginning of a long, hard road.

I’m just thankful that God has allowed us to be friends and that we were able to offer some comfort. These are the times when I’m glad that God has molded our hearts through the pain of losing a daughter, because we are able to understand pain and loss.

Discipling

I’m going to be taking on a new student to disciple this summer. "S" has been coming to Bible study (which has been going really well this semester) and we’ve grown close. I took him out this week and we talked about going deeper in Scripture one on one.

All of our students have been growing spiritually this semester. We have one girl who will be leaving this year to do missionary work with her new husband and a girl who left Mormonism: she also invited a friend to Bible study, who was saved at the beginning of the semester! She is still with us and we’re continuing to follow up with here.

Ministry in Odd Places (continued from last month)

It turns out “D,” the guy that I met through parting out my Toyota after it broke down, is not unlike many non-Christians that I’ve met. He is a good husband, he doesn’t drink, he’s loving to his 16 month old daughter, and he even took in a couple of teenagers whose parents were on drugs and couldn’t take care of them. On the outside, he is a good person who looks like a Christian.

However, the parents who were on drugs and should have been taking care of their kids (who were living with “D”) claimed to be Christians, and so now “D” has such a bad picture of Christians.

I am working on giving him a better picture of a Christian. I also don’t want to be silent about the gospel, so I shared with him last time we were together, but also spent a lot of the time listening. His family background reminds me of one of our girls who took three years of prayer and sharing with her until she accepted Christ.

The funny thing is that he happens to be the husband of a student on our campus! So this is an opportunity to reach one of the commuter students as well.

I am confident though that God loves him and there is a reason that God connected us, so I’m going to continue doing what God called me to do, and that’s share my faith and to be a light in the darkness.

Pappah Chuck came in for a visit!

Powers Update

THANK YOU! Due to “Taxpayer Privacy,” we do not know who was able to donate owed AZ state tax money to help with D’s Christian education, but we want to say, THANK YOU, either way! We have a HUGE answer to prayer: D's entire kindergarten year is PAID IN FULL!!! Praise Jehovah Jireh, our Provider. Although we raise our support to be able to minister to college students, God has blessed us with so many blessings and opportunities. After my amazing experience with Christian education, I have always known that I want that for my children. Thank you for your prayers for this and your help!

The sweet brothers at a local museum