“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (II Cor. 12:9-10 ESV).
Since I last shared, God has been doing quite a few potentially puzzling things. For one, we experienced two break-ins in two weeks and a third attempt a week after. Over $6,000 worth of electronics and equipment were stolen. We lost everything we use for our worship services, outreach concerts and family movie nights. Bobby (you likely know that name by now) and I walked in on the destruction after the second break-in when we came in the building for the weekly Friday morning prayer meeting. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t really impact me. Honestly, it hurt. It caused significant pain in the moment. I couldn’t think of how we would move forward because our services are on Saturdays and there wouldn’t be time to get everything back up and running. But God…
As I shared about the break-ins, we saw God do something amazing. We had brothers reach out to encourage us. We had people who wanted to help us. Today, thanks to a generous church, we have almost all the money raised to replace the equipment. We also had a couple of dear brothers from FreedomWorks, the place I volunteer each week leading Bible studies, contact us and surprise us with a system we could use until we got our own. We didn’t want to lose this system, too, so I rented a storage room offsite and packed it away. We went back to the hymnals and sang in acapella. God blessed us as our people got to show how much more valuable God is than anything we lost. It was almost like nothing was taken. The impact on our service was so much smaller than I thought it would be, and it was one of the first times I got to hear all our people singing (maybe the music is too loud)! I can only praise God for the way He turns losses into great gain.
The Twins and my father had birthdays — their birthdays are all on the same day. Laura, Bobby and I took the kiddos to an indoor playground, and we celebrated with family. God blessed the time. I love seeing how the kids are growing, but I also hate it. It goes too fast.
We also had a couple of major business meetings. We had one of the first non-unanimous votes ever. This vote was on adjusting our budget to lower expenses due to the limited amount of funds we are receiving. The group was about half and half, with some wanting to take the cuts and the other half wanting to continue without taking the cuts. We ended up voting on praying about it for a month. This was a blessing to experience. The next month, we took up the old business and discussed what God was leading the church to do. This time we had a unanimous vote in favor of the cuts.
Our meeting last month addressed another hard issue — church discipline. We had a list of members who are not actively engaged in meaningful membership for various reasons. I shared the work Isaiah and I had been engaged in to call the old members back to join us and take part. I then asked the church to vote to remove the members unless there was reason to leave them on the rolls. Again, we had a divided group. Instead of moving forward, I asked the group to reach out to the missing members on behalf of the church and meet again this month to vote on what to do rather than divide the church. We had a unanimous vote to take this course of action. Since then, we have seen three members return and do so consistently. We look forward to others doing the same in the near future. We also saw an increase in volunteers at our weekly service.
Business meetings are important to me. I see them as another gift from God to disciple our people. We get to teach biblical wisdom on matters that impact our people in their own homes and at work. My hope is our people will grow in this wisdom and become even better equipped to glorify God in how they oversee the responsibilities He gives them in and outside the church. We work on financial wisdom, like budgets and planning events. We work on prioritization principles due to our size and limited resources. We work on doctrinal issues like membership. We work on practical theology like how to live out the things we believe. And in all of it, we learn to do these things by faith rather than by means that come from some source other than the Word of God.
What we have seen is that God is able to take the things Satan and his demonic forces would love to use to end our work and instead use it to grow our faith and increase our love. We have seen Him take us through loss and potential division and use both for increasing our unity and faith. He is a faithful God!
Please pray for us, as there are several other challenges going on internally. We have some people going through some really hard things, as you are probably also walking through with your people. With most of our group being new believers, we are doing our best to be involved in the lives of our people to help them face these challenges and mature in their faith and character. We can’t do near what we would like to do. We need prayer for our people to overcome sin they are now fighting.
We also need prayer for ongoing needs, long-term needs, to accomplish the work God has here in Minnesota. We need prayer for ongoing provision. We need prayer to continue to add partners that get church planting in hard places is very profitable for the kingdom, but also requires significantly longer time frames than some other locations. We need co-laborers who are mature and able to come and walk with members who have the gifts to grow into future leaders, but need to grow in sound doctrine, character and their skillsets. This is especially true for the women’s ministry. Only my wife, who is also limited due to needs at home with our many children and her own health, has been a Christian for several years.
One last prayer request is for our membership class. We have five new potential members, with at least one being a young man who was saved at a recent service. We recently met to work through the roughly four-hour class. Please ask God to give clarity to the attendees and continue to grow our unity around the purpose and plan He has for this church plant.
Thank you for your prayers and your partnership in the gospel ministry.
Also, I am trying to figure out how to get to the national meeting. I am the clerk for the Baptist Publishing House and would prefer to be there in person, but I would also like to meet with anyone who God may be leading to find out more about the ministry here and how you can partner. Please email me at mike@nnccmpls.com if you would like to set up some time to meet.
One area I want to put out there where we need short-term help is in regard to surveying the neighborhoods of North Minneapolis this summer. This would be impossible to do in the time we have available this summer if we end up limited to our small group of members, but with a few churches coming out to lock arms with us and take the task on, we could definitely accomplish it. We would also like to start feeding some specific groups around our part of town and could use partners to help us accomplish that for a year or two. Thanks for praying about how you might be able to answer the call to make disciples and plant churches in Minnesota.
