Surviving VS Thriving

WE SURVIVED! 

...AND THRIVED!

It's been an extremely DIFFICULT and yet EXCITING month! 

I expected to do a lot of planning for the Fall and I knew my role on staff would be different but I didn't expect to have so much more responsibility. My new role as the Missional Team Leader (MTL) in the Urban area in New Jersey expands my responsibility to coach a team of student leaders to include staff and intern leaders as well!

To the left is a collage of pictures of my coaching group this Summer on our trip to go white-water rafting. Being a city girl, I didn't often enter into nature's uncontrollable scene. That was God's work and I typically appreciated it from afar with my paint brush and canvas but this time God had something else in mind! I was SO nervous to head into the unfamiliar and basically learn through experience and yet, none of us fell out or were injured! Our guide was younger than us and had only a High School education but he was the expert and knew how to correct our mistakes if and when we did!

Similarly, I know the Holy Spirit is an expert (at the very least) in winning people to Himself! He controls the waves of the sea and he reigns over the waves of ministry! 

Just as the guide taught us how to row correctly, my job now calls me to be a guide and coach the staff, interns & student leaders in how to lead others to Christ, build them up & send them into mission. As their team leader, I will have to be the example but I can't do it alone. I need the help of my team to maneuver through the waves of ministry and I especially need the leading of the Holy Spirit to show us where to go.

• Please take a moment to stop and pray for the Holy Spirit to move before us in the lives of students who don't yet know Christ and those who know Him but don't know how to serve yet.
• Please also pray that God will remove all obstacles that can cause our team to row out of sync and any obstacles that may not allow us to report to campus full-time. (ie: financial support) Pray that we may thrive in His power!

It is day. But it won't be forever...

Urgency—There might not be tomorrow

Campus Crusade’s role is to help build movements everywhere so that everybody knows somebody who truly follows Jesus Christ. Part of my role in that ministry is to be trained in how to win, build and send people by the power of the Holy Spirit and so, help the body of Christ to fulfill the great commission. In this training, post summer Bible classes, I read an article by our current president, Steve Douglass. “Future Direction” describes how and why Steve felt led to more clearly define our ministry’s role in the Church universal, and he does. At the end of this article, Steve emphasizes John 9:4 in  regards to the very ripe harvest all around the world in saying: “It is ‘day.’ But it won’t be forever. So let’s work… together!”
When I met Dina, a new Latina staff joining Destino (Cru’s effort to reach Latin Americans & Hispanics), in Orlando this summer, I didn’t recognize the seed God was planting in our relationship to create a thicker unity within the body of Christ. In connecting us through my former discipler and good friend, Jen Hu, God began to align us to the same vision Steve Douglass mentions in this article, “movements everywhere...so everybody knows somebody who knows Jesus Christ.” Dina and I both recognize the quickly growing Latino community and plan to: help bridge their knowledge of Christ so that they may know Him, bridge to the majority staff (not Destino) with them on the mission field level, and bridge the generational gap within their culture and churches. With this community quickly growing, we recognize the urgency in our mission to see every Latino & even every minority have an opportunity to know somebody who truly follows Jesus Christ.

Discomfort vs Disunity

Minorities in ministry often feel uncomfortable as they are surrounded by people of a different class, culture, etc.
One of the things God taught me when I first became a part of Campus Crusade for Christ was that comfort is NOT something He has given us a right to. Christ’s divinity in flesh, Paul’s radical life change, the disciples living off of whatever they were given, Abraham leaving the only place familiar to himself, Moses speaking & leading a nation, Esther confronting a King on behalf of her people are just a few examples of people who were obediently uncomfortable for Christ. Even Peter, who didn’t want to take the Gospel to the Gentiles was challenged to do so in a vision from the Lord recorded in Acts 10. Like Peter, in Acts 11 was in an uncomfortable position to bridge the gap between the Jewish believers and the newly converted Gentiles, I think God has called me to be a bridge builder within Cru. Please pray for me and Dina as we seek the Lord to know how exactly He wants us to do this.

My Mission:

“Through the leading & power of the Holy Spirit, may Christ be fully known to all peoples, by our love for one another, as we raise the standard of this Christian nation and ultimately be a light of unity to the world.”

For more information on what I mean by this, feel free to email, call, or look to my Facebook or Blog. :)

Keep reading and praying! Thanks for helping me work full-time to be part of fulfilling the great commission.

In Christ,
E. Tabitha Morales