The Naz - Blog

A Mission's recap from our Student Ministries Department:

We headed to Pilsen, a neighborhood in S. Chicago and were warmly greeted by New Life Pilsen Church. We locked arms with another group from Canada which totaled sixty-five of us all together. We only had two sinks, eight showers, and slept shoulder to shoulder.

Our teens did street evangelism and door to door prayer in local businesses. We ran a Chicago Public School event which involved over 3,500 people and were recognized by the mayor and the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools for our contribution. They also made hundreds of beds at the homeless shelters, cleaned out maggot filled trashcans in the alleys, prayed with the homeless people, and shared about their love for Christ.

Several children and adults gave their lives to Christ as a result and the teens found themselves in awe of God’s mighty work. They prayed together, laid hands on each other, worshiped together, supported, and encouraged each other when turmoil tried to strike. They stood united and prayed fearlessly! Our teens are amazing! If you see one of them, ask them about their personal experience. -Deb Winters

Sunday was a beautiful send off service for our youth mission trip as 50 of them laid down their life for this next week to put their love in action. We are hearing great reports already, check out the missions blog for details. Pastor Ben is back and the staff is thrilled! Our staff meeting overflowed with an anointing from him that was powerful. We feel blessed to be lead by him and are looking forward to another year of leadership from him. This Saturday some of our worship team will be playing at the Love Inc. fund raiser at Steve and Patty Gronow's house. It is such a privilege to be invited and we are praying that every lyric sung, every note played will point straight to our almighty God. See you on Sunday - you won't want to miss the kick off of Our new series called "What's love got to do with it?".

We have wrapped up everything with adventures in Missions and right now we are heading to help the church that has been hosting us. We are going to be interacting with anywhere from 1000 to 2000 kids. This has been amazing group! Lives have been change and transformed. The last few nights we have been encouraging each other. We wrote words on each others arm of who they are as children of God and last night the leaders got to look the students in their eyes to pray for them and remind each youth of who they are in Christ! We then prayed for the young women and continue on to pray for our young men to raise up to be who God has called each one of them to be. Please pray for us today as we are tired and weak, cover the children that we will interact with in prayer.

There are no words to describe what happen today but God! We had a giant block party this evening. We shut down the block, pulled tables out, food, games, music,pinatas, and of course water balloons. We had a blast spending time with the neighborhood. After we shut down everything we did a time where students shared their stories from the day and one by one our students got up to share. They shared stories of how they helped a single mother move who had gotten herself in bad situations, stories of how kids impacted them, kids begging them to stay with them because nobody pays attention to them at home, stories of how simply picking up trash in Chinatown was the best day in a long time, another story of just how blessed we are, and the story that sent all of us into tears was one of our youngest students got up, starting crying and he said, " I got to pray with one of the kids today!" Something so simple and yet it spoke volume! If nothing else we were faithful to God! We served well, loved well and we bathed these people and community in prayer surrendering the rest to God because we did what we were called to do!

Praise God!!! Today has been a great day!! God is working in mighty ways!! 3 groups went back to safe haven with the kids and our kids are showing God's love to these kids. Another group had the chance to go hand flyers out for a block party we are having and they had the chance to go bless people in the city just praying for them, encouraging them and blessing some people doing laundry. Another group spent the day cleaning out garbage cans that were full of maggots,poop and other things. The worse smell you could ever imagine! But Not one word came out of our kids mouths they grabbed some bleach, a scrubber and went to work! These kids are not only speaking truth but they are putting it into action. So please keep praying! God is moving in our students as they learn to Love God, Love all people and learning to put that Love into action.