Back to Reality

Well we have returned safely! We left on Saturday morning and were home by the evening, in time to see Australia beat the South Africans.

What a great week. We're all tired. Some of us are already back at work this week - trying to shake off the post mission blues and re-orientate our lives to the day to day grind.

It would be nice to list all the things we have learnt in this post but it doesn't feel like we have had enough time to process it all. The mission aspect was absolutely fantastic. We had 55 kids attend over the week. The parents gave some really positive feedback about the new theme and they kids (particularly the high schoolers) were so encouraging to lead.

The team time was amazing - probably the best week of fellowship many of us have experienced. It was great to study the bible together and really grapple with the idea of Holy Living for People Who Sin. Many of us came away challenged by the messages of the bible and the reality that God has chosen us to bear fruit - fruit that will last.

We'll post a couple more time this week with some pictures as well and then call this blog to an end.

Tune in later this week for our final thoughts.

Thirsty Thursday

Just a quick report to say all has been going well.

God has been blessing us richly this week.

Please pray that God will be energising us for the last two days of mission. Pray that the Kids might be moved powerfully to honour and serve our Lord and Saviour.

We look forward to seeing many of you soon.

Terrific Tuesday!!!

Well its Tuesday night, mision is already four days old - we're technically halfway through. It's amazing how quickly the week has gone.

The first two days have been great. Monday and Tuesday has seen 45 and 44 kids turn up -very encourgaing!!! Andrew Spalding's talks have been great and Stephen Mugridge has been challenging the younger group as he talks about the choices that have been made by the biblical heroes in response to God great choice on the cross.

The Emmerson's the family we live with are wonderful - they share their house, their dirt/weed tennis court and of course the spare house they have with us. It has been great spending time with them after mision - we've fought some fierce games of soccer on the dirt/weed tennis court. Hannah Emmerson is currently avoiding washing up but Mark's (her dad) just given her the tally ho and she's on the way to the sink!

Seriously its been an encouraging week where we have seen God working powerfully. We praise God for that. Our devotion times have also been really encouraging as we grapple with the reality of being sinners who have been saved by God and chosen to live holy lives.

Hannah is now back - oh no she hasn't finished the washing up yet so she has again been given a fatherly giddy up.

Please keep praying for us. We have three days of mission to go. We are tired but excited about how God is working. Pray that we might remain energised and passionate about the message we are bringing. Pray for our relationships within the team and pray that we might be inspired by the awesome nature of God's glory.

Super Sunday

Well the trip up was great! We left at 9:30 and were into Tambar's main street by 3:45 - pretty good time and and we brought some rain with us too.

Today we went to church with the rest of the Tambar Community. It was an immensely encouraging experience for us all. It's a great time to touch base with some of the more regular families at Tambar and hear how the year has treated them. The church was packed today. They seem to be a growing community which is so great to hear.

Tonight we had a great devotion time thinking about the reality of sin and we were all convicted about the reality of our ongoing struggle with sin. Pray that we might continue to learn, be challenged and grow.

Tomorrow is the first day of mission. Please pray that it might all go well. It seems like God is working really powerfully in the team and we pray that he might do the same in the kids.

Please pray that the weather during mission time would remain fine so we have enough space to run our activities. Please also pray that many kids come to hear our message.

On a slightly less important note Emily Hammond and Andrew Spalding have asked that their families would tape Lost and Prison Break.

We're off

Well it's Friday night - the planning is over, albeit for a night of sleep ( We hope!! ) and we leave tomorrow. We're excited, some are nervous, some are apathetic - well hopefully no one is really feeling that.

Pray that our packing and preparation on Saturday morning goes well. So much stuff to get into a very limited space - but we keep trusting God.

We'll write on Sunday after our service at Tambar - pray that we have a safe trip up tomorrow.

Thanks for your prayers
The Tambar Team.

Impending Excitement

Well the time has nearly arrived for mission. We're all pretty excited but the reality of city life - work and uni exams - still fills our horizon. It will be great when Friday afternoon arrives. At that time the whole team will be able to start really focussing on the week away.

The word on the street is that temperatures in Tambar are in the 1-8 degrees celcius range some days! It looks like thermals will be a good investment for all team members. Will we see these images at Tambar this year?? Doubt it but we can only wish...

The reality is that the lead up to this mission has been a Jeckyl & Hyde experience. It's been pretty tough at times - many of the team have been bogged down in a ridiculous number of exams (my arts student background says "no uni student should have more than one exam"). On top of that some of us have really struggled spiritually at times. But the Hyde side has been the encouragement of a team that has been focussed on God and serving each other. Prasie God for those blessings!!!!

We also want to convey a really big thank you to all those people who have cooked or bought food for us. We will certainly not go hungry this year. It's wonderful to be able to share the mission challenge throughout the church and feel like we are supported and cared for. Thank you.

To all those who are praying for us - grace and peace to you. We will need all your prayers next week. It is when God works that miracles happen. We want to see miracles on mission, we want to be reminded how awesome and great is the God we love and serve.

Prayer Points for the next few days:

• For our safety and logistical needs as we travel up on Saturday


• For enough room for our remaining luggage and food stock.


• Praise God for the generosity of the Emmersons, who not only will be housing us for the week but also took a trailer load of our stuff up


• For the health of each of our team members - may we not get sick in the lead up to and over the week of mission


• Pray that many children may come over the week - especially some new families and non church families.

Stay tuned for more over the next few days

Update

Perhaps read the post below this post before you read on...

Well the last day or so has been good - an opportunity to submerge myself in the scriptures and come to God in prayer. I write this not to give you an ongoing personal account of my travels but to encourage those who are praying that God is hearing and delivering.

Last night as I talked through the realities of struggling through faith with my youth minister I was reminded of the reality that God uses all things to bring about his good purpose. For me it's refreshing my understanding of grace. I don't know what it will be for the others in the team.

Mission planning is going well - we seem directed and focussed on the goal ahead. I think we are all excited about the week. But I guess the reality is that when you preach the Gospel you will come up with resistance - sometimes the resistance is in the form of physical things (lack of money, cars breaking down, people being injured, people being abused) and sometimes that resistance comes in a spiritual form. Take Job for instance, a man who clearly suffered on earth because a greater and more titanic struggle in spritual realms was taking place.

Our only hope is that in God we are more than conquerors. He will take us quite far in our troubles but never too far.

Can we continue to encourage you to pray for the week of mission. May the testing times that lie ahead for the team be times which grow us in our knowledge and love of God.

A battle

Well what a tumultuous 2 weeks its been!

I'm sure you have noticed that our Google advert is no longer on the site. Why you might be asking. Well DJ, one of the team members, brought to our attention a decidedly dodgy ad - the ad read -"Is Jesus God? No. Obviously not something we believe or want others to believe. So down came the ad. It's a shame really - we were starting tick over the hits and we had made about $1.00 a day for the past week. But nothing is worth defaming the name of Jesus.

It's funny how things like that happen when you plan to spread the good news of the bible. Personally, I have been suffering deep and desperate bouts of doubt this past week. A deep sense of distance from God came over me around Monday. While I write this post (on Thursday) I am feeling a lot better but the reality is that I continue to hang on to the edge, forever hopeful that God will remain faithful to his word and not let me go.

I gave a sermon recently on doubt - how I wish I could give it again now - with a depth of insight you perhaps forget when life is good - times of doubting make you desperate - seesawing between the emotions as one minute you are sure and the next you aren't.

But in the midst of what seems to be the pitch black midnight of uncertainty God comes through, not with the shining beam from heaven, or booming voice but perhaps with something as simple as the insightful words of a Christian author. I went to my bookshelf at 3am on Tuesday looking for an Alpha booklet talking about the historicity of the bible and found instead a Phillip Yancey book I bought years ago and never really read - it was titled "Reaching for an Invisible God". An open and fearful discussion of the reality of doubt, faith and the call to perseverance. Praise God!

The reality is that others in our team are also suffering from doubt at the moment. There is a battle in progress people. It's real, it hurts and we are powerless in the struggle. All we can do is rely on the faithfulness of God and the call to prayer.

So accordingly the prayer points for this week are:

• Please pray for myself and the other team members as we deal with reality of an Invisible God who chooses, in His wisdom, to reveal Himself through the Cross and Scriptures and His Holy Spirit.


• Pray that God would not let go, that His grip would strong, sure and eternal and that each of us would not forget that.


• Pray that our love for the Lord Jesus would not be fickle and be crushed when the worries of the world grow up around us.
  

May I implore you to pray for us. The encouragement for us as a team is that the devil is scared - he doesn't like what's happening with mission - and we are looking forward to our Lord working victoriously!

I tell you, whoever acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man will also
acknowledge him before the angels of God. (Luke 12:8)

Food for thought...

Remember this event:

As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, "This is a remote place, and it's already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food."

Jesus replied, "They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat."

"We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish," they answered.

"Bring them here to me," he said. And he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave hanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples ave them to the people. They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children.

Pretty amazing event isn't it. Can you imagine what the disciples must have been thinking? There's five loaves of bread and two fishes for five thousand. Imagine trying to cut the fish into bits small enough to feed 50 let alone 5,000. And Jesus says no don't send them away! But the most astounding thing is what happens next.

I only wish I could have been there to see that happen. What happened to the fish? Did they just suddenly multiply like some single cell organism continually dividing in half. Perhaps the baskets were like the Tim Tam packet that never runs out - it gets to a critically low level of two fish and the next thing its full again.

Just imagine what the disciples must have thought - running excitedly through the crowd spreading the food, looking at each other and back at their master in awe.

God provides so much, so easily, so often. And yet we doubt he will provide the simple things in life.

This year at mission we are cutting our budget - trying to reduce our spending and keep mission affordable. It means cutting some "luxury items" from the list - a sacrifice we are happy to make. But despite the cuts it seems hopeless at times, petrol is going up and we want to do so much at mission but know that somethings are out of the price range. The challenge for us is to trust our Lord that he can feed, inspire and guide not only the disciples and the five thousand but also the 16 of us. And he will.

Please pray for us this week:

• For Tammie as she plans our food for the week. Help her not to be stressed but give her insight and peace as she deals with what could be a stressful job.


• Pray for Laura as she begins writing the drama and for the others in the team who will help her over the next few weeks.


• For Marika as she takes over the follow up role from one of our previous team members (thanks Jill for all your great work!)


• For Stephen and Andrew as they continue to grapple with how best to teach the concept of choice while ensuring that the doctrine of God's unending grace is maintained.

The Pleasures of God

I've been reading a book by John Piper this week The Pleasures of God. I love Piper, his well known literary work Desiring God inspired me a few years ago and I bought The Pleasures of God soon after only to start reading it this week.


The crux of Piper's Pleasures of God is the phrase "The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love" taken from Henry Scougals' The Life of God in the Soul of Man.


Piper insists that the worth and excellency of God's should should also be measured by the object of his love. He reminds us that God's highest pleasure is found in himself, within the Trinity, so that God is not reliant on anything or anyone. So that his worth is in fact supreme because it finds its pleasure in himself - the Supreme Being. But far from being a selfish being, God in a display of his grace chooses to direct his love toward us - who so desperately need it! Piper's application (or so it seems to me so far) is that "If the excellency of God would be admired in his pleasures, and if we tend to conform to what we admire, then focusing on the pleasures of God would help me be conformed to God."


This year at mission we have set a goal for ourselves as a team: to be conformed to the likeness of God. Sp what better place to start than to look at the pleasures of God. First foremost amongst these is of course our Lord and Savior Jesus.


We want our week at Tambar to be a week where not only the kids hear about Jesus but we as a team are also confronted by the witness of Jesus and challenged by how clearly the Father loves his Son and who through offering Him up to death He actually lifts Jesus up to the place of Lord of this world and the next.

We are planning well and good things are being done. Please give thanks for and pray for the following things:

• Give thanks for George and Andrew's work in getting advertising done! Leaflets and flyer's have been done and sent.
• Pray that the advertising material will reach all the relevant families and that many families will come this year. We especially want to see new families coming.
• Please pray for the team as we prepare ourselves for a week of mission. Pray that we would be reading the bible and praying regularly.
• Please pray that God will provide enough money to cover the various costs.
• Please pray for Tammy as she organises the food for the week. Please pray that enough people will be able to provide food for us and that we will be able to keep within our budget.
• Please pray for Prash as he writes the team devotions and the sermon for our Sunday service.
  
• Please pray for Laura as she starts on the drama.

We appreciate your support and prayers. We would love feedback so please leave comments. This week we will be introducing interactive blog entries so stay tuned.

The Winding Road of Preparation

We had our first mission meeting last week. 99% attendance and the other 1% was extremely apologetic - a pretty good start

One of the things that strikes me each time we start preparing for mission is the number of apparently meaningless things which seem to occupy our time at the start. For example - what do we call mission, a kids club or a kids mission. We're all so keen to do mission that the work leading up to the week seems torturous. But that's mission I guess. While bringing people to know and trust Jesus is important and exciting it often doesn't happen without hard work and planning.

So it is to planning we go. Posters and flyers will soon be shooting off the presses and out the north west of NSW. The drama is being written, or at least thought through. The talks are being planned and written. The craft is being... well its being dreamt up. Trying to keep our eye on the prize will help with motivation. So will prayer. We'd love if you could pray for the following things this coming week:

• For rain to fall on the rural parts of NSW, including the community of Tambar Springs;


• Please pray that advertising for the week will reach the kids of the community and they will be able to come for the week;


• Please pray for the provision of appropriate transport for the week;


• Praise God for the great first meeting we had; and


• Please pray that we will remain a team focussed on our mission to bring Jesus to the kids of Tambar Springs.

Prayer

In Exodus we are told the story of God's sustaining power.

For hands were lifted up to the throne of the LORD

While Moses held his hands up in prayer to the Lord the Israelites continue to defeat the Amalekites. But as soon as his hands fall and his prayer is broken they begin to lose.

So too do we depend on the sustaining power of the Lord to prepare and run mission.

Each week we will publish prayer points for mission. We would love for you to bring us before the Lord in prayer.

Here are this week's prayer points:

• For Stephen Mugridge as he begins preparing the infants and primary talks. Particularly pray that he would choose good biblical accounts which develop our overall theme of prayer.
• For our first meeting on Tuesday 24 April 2007. Please pray that we are able to map out the way forward.
• For Ed David as he prepares the mission's budget and considers how we can cut our costs from last year.
• For the Australian rural community, especially the Tambar Springs community as they battle with drought. Please pray that God would send rain.

Choice

Matthew 27:15-17 describes the following account:

Now it was the governor's custom at the Feast to release a prisoner chosen by the crowd. At that time they had a notorious prisoner, called Barabbas. So when the crowd had gathered, Pilate asked them, "Which one do you want me to release to you: Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?"

They choose Barrabas.

It's clearly the wrong decision. Faced with a peace loving teacher who only seeks to challenge the thinking of a nation, the people of Israel choose a muderous rebel.

Our reaction as twentieth century readers is to cry foul, to be struck with astonishment at the foolishness which had gripped the Jewish people of the time.

But here's the thing - making bad choices isn't resticted to the past. We make them all the time - Sunrise or the Today Show, Iemma or Debnam, Scruch or fold.

The God of the bible challenges us that the biggest choice we must make is whether we choose to follow Jesus.

This year our mission will be built on the theme of CHOICE. Our talks, drama, memory verses and craft will centre on this theme of choice. Hopefully many of the kids will want to choose Jesus.

Act 2:12 says:

"...everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved"

A little bit about Tambar Springs, NSW Australia

Tambar Springs is located in north west New South Wales Australia.

While the exact population of Tambar Springs at this moment is unknown many estimate it is in the range of 80 - 110.

There are a number of members of the community who live in town but the majority of community members actually live away from the town centre on rural properties.

The current popular visiting places are:

• The General Store


• The Pub (not surprisingly)


• The Church

The only active church is found at St Marks Tambar Springs, part of a parish that also includes the nearby towns of Premer and Mullaley. The current vicar is John Chalker.

This town is part of the beautiful Australian outback.

"Yarrandoo" (copyright - pdc 2006)

In the beginning...

Welcome to the Tambar Springs 2007 Mission Blog!

This blog will give you an idea of what we are doing for this year's mission to the NSW country town of Tambar Springs and why we are doing it.

For starters here is something on our motivation:

"For while we were still sinners Christ died for us."

This blog came into being at 8:03am on Monday 16 April 2007. Hopefully over the next couple of weeks I will update it so that anyone interested can stay in touch with what is happening as we plan for mission.