Mission Adventures NZ

This year, Mission Adventures is helping run the city-based component of City Lights.

Basically, City Lights is a non denominational movement that gets young people involved in serving their communities in a practical and loving way.  In the past we have helped out with CYF’s initiatives, women’s homes, low decile schools and foster care – doing things like painting, cleaning, running community fun days, and DIY.  The event is held over the weekend of March 5th and 6th. If you are in Auckland over this weekend and are thinking about getting involved I would urge you to do so.  There are plenty of areas of need around our city and this is a safe and effective way to serve needs in a practical manner.

The Bible talks about ‘true religion’ as being one that serves the needs of the widows and the orphans – people that could do with a helping hand, and so often we as Christians are thinking, “How can I get closer to God?” Well the answer is quite clear in my opinion. These two objectives meet at the same point when Jesus says, “Whatever you have done to the least of these, you have done for me”.

My good friend Phil Cunningham has recently been to Cambodia. Phil has a special place in his heart for justice and seeing the kingdom of God come to earth. Here is one of his latest posts where he talks to a Pastor in Cambodia about the sex trade that is devastating their nation. It is a hard read but with a silver lining.

Click on his picture to read more.

We have just finished the YWAM NZ Ship Tour, and had an awesome time touring throughout the country. The Pacific Link visited eight different ports (Gisborne, Wellington, Dunedin, Invercargill, Timaru, New Plymouth, Nelson and Tauranga) over eight weeks, but teams also travelled to the surrounding towns at each port. The different teams participating in the tour bombarded each place with a call into missions for young people, whether it was in churches, youth groups, schools, or even on the streets. People were challenged with what God is doing in the world and the need for both local and overseas missions. In each town the Marine Reach medical ship, the Pacific Link, opened up its doors with free ship tours presenting what they get up to in the Pacific Islands. A combined JUMP into missions youth event was held in each port on Friday and Saturday nights, numerous YWAM outreach teams went throughout schools and drop-in centres, and the Engage media team showed presentations at youth groups, home groups and church services.

Over the whole tour our teams spoke to:
- 18 youth groups
- Over 20 church services
- 6000+ students from over 30 schools with the message of missions
- More than 20 youth pastors about church missions
- Numerous Scouts, Girls Brigades, and youth drop-in centres with an evangelistic message
- We also ran six “JUMP into missions” youth events with over 1200 youth attending

Last night around 2am, I woke up to Erica yelling at me, “Get that animal out of our room!” It was making this nasty high pitched squealing noise. Jake (our cat) had obviously brought it into the house through the upstairs window and then started playing with it.
After turning on the lights I saw a small movement and tracked towards it, but just as I was about it grab it I realised that what I thought was a small bird or mouse, was actually only the head of this giant rat. I backed away just as it started hissing, and then it launched all fours off the ground at the cat’s head – it actually jumped like almost a foot high and forward too! Jake leaped out of the way, and the rat ran towards my shoes just as I was headed there to get some protection (as I was only in my boxers and feeling pretty vulnerable at this stage).
It wedged itself in between my two shoes – in front of my shoe drawer, so with no foot protection I gathered up courage and snuck towards it with a towel. Nervously I threw the towel on the shoes and pinned the two shoes together really firm, it didn’t like it at all and started shrieking and screaming again (Erica was doing the same – over the other side of the room – with fits of hysteria – somehow she thought it was hilarious!). With nothing else to do I just started punching my shoes! 1. To stop the noise and, 2. Cos I didn’t want this huge rat to be fully functional when I had to carry it outside in the towel.
After smashing the sides of my shoes in, I got the towel in between and rolled up the rat real quickly… those things are strong! I had the torso of it in my left hand and when it was convulsing, I could barely hold the sucker. I chucked the whole towel out the front door and slammed it before anything could happen.
Ha ha, and then our flatmate, Tina, gets up early this morning and as she is leaving, picks up our towel which houses a huge dead rat – sick… and funny.

We left this week on a seven week tour of the country, alongside the YWAM NZ Ship Tour (Oct 16-Dec 6). We will be running youth mission events every weekend in eight different towns (check out YWAM Ship & Jump Rally tour), and meeting with youth pastors and youth groups throughout the week. Heaps of opportunities to promote what we do – with three churches already having put their names forward for Mission Adventures 2010 this week. We will keep you posted on how the tour progresses.