Resonate Roadie - the pics

ROAD TRIP!!!!! We had a wicked time on our Resonate Roadie to Timaru the other weekend. There's nothing quite like jumping in a van with a whole bunch of randoms (ok so I knew everyone but really they are quite random!!) and enduring some of the crazy carnage that is involved with long distance travel. Being the only girl in the van also made thinkgs "interesting" - enough said. Seriously though we had a great time- it was awesome to catch up with the guys from Dunners, Timaru and Chch and Ps Leon Rakete from Equippers South was off the hook! Plus we were relly wel looked after by the guys from Timaru with the meanest suppers! If you didn't come with us then you really missed out!

But because I like to reminisce, and to help those of you reading on the interweb feel a bit of the Road Trip love heres some pics:)

Enjoy!

Keith in the van - the trip to Timaru was highly entertaining, but they say - what happens in the van stays in the van!

Simons mad as photography skills - watch out Andris Apse!!

Jairus in the van

We played some crazy games - it takes great concentration to cover yourself in sellotape!!
Haha Si!

Simon and his balloons - once they were taped on he had to race around the church twice. Very funny to watch!!

Sam & the awesome crew from Dunedin leading worship

Worship went off!!

Me and Lyds before driving back to our respective homes.

A very attractive (and single!!) Lydia (right) from Dunners and Shelom from Chch.

The morning after - these guys had all slept in the church (well if you can call it sleep!!) More like chaos and carnage!!

Revival Pics

OK guys so as promised here are a few shots from when we had Roy and Melanie Fields here the other week. It was a phenomenal time of worship and God really switched something in the Spirit. It was like taking a 60 watt light bulb and then shoving 2000 volts of electricity through it to see what would happen - things will never be the same again!!!!

SUNDAY MORNING SERVICE

Singers Band in Worship
Worship led by Roy Fields. You can't really see but Church

was PACKED out.

Pastor Ian (with Dayle in background) deep in worship

SUNDAY EVENING SERVICE

Love this shot!!!! Resonator Lulu and members of the ministry team during the evening service.

Southern River pastor Danny Steel (centre) responding to a call for healing while Melanie Fields (right) prays.

Melanie Fields praying for people during an altar call.

Associate pastor Grant hanging with his kids after the evening service. (It was 11.5pm and they just got their second wind!!)

Revival Weekend

Wow what an amazing weekend we just had with the amazing Roy andMelanie Fields. If you ever doubted Revival was in the air then those doubts should be well and truely gone now!!!

For those of you who aren't aware, Roy and Melanie led the worship at the Lakeland Outpouring and are a phenomenal couple who carry an incredible passion to see God move in miraculous ways transforming lives and seeing Revival break out across the globe. These are just a couple of pics from the weekend and we will have testimonies and stuff coming soone:)

Shan

God is flippin' fantastic

http://www.odt.co.nz/your-town/dunedin/21218/church-ramps-snow-fun-pupils

Well, it's all happening up in Dunedin. This one snow-party event was advertised to 5 of the high-schools, including Taieri College, which according to Ps.James, they'bve never been to, and handed out thousands of cecreams and fliers. Over 250 turned out for the event, and the youth band did fantasmically, and Ps. Jordan Smith from equippers Auckland did his thing, and we took note of 55 salvations!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

so praise Jesus, it was beyond expectation!!!!!!
apparently the spotters at the back were sooooo shocked, it was crazy! with gapping mouths and everything, even Jordan was stoked as!!

so that was crazy crazy crazy, and the article link was on pg2 of the ODT in Saturday's paper, the day after the event.

Next year it's gonna be bigger and THEN we will be FRONT PAGE NEWS!

Like woah! it is intense in Dunedin, bring it!!

Bourke - a few thoughts & a broken heart.....

My heart has broken. Well and truly gut wrenchingly, utterly shattered, and broken so much that the usual cure of sticky tape and super glue will not do. My eyes have laid witness to a dispair, a hurt, a brokeness that run so deep it was bred into the very blood of generation. It was a sight I never would have believed in a nation so beautiful and similar and "civilised" as ours, but my eyes did not deceive me, what I saw was true.

But no matter how deep my grief, God's is deeper. No matter how badly my heart breaks, God's breaks more. In the places and people I see brokeness, despair and pain, God sees HOPE.

Four of us from Invercargill joined with the guys from Highway Christian Church in Ulladulla (Australia) to help at REACH 08 - a conference with a complete missions focus and a desire to see God to move in a new way. We were equipped as the army of God to go into the community and show love as Chirst loved us in a real and practical way.

Bourke, NSW Australia is a beautiful outback town and to look at it I really wondered if what I had been told was as bad as what I had been led to believe. But closer inspection showed me a deep level of dysfunction and hurt. Almost every house in town was surrounded by high metal fences, with an almost as big dog, the main street at night looked like an industrial area with big garage doors and windows barred and then in the Aboriginal "missions" the houses were nice and normal but then you saw the smashed glass and boarded up windows.

And the kids. The beautiful children who knew no different from what they lived in everyday. 3, 4, and 5 year old children who are on the streets at all times of the night, abused and taking drugs and alcohol like they were lollies, whose idea of a good time was stealing cars and then burning them.

But despite it all, God is in that place.

You could see Him in the smiles of the children, in the fresh greening of the ground that had been drought-stricken for years, in the passion and perserverence and faith of the Christians in Bourke who had been faithfully praying for and serving in their community.

God was seen on the lives of young children, as small as 4,5 and 6 years old, as they stood silent and still in His presence. He was there in the midst as 200+ young people from throughout New South Wales, wider Australia and New Zealand stood and worshiped Him freely, separated not by race or circumstances but united in love as the whanau of God.

God was in the riverbed as the drunked, just released from prison, wandered aimlessly with his bottle of booze. He was there when he was struck by the power of the Holy Spirit and set free from his sin and pain, and came into the Kingsom of Heaven.

My time in Bourke has shown me a fraction of the heartbeat of God. Jesus died for these people, each and everyone of them, of us, saved or unsaved, black or white, male or female, old or young. We are not different. We are all seen the same through the eyes of God - His children.

I am still processing what I saw, what God has done and is doing in Bourke, and in me. It is beyond our comprehension to know how deeply God mourns over the blood shed there in the name of "civilised people" and government policy. How His heart aches for the children of Bourke, many who have never known a fathers love, a tender touch or a kind word.

But God IS in that place. And He is moving. Heaven linked with earth during the time Reach 08 was in Bourke, and even though we have left there, God hasn't.

Heaven hasn't.

Hope hasn't.

God is in that place, and He is moving. It begins with HOPE........

Reach out!

Missionary.

For me this used to conjur up images of little old people with grey hair, dressed in brown wrinkly stockings with brown knitted cardies giving a really long and incredibly boring slide show. (Crazy but in fact none of the missionaries I have ever met fitted this description - they are all awesome funky people with a fire in their belly and a passion for Jesus and the people they serve)

But lately my perspective is a little different. As you leave our church there is a sign above the door that has got my attention and started me thinking.

"You are now entering your missionfield."

Your missionfield. My missionfield. Does that mean that I am a missionary?

Now for those of you who know me, I would really hope you don't see me as the above desrciption of a missionary. (I don't have brown stockings, haven't worn a cardie since I was 12 and am reluctantly embracing the digital age.) Do you fit that description?

We are all missionaries. We are called to be salt to the world, making people thirsty for Jesus. As christians we carry something that the rest of the world needs whether it knows it or not. We don't have to go to a third world country or a diaster zone to do this. I am in no way discrediting overseas missions, just not all of us are called to serve in this way. But we are called to be missionaies in the place we find ourselves now. This may be our university, workplace, home, town or wherever.

Reaching out to those around us - it may be our family, friends, workmates, classmates, neighbours, or that random chick at the supermarket checkout. They may be broken in need of healing; lonely in need of a friend; hungry in need of a feed or lost in need of a direction. Whatever it is they are looking for, because we have Jesus, we have the answers that can satisfy them.

Matthew 28:18-20 – the great commission. Jesus basically told us to go to all the world and reach out to those around us. If you don't reach out in your world who will?

The ultimate example of a missionary is Jesus. He reached out to the misfits of society – prostitutes, murderers and thieves. (eg Woman at the well, Zaccheus in the tree, etc) Jesus quite literally was a radical – he didn’t conform to the bounds of society or focus on being seen as 'proper'. Instead he was a living example of the love of God. It says in the Bible ‘there is no greater love than to lay down ones life for another.” This doesn’t necessarily mean we have to physically die (although sometimes this can be the case) but to die to our own desires, wants, dreams or fears for the sake of another.

This could mean putting aside your own embarrassment to eat lunch with the school weirdo or instead of buying your usual latte on the way to work, put that money aside for a week and buy groceries for a hungry family.

I just want to challenge your perspective a little. Do you see yourself as a missionary? Are you reaching out to those around you, or is that up to someone else to take care of? Ask God to show you the outreach opportunities that surround and take a leap of faith and act. You never know what will happen!

(And when you do let us know what happens! We would love to hear your experiences!)

Leader Focus: Lyle Penisula

I thought it would be a great idea to look at some of the Christian leaders in our nation. Lyle and Debbie Penisula are the Senior Ministers @ Hawkes Bay Equipper's Church in NZ. Lyle is a passionate communicator and a gifted artist (the painting to the right should leave you in no doubt). He has a heart for seeing revival in NZ, and firmly believes that it will start with our generation's youth. Anyway, here's a self-introduction, and a post from Lyle's Bebo which illustrates his vision for revival.

Ray

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FYI: I AM a husband (Debbie's man), a father (4 boys & 1 girl), a son, a brother (2 Sisters), an uncle. And I abolutely love my aiga (family) to bits... we serve Jesus and His cause.

I AM an Artist... inspired, influenced, motivated, and gifted by the greatest artist of all the one and only Creator of the Universe, God Himself... by the way God and I are friends.

I AM a preacher called by God commissioned by Jesus and endorsed by the Holy Spirit... Yeah, I AM blessed.

I AM Samoan, I AM Palagi (Scottish) I AM a son of Aoteroa, New Zealand... However my citizenship is not of this world. I AM a child of God an ambassador of Jesus Christ... I AM on a mission from God!!!...

How about you? have you found your purpose in life? True purpose can only be found in the great I AM Jesus Christ! Common I dare you to ask Him right NOW to reveal Himself to you. What have you got to lose?

Youth Revival

The vision? The vision is JESUS ? obsessively, dangerously, undeniably Jesus. The vision is an army of young people. You see bones? I see an army. And they are FREE from materialism. They laugh at 9-5 little prisons. They could eat caviar on Monday and crusts on Tuesday. They wouldn't even notice.

They are mobile like the wind, they belong to the nations. They need no passport.. People write their addresses in pencil and wonder at their strange existence. They are free yet they are slaves of the hurting and dirty and dying.

Such heroes are as radical on Monday morning as Sunday night. They don't need fame from names. Instead they grin quietly upwards and hear the crowds chanting again and again: "COME ON!"

And the army is disciplined. Young people who beat their bodies into submission. Every soldier would take a bullet for his comrade at arms. The tattoo on their back boasts "for me to live is Christ and to die is gain".

Sacrifice fuels the fire of victory in their upward eyes. Winners. Martyrs. Who can stop them? Can hormones hold them back? Can failure succeed? Can fear scare them or death kill them?

And the generation prays like a dying man with groans beyond talking, with warrior cries, sulphuric tears and with great barrow loads of laughter! Whatever it takes they will give: Breaking the rules. Shaking mediocrity from its cosy little hide. Laying down their rights and their precious little wrongs, laughing at labels, fasting essentials. The advertisers cannot mould them. Hollywood cannot hold them. Peer-pressure is powerless to shake their resolve at late night parties before the cockerel cries.

They are incredibly cool, dangerously attractive inside. On the outside? They hardly care. They wear clothes like costumes to communicate and celebrate but never to hide.

Would they surrender their image or their popularity? They would lay down their very lives - swap seats with the man on death row - guilty as hell. A throne for an electric chair.

With blood and sweat and many tears, with sleepless nights and fruitless days, they pray as if it all depends on God and live as if it all depends on them.

Their DNA chooses JESUS. (He breathes out, they breathe in.) Their subconscious sings. They had a blood transfusion with Jesus. Their words make demons scream in shopping centres.

Don't you hear them coming? Herald the weirdo's! Summon the losers and the freaks. Here come the frightened and forgotten with fire in their eyes. They walk tall and trees applaud, skyscrapers bow, mountains are dwarfed by these children of another dimension. Their prayers summon the hounds of heaven and invoke the ancient dream of Eden.

And this vision will be. It will come to pass; it will come easily; it will come soon. How do I know? Because this is the longing of creation itself, the groaning of the Spirit, the very dream of God.

My/Your prayer of faith invokes a thunderous, resounding, bone-shaking great 'Amen!' from countless angels, from hero's of the faith, from Christ himself - the original dreamer, the ultimate winner.