Here’s a picture of the team at our latest practice, taken by yours truly. Obviously it wasn’t a staged picture, otherwise you might actually be able to see more than four faces.

Just wanted to remind y’all that the countdown is on! Less than a month until departure! We’re about $700 away from our goal, and still coveting your prayers for the trip. We have only four more scheduled practices until we leave, so pray that they are effective times!

Thanks!

*Just in case you missed it, we’re going to Greece!*

As with most missions trips, there are two main ways you can be involved: finances and prayer.

Finances
The trip will cost $2,000 per person ($4,000 per couple – and I wasn’t even a math major in college). Of that amount, we have $3,500 already accounted for – Praise the Lord – due to our very generous church family. So, Luke and I need to raise another $500, which we know is no big deal for our great God!

There are other miscellaneous expenses that will need to be covered as well, namely extra baggage costs involved with taking musical instruments and sound equipment overseas. If we happen to raise any extra money, it will go toward that and/or other team members’ expenses.

If you are willing and able to contribute to our trip, the simplest way is to use the “Please Donate” link in the right-hand sidebar of our site {or access it here.} This will allow you to donate through PayPal, a secure online payment system.

If you’d prefer for your donation to be tax deductible, you can access a contribution form here, which you will then fill out and mail to the church with your check. (Be sure to read the “Important IRS Information” at the bottom of the page!)

Prayer
Even though prayer somehow feels less significant than shelling out hard-earned money, I am convinced that it’s the more important part of the support equation. In fact, we will be looking for some people to commit to partnering with us in prayer for this trip. Please consider blessing our team with your prayers!

I’ll give you some requests to bring before God right now, and I’m sure this list will change and grow as the trip nears…

• Pray for finances to be covered completely for our team.
• Pray for unity for our team.
• Pray for our team to have adequate preparation, and to do a spectacular job at encouraging the missionaries.
• Pray for the missionary families who will be attending, that their hearts will be encouraged and refreshed.
• Pray for the other people who will be working at the conference, including speakers and childcare workers.
• Pray for peace for me, as I’m working hard not to be a worrier about leaving our four absolutely-wonderful-and-precious children for a full week. (And as a side prayer, pray that Grace’s diabetes will be well-controlled while we’re gone. That might be my biggest concern with leaving them.)

Please know that we appreciate you and whatever support you are able to provide. Thank you in advance!

Association of Baptists for World Evangelism (ABWE) is a missions organization that has sent out approximately 450 couples and over 100 single men and women to more than 70 countries.

Every other year or so, ABWE holds a regional gathering for its Eastern and Central European missionaries. It’s a time of refreshment, when these people who have dedicated their lives to serving others in the name of Jesus Christ can take a week to breathe, relax, and be poured into spiritually.

The conference is to be held in Kassandra, Halkidiki, Greece this coming October.

Our church has been asked to provide the worship music for the conference. So, we will join our youth/worship pastor and his wife (who just happen to also be great friends of ours) and possibly a couple more people to be the worship team at this conference. Luke will play bass/acoustic/electric (guitars) and I will play flute/pennywhistle.

This is an amazing opportunity for us. We are beyond humbled to be able to serve these godly individuals in this way. I feel so inadequate, and yet I know God has used leaders in His church to call us to go. So we will go!

Many of these missionaries serve in closed countries, where they cannot worship openly with other believers. Many of these missionaries haven’t participated in corporate worship, then, in years. It will be our great privilege to lead them in worship.

Chad Vitarelli, the worship pastor at Calvary Baptist Church led the team for the last conference. He shared with our church congregation, in video format, about their ministry in Greece. Here’s part of what he said:

That first night, our first service, we were a little disappointed, because we had the sense that there wasn’t as much participation. We questioned whether maybe we’d picked the wrong songs, or if we just weren’t connecting with the missionaries. And as we were talking about that together as a team, one of the missionaries came up to us and said, “Hey, you may have had the sense that we weren’t participating with you.”

We said, “Well, yeah, we did.”

And he said, “Well, don’t give up on us. For many of us that are meeting together here, this is the first time for some of us – in years – that we’ve had the opportunity to worship in our native language with brothers and sisters with this common purpose. So it’s hard for us even to get the words out without choking up.”

We are so excited to help provide this opportunity for these servants of Christ.