Tuesday, February 06, 2007

We're back


Well we are back in Delaware after a great weekend. We arrived in Oakville, ON around 4:00 in the afternoon on Friday and had time to eat, visit a Wholefoods Market, and still arrive early for the beginning of the conference. We actually didn't fight at all on the 8 hour drive, so there's no interesting story to tell about the drive. We met lots of new people, worshipped, and heard Roger Bye kick off the conference with a great message basically establishing that we all feel a lack of power for ministry and we need power, but we already have been given "the fullness of him who fills all in all" (I'm quoting ESV though he used NIV). He preached from Ephesians 1:15-23 and 3:14-21 and we ended up by praying these prayers from Scripture over each other.

I'm really not that good at summing up sermons so I think I'll wait for them to be put online and then give you all a link. I'm also expectant that Andrew Fountain will give very accurate summaries on his blog eventually, so I'll keep an eye out and let you all know if he does.

On Saturday, we had 5 sessions all together and heard from (in order) Chris Maclean (Kingsville Family Church, Oakville), Joe Crummey (The Meeting Place, Fredericton),Andrew Fountain (New Life City Church, Toronto) Roger Bye (King's Church Cockermouth and apostolic oversight over Ontario), and John Lanferman (Jubilee Church, U.S and apostolic oversight of U.S On Sunday morning we heard from John again on faith.

Now I mentioned that we didn't have a fight on the way, but on Saturday morning we did have a bit of a problem over my mentioning to John Lanferman (whom I'd never met before) that Canadian butter was superior to American butter. It seems my husband was a little embarrassed by me (no self-proclaimed social butterfly) but he's a good apologiser, which is one of the main reasons I married him. We managed to get through it and go on to eventually enjoy the rest of the day.

The main highlights for me were all centered on seeing friends and meeting new ones. I'm beginning to realize that apart from fellowship, meetings and all that go along with them are more or less meaningless and powerless to me. It is in the context of a loving family that I am truly changed, and I suspect this has something to do with God's promise that he would be with us. So, for old (ish) friends we had Joe, Trevor, Chris and Rachel, Dave and Chris, Andrew and Anne, and many more (and we didn't get to see any of them as much as would have liked), and we met Roger Bye, Mike (?), another elder in Oakville, Kevin, John Lanferman (beyond the butter incident), and I was also introduced by Andrew to a beautiful lady named Janice. I'm sure I'm missing many and some of them I'm not able to list because I either can't pronounce/spell or remember their names... We really felt welcomed into the family and it was amazing.

We also had a great time staying with my sister Kelly and her boyfriend Mike. We didn't have a lot of time together, but we had some time to hang out on Sunday night. They managed to get me off my diet completely which is always fun, and catch a mouse during the night. So, good times all round.

We are now back to decisions. Oakville or Fredericton? We welcome any and all prophetic or possibly prophetic thoughts, dreams, visions, pictures, or inclinations any of you may have. Either destination would be wonderful and we know we'll end up in the Maritimes no matter what, so it's a question of which road we take. We have yet to experience a great revelation , though we may be leaning in one direction a little bit. We are hoping and praying that we can get this house on the market by spring. If there's one thing we all agree on it's that IT'S TIME.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Jul,

We are with the Apostolic team that Rob Rufus is involved with, he was on the lead team until he took time off to plant the church in Hong Kong 2 years ago. The group is called New Covenant Ministries International. www.ncmi.net

There are around 40,000 churches worldwide that relate to NCMI in I think 60 nations now. It originated in South Africa in the early 80's. There is a large group of churches in Ontario and British Columbia and it is growing quickly.

It sounds like we have a lot of things in common!

I think you already have Rob's church site, I saw it listed in your links. If you want to know more you can email me at shasher_72 at hotmail dot com

Adrian Warnock said...

Hi there.
Ok so I have a question. What about downtown Toronto?

jul said...

We have asked ourselves the same question. Actually, since the downtown plant meets with the Oakville church on Sundays, and has their own meetings at other times, we kind of plan on having our cake and eating it too. If we go to the Toronto area, we would probably try to live between downtown and Oakville. We would consider living downtown if it works out but the house prices are much higher and we have 3 small children, 2 of whom will be school age next year. Why do you ask?

jul said...

Oh, and hi and welcome!

Adrian Warnock said...

Just being nosy! It was the only one you didnt mention, thats all.