LECTURE PHASE MARCH 2023

THIS YEAR WE ARE CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF YWAM BEING IN THE NETHERLANDS!!!

WELCOME AND HI AGIAN!!!

Welcome and hi again! I am so looking forward to having you read this update. I am excited to share with you all what I have been doing, learning and I hope that in my vulnerability God would speak to you and you would learn something new!!! I pray that this update blesses you and helps you to fall more in love with Jesus.

Since my last update, the January DTS school has been my main ministry and my main responsibility. During this time I have had the pleasure of teaching, discipling the new students, leading intercession times, practicing evangelism and helping out in various ministries held by the base. In this update I plan to update you on how the lecture phase went for our January DTS and what I have been learning in this season.

Like with every update, I want to begin this time with some prayers of thanksgiving and write out the prayers I have been praying over us as we read this together. When praying I was reminded of the verses in Isaiah 55:8-9 and I felt to specifically pray that those reading this would grow in trusting the Lord in what He is doing, trusting His direction/wisdom and trusting that He is near.

Isaiah 55:8-9 ESV

8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, Neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.

9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

AS HIGH AS THE HEAVENS ARE HIGHER THAN THE EARTH, SO ARE HIS THOUGHTS AND WAYS HIGHER THAN OURS!!! WOAH, I think this is crazy and if we can have faith in this I truly believe our trust in the Lord will grow exponentially. This verse is the verse that God has constantly been repeating in my mind throughout this season and I encourage you to ask the Lord for help to fully believe in this verse.

Imagine/think about the fruit God could bear in our lives if we fully believed what God is saying in these verses and how our perspectives of our situations/decisions would change if we were fully confident in these words. So lets ask God to help us have faith in His words and be fully convinced. Thinking about the results of being fully convinced by this creates in me so much excitement and peace. So lets pray!

My Prayer for Us:

Heavenly Father, thank you for this day. Lord you are faithful and trustworthy even when we don’t always clearly see it. Thank you that your ways and your plans are way greater than ours. I ask that you would help each one of us to grow in trusting you, trusting that you are doing a good work in our circumstances, trusting for your wisdom/direction and trusting that you are near us in our circumstances. I pray that you would help us to be fully convinced of your words in Isaiah 55:8-9. Help us to see in our pasts how your ways and thoughts have already been so much higher than ours.

I also pray for my friends and family that as we all read this update we would fall more in love with you Jesus, I pray that you would speak to us and that we would hear your voice as we read this update. I pray that you would draw near to us in this time and that we would grow in a passion for missions and a passion for helping others know/love Jesus!  I ask for all these things In Jesus name Amen!

THANK YOU!!!

Once again I want to say thank you so much for supporting me prayerfully and financially. Your generosity has not only blessed me but also helped me to bless the various ministries and others on the base with my time and also with our finances. Through your generosity we have also helped support other missionaries going to places like Malawi, Egypt, Turkey and Morocco. I am very grateful that you have entrusted me to steward your finances for God’s kingdom. I pray that as you read this update God would bless you with the joy He is experiencing as He watches His kingdom be made known and as people choose to follow/accept Jesus through your generosity.

OVERVIEW:

The January DTS so far has been so good this year. I have watched the students grow in their relationships with God so much and some of my favorite moments are those “AHHH HA!” moments where something just clicks in the students mind and you can see a clear and tangible shift in their attitude towards pursuing the Lord. In this update I plan to talk about the following things:

The various lecture topics we had this year & talk about some of my favorite weeks/lesions.
The schedule/curriculum of the DTS so that you have a better idea/understanding of how exactly you are helping others to grow this year.
Testimonies from the students & from our times in evangelism.
The locations and plans of our outreach phase.
Our prayer requests.
Lastly, talk about my personal revelations I have learnt this year.

JANUARY DTS LECTURE PHASE:

Just to give everyone a quick recap I want to discuss the focus of our January Discipleship Training School. The January DTS is a missions focused training school with a goal of helping students graduate with the skills and knowledge on how to be a missionary in both a cross cultural context and their home countries. Whether that's in their universities/collages, in their jobs or with their local church.

Remember missions is not about where you go to, but whom you point towards with your life. I question I often find God asking me is “when people look at you how much of Jesus do they see?”. Remember Jesus lived a life where He said that He was the perfect representation of His Father, who sent Him, therefore being in Christ have an opportunity to represent the one who sends us, Jesus (Matthew 28:16-20). Missions is the lifestyle of loving those whom God loves with the same love that He has and a lifestyle of being discipled and making disciples.

This year in our January DTS, we have felt to have a special focus on the Bible and how God's heart, character, and nature is revealed in Scripture and in the Jesus' life. We want to be rooted in the Word of God!

We will also have a special focus on sharing the Gospel with those who have never heard it before. This means that we will have speakers come who are actively serving in the 10/40 Window, and we will focus our outreaches in this area, specifically reaching out to the Muslim world. We will have specific lectures and training on how to minister to Muslim people.

MEET THE JANUARY DTS SCHOOL

LECTURE TOPICS:

This year we have had and will have the following topics. We are currently in our week focused on missions. We will have speakers who are missionaries in Iran & Iraq who will talk about the underground church in these muslim nations. Below I have included the other lecture week topics included in our school and shared some short summaries on what I have or other students have learnt in those weeks. My hope in explaining this is to help you to have a better understanding of what is taught in our schools with the hope that it stirs up an excitement to know that young people from across the globe are growing/maturing in these areas for the sake of furthering God’s kingdom and sharing the gospel with others!!. God is moving in the lives of these students and they have an excitement and zeal to make Jesus known!!! So thank you for partnering with me in this process, I love you all so much and I love that I get to serve God in this way. Thank you!!

Hearing God’s Voice - Out of this week many, if not all, students finished confident in the fact that God speaks and they are all growing in their ability to discern God’s voice. We did various practical exercises to hear God’s voice and it was exciting to see all the students' faces light up as they saw and became more aware of how they had already been hearing God’s voice.
Character & Nature of God - During this week we focused on unpacking how we discover God’s character and nature in scripture. As we grow in understanding of who God is, it becomes easier to recognize who’s voice we are hearing, His or Ours or this Worlds.
Jesus - During this week explored the life of Jesus, specifically the humanness of Jesus. The biggest revelation for some of the students this week is the fact that becoming more like Jesus, is becoming more human. Because Jesus lived out perfectly what it meant to be human.
Holy Spirit & Spiritual Warfare - This week was one of my favorite weeks. The thing that stood out for me during this week was a lesson found in Ephesians. In Ephesians 1:20-21 & Ephesians 2:4-6 it talks about how Jesus Christ is now at the right hand of the Father in heavenly places and it also talks about how we are seated in Christ. (In Romans 8:34 it also talks about how Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father.) The reason why these verses are so impactful to me is because it talks about our position, which is in Christ. It has changed my perspective of prayer. Now when I pray and do spiritual warfare, I don’t pray with this mindset of me being on earth and trying to impact what is going on in the spiritual realm, (Ephesians 6:12), but rather I pray from this position of authority of I am seated in Christ, on the throne in Jesus, “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion..”. When it came to engaging in spiritual warfare it helped me to realize I am not looking up at the enemy, but looking down upon it from a position of authority.
Lordship of Jesus - This was also one of my favorite weeks. During this week we talked about Proverbs 1:7 which teaches us that “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” In hebrew the root word for knowledge is ( יָדַע) yâda‛, [strongs H3045], which means both to praise and also means to know someone intimately in the context of marriage. Through this week we explored how our friendship with the Lord will only go as far as our fear of the Lord. This week was very convicting for both the students and I as it highlighted areas where we don’t have Jesus first and don't have a fear of the Lord present. This week encouraged me and my students to pray this prayer of “Lord show me where are you not Lord over my life”.
Biblical WorldView - During this week we focused on understanding what is a biblical worldview, but also spent a good amount of time also understanding what is a secular world view and an eastern world view. We also explored and took the time to see how our worldview has been impacted by movies, tv shows and other things of the world.
Identity - This was a very content heavy week for us. Many of the students and staff, including myself, are still digesting this week and going over our notes. A common point of discussion for this week was shame and how it distorts how we perceive ourselves. Shame is this concept of “if they really knew me and knew the things I did, no one would accept or love me”. Our speaker did a really good job of teaching us how we can find freedom from shame in our lives.
Relationships & Sexuality - In this bible school there are many different ages, cultures and nationalities represented. There are many different ways of doing life and naturally when you do life with so many other people who have different ways of doing things or saying things there are bound to be misunderstandings. This week really helped the students and I understand the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation. A fruit of this week's teachings was that we saw many of the students taking ownership of their relationships with one another. There were many opportunities to share hurts, misunderstandings and offer forgiveness. Since this week I personally have felt that our school has been more unified and that I can trust my students to have grace and forgive one another and also show this grace/forgiveness towards the people from their home nations that have hurt them. For bigger offenses from people back home I have seen the students pray this prayer of “Lord I am willing to be made willing to forgive.”
Missions (not yet done)
The Kingdom (not yet done)
God’s Heart for Israel & the Nations (not yet done)

We were taught many things in our lecture times and most of what I mentioned above is just what the speakers thought on in their lecture times or what stood out to me the most. I love hearing from our speakers but I also love hearing from our students. We have students in various places of their lives, at different levels of maturity in their faiths and it is always interesting to see that different things are standing out for different people.

As a staff it is my responsibility to help the students further process and engage with the content of the week. I typically do this in one on one conversations or group discussion where led by the Holy Spirit I ask what has God been teaching them this week. It has been so enjoyable to help them take what they have learnt in lectures and show them how to use it to futher engage in a conversation with God. In scripture a difference I see between the thousands who heard Jesus and the few (in comparison) whom He called disciples was that His disciples took the time to ask Jesus the “WHY” questions and took the time to listen to Jesus’ explanations, but also choose to follow Jesus whether or not they fully understood Him.

In the same way, I encourage my students and teach them how to ask God questions and help them to process what they understood or didn't understand. I would typically follow up with them to help them process it more, help them to practically apply what they have learnt and follow up on their progress. As a leader I also have the responsibility to do first, then teach so I also model/talk about how I have been engaging with the Lord and talk about what God has been teaching me and asking me to grow in. It has been exciting to watch the students grow in their maturity and in how they relate with others and the Lord. Thank you for your prayers and your financial support, thank you for enabling me to be a discipler but also be further discipled by God in this process of discipling others.

Below I have included some funny pictures and testimonies from the students.

MEET THE STUDENTS & STAFF

TESTIMONIES:

ZACH:

How has this DTS impacted me or matured me?

So far this DTS God has crazily matured me in my identity as a Son. He's exposed deep areas of shame in my life that I didn't know existed, and shown me how to live free in Him and how important staying in His love is to pour out to others.

How has this school changed how I see God?

I am more confident that I am loved, but even more specifically, more confident that God is moving and I am growing even when I don't feel it or see it. Not letting my mind and emotions control my life, or at least realizing they don't have to, has totally changed how I see Holy Spirit working and how I can trust God and be loved by Him regardless of what I'm feeling or seeing

LOIS:

How has this DTS impacted me or matured me?

I am more intentional with focusing/listening to obey the Lord, focusing and listening on what and how He is speaking. I love people more and more. I look at people like how Jesus did and reflect His life in my life. I really discovered that I have a passion for the bible and I really want to know and learn more about His truth/word. My confidence in praying (in English) has grown so much. Stepping out in praying in front of more people, for example the whole base was out of my comfortzone but God asked me to do it, and in the moment I did not really enjoy it but later it helped me in other situations. Declaring prayer in the mic at the tabernacle also helped a lot and I’m more comfortable and confident to do this.

How has this school changed how I see God?

I have grown in my character, and God really opened my eyes, through encouragements from others but also through the lectures, that I’m so so so loved. I already knew it, and believed it but now it is deeper in my heart and it is sinking in. Im also believing step by step with more confidence to believe that I have good things to add and speak out.

ANA:

How has this DTS impacted me or matured me?

This DTS has matured me because I was forced to reside outside of my comfort zone, through constant human interaction, challenging discussions, engaging relationships with people I normally wouldn’t be with, etc. I have been able to explore my identity in areas of life that I have not voluntarily explored before. I feel like I take more space in society now, like I have more to offer because I have allowed myself to expand.

How has this school changed how I see God?

God is almost totally different to me now than who He was before I began DTS. I never realized how much He truly sacrificed for me, and how much He truly loves me. I now know that I do not have an identity of a sinner, but of a child of God (and that sentence never really impacted me until now).

JULIA:

How has this DTS impacted me or matured me?

I feel more the need to read my Bible. I feel when I don’t spend time with God in the morning that I miss something in the whole day. My everyday life looks different I am more open to share the Gospel on the street. I can see that fear of man is getting less and less. God is holding really his hand over me and shows me so many talents and gifts what I never saw before.

How has this school changed how I see God?

I see Him in such a big way with so much more power and love. And He is so faithful like look at the Old Testament. I got so many revelations about God being a person and especially Jesus as a person.

I don't know about you guys, but I cried with so much joy when reading these testimonies. I felt God’s joy towards these students. My prayer is that you would also feel God’s joy when reading these testimonies. God is moving in the lives of these students and I know each and every one of these students will go on to disciple more and help others discover more of Jesus in the future. This is what we have gotten to sow into. So Thank you, thank you, thank you!!

JANUARY DTS SCHEDULE:

LECTURE PHASE SCHEDULE

Now I want to talk about other things on our schedule to also help you to have a better understanding of our school and what we are investing into together. My prayer is that you would also see how these practices have contributed to the amazing testimonies above.

Worship & Intercession: It is an integral part of our school and our discipleship process. Which is why we have some form of it nearly every day in our school. (The examples of this include: Worship, Ministry Night, Intercession, Tabernacle, Base Time & Base Intercession).

Our hope with having it everyday is to teach and impart to our students a habit of daily praising/thanking the Lord for who He is and what He has done and a daily habit of praying for others. In worship as we daily declare who God is and thank Him for what He is doing; we are renewing our minds with the Truth of who He is and actively remembering/engaging in what He is doing/has done in our lives. The fruit of this is a confidence in God’s faithfulness and a sureness in God’s worth. In intercession we practice intentionally growing in awareness of what is breaking God’s heart, this can/has included learning about and praying for the needs of others, the needs of countries different from our own and the needs of the church body. The fruit of this is a mind practiced in thinking about others and a spirit intimately connected to God’s emotions.

Worship & Prayer/Teaching & Preaching Workshops: Since worship, prayer and sharing the gospel is an integral part of our school and our goal for the DTS, we have devoted parts of our week to specifically learn/talk about how we can grow in these areas. In the worship & prayer workshops we help the students grow in awareness in the different/various ways they can engage in worship and prayer. This was particularly helpful for our students who were new in their faiths. Just like me when I was just growing in my relationship with God, I didn't really know what made worship, worship, or what made prayer, prayer. I didn't know how to engage with God in these areas relationally. These workshops helped the students do just this.

We also have a preaching and teaching workshop focused on how to prepare teachings and how to share the gospel in different settings. I had the pleasure of teaching in this prayer workshop. I taught how to prepare your heart to teach, I called it “The Heart Prep in The Sermon Prep”. I know not everyone reading this will be preaching or teaching in churches but I really felt to share this one point that God taught me while preparing this teaching because I believe that this will be helpful in a variety of ways in our prayer lives. The point is from the book of Romans, specifically in Romans 8:26-27 & 8:34-35 which talks about the Holy Spirit and Jesus interceding for us (praying for us). Another example of Jesus praying for us can be found in John 17. What I am trying to point out is the fact that Jesus has been and is praying for us. So what I felt invited by God to do and what I feel to invite us to do is ask the Lord “Lord how are you praying over me and my situation, I ask for the wisdom to join in with you and pray your prayers.” Maybe you are going through some hard circumstances or having to make difficult decisions, I want to encourage you to pray and ask God how is Jesus praying over you in this situation, or ask Jesus, “Jesus, if you were me how would you pray?”. God show me how intimate this way of prayer is! Which is why I want to invite us to take part in it. This makes prayer less of a request and more of an act of joining in or an act of partnership, which is way more relational.

Bible Night: Our bible nights have been centered around God’s description of Himself found in Exodus 34:6-7, shown below. We spend the night in a lecture/discussion type of class exploring each characteristic of God, exploring where in the bible we can also see these characteristics and how we can spend it learning about how the original readers (ancient Hebrews) would have understood these characteristics. These nights have helped us to better understand who God is and why he chose to describe Himself the way He did.

Exodus 34:6-7

6 The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands,[a] forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

Evangelism: Our Thursday afternoons have been the most challenging time for both our students and I. I will be honest and say I am always so nervous when we begin but always so encouraged and glad that we end up doing it. One of my favourite testimonies was from the time we had the opportunity to do evangelism inside one of the local mosques in Amsterdam. We initially just planned to come and learn and be more aware of how they pray, but then they invited both the men and women in our class to have coffee & tea with them. Through this we had a wonderful opportunity to share our faiths and testimonies in a more casual setting. We also had the opportunity to read the Bible and Qur’an with them. I think it was so God planned, but unknown to us, they invited us to read a portion of the Qur’an which was a parallel to the story found in Luke 1:1-56. The part that makes it so God planned was that we were able to read Luke 1:31-35 shown below, with an emphasis on verse 35, in both Arabic and English. In fact the other men in the mosque were the ones that were more excited to read the bible. We had a great opportunity to share God’s love with them and pray for them.

“31 You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” 35 The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.”

One on Ones: These are scheduled times where the students and staff meet together to process the week and discuss things that they would typically not like to be heard in public settings. These times have been my favourite times with us guys every week ending the meeting amazed at what God spoke through the other person. With on my male students we have mainly been focused on the area of sonship, forgiveness and what it means to honour women in relationships.

School Time: This is a flexible time and its content is typically adjusted to suit whatever we feel as a leadership team is needed to further disciple the school in or help the students to further process/understand the content discussed at lectures this week. It is often very practical teachings, such as teachings on how to handle difficult conversations, how to deal with culture shock, how to prepare for outreach, etc.

Community Night: We describe it as mandatory fun time hahaha. It is just an opportunity for us as a school to bond together, get to know each other and play games or watch movies together. It has been really enjoyable to get to know each other in a more relaxed context

JANUARY DTS OUTREACH PHASE:

OUTREACH LOCATION: EGYPT!!!

FLAG AND MAP OF EGYPT

EGYPT!!!!!, I am so excited to go to this nation with my wonderful team below. We have been praying and interceding for this nation for the past 3 months and we as staff team and as Team Egypt have consistently been gaining God’s heart for this nation and hearing God’s voice. I am excited to see people healed, see people know Jesus deeper, see salvations, see people set free from addictions and see families be unified (especially in families where someone converting to christianity has caused a division).

It is important to note that Egypt is a closed nation where converting people from Muslim to Christianity is Illegal, therefore please be praying for us specially in the area of wisdom and also please do not post about me going to Egypt on social medias. Some facts about Egypt is that it has a total population of 110,904,000 with 86.2% of them identifying themselves as muslims. 13.2% claim to be christian. If you would like to learn more about Egypt and its progress to becoming a christian nation you can take a look at this wonderful website called Joshua Project which records this kind of progress for almost all nations.

Click Here if Interested: Joshua Project

MINISTRY OPPORTUNITIES:

Like with most muslim/middle eastern nations they are very relational therefore we will be spending the entirety of our stay in the capital city of Cairo to build/deepen our relationships with the locals in Egypt and out hosts/contacts. For this outreach we will have three main ministries which I will talk little about below.

FRIENDS & LOCAL MINISTRY: Our friendship & local outreach times will primarily be focused on friendship building with the intention of sharing the gospel in a more relational way. This is because we won’t be able to easily talk about the bible in these ministries, but we will be able to share the gospel with how we live, how we love them and how pause to see/listen to them. Under this umbrella of friends & local ministry, we will be volunteering with the local orphanages and handicapped centres. We will be serving at the local drug rehab centres with a potential to share our own stories of Jesus freeing us from our own addictions. Lastly we will be doing a lot of park evangelism where we will be going to the local parks, meeting with locals with the intention of building a friendship with them so that we can eventually invite them to our house to share the gospel with them in a more secure setting.

REFUGEE MINISTRY: In Egypt there are many refugees from the neighbouring countries. We will mainly be working with the Syrian and Sudanese refugees in Egypt. Most of our time in this ministry will be spent doing house visits. Thankfully our contact has already planned and set many of these meetings up. We have been invited by many of these refugees into thier homes, therefore we are looking forward to getting to know them deeper and share stories or testimonies around a meal with (which is very typical in a middle eastern setting) with the hope of making them feel loved, seen and welcomed. We hope to also be able to support them through our generosity but unfortunately this has really been unwelcome by the Egyptian locals, with many of the Egyptian locals claiming “the christians are trying to buy people into thier religion”. Therefore if you could pray that God would give us wisdom on how we are to be generous and how we can give to these people in a way that wouldn’t often the locals or damage our hosts reputation, please do so. Thank you.

BODY OF CHRIST MINISTRY: Our last ministry focus will be with the local churches in Cairo. We have some local contacts whom are pastors in Egypt, therefore we will be working with thier churches to help run church services. We will have opportunities to preach at church, lead worship, work with the local youth groups and lead bible studies within the church.

OUTREACH TEAM:

OUTREACH TEAM PHOTO

Team Egypt: [Top Row] Zach, Ella, Lois, Soyoon & Cliff [Bottom Row] Julia, Ana & Claudia

PRAYER POINTS:

As a team we felt to specifically ask our friends and family to pray for the following things.

PRAYER REQUESTS:

FOR PROTECTION, prayers for physical and spiritual protection.
FOR JOY, prayer that our team would be filled with the joy of the lord and that we would have so much joy/excitement towards prayer and hearing god’s voice.
FOR UNITY, prayer that our team would have a willingness/joy to surrender our own preferences and desires for the sake of the team. that we would choose harmony over our own desires.
FOR BOLDNESS, prayer against the fear of man and that we would have so much boldness and courage to share/live out the gospel.
FOR FAITH, prayer for supernatural/elite faith and that uncertainties or unknowns would not discourage us.
FOR NEW REVELATIONS, prayer that our team would receive new and deeper revelations of God’s love and of who Jesus is.