Thanks so much for your recent prayers. It’s been two weeks with a lot of travel miles. Our team time in New Orleans was wonderful! Our team enjoyed a lot of hours of time together, lots of laughter, lots of eating, and lots of business. I’m a sort of evangelism champion for our region which just means I help our team own the value and practices of reaching non-believing grad students and faculty members on our campuses. We spent a couple of sessions assessing where we could be more effective and set a new training and communication structure in motion for our whole region. Much more on that. Much later.

We got to enjoy a few outings during the four days. We took a very chilly horse-carriage tour of the French Quarter that ended at Cafe DuMonde (powdered-sugar-drowned beignets for everyone). We drove to Baton Rouge, prayer walked part of LSU’s campus and paid a visit to Mike the mascot (actually Mike 7, the seventh such LSU live tiger mascot since 1936). What I enjoyed most about our time together was the extended time we spent in scripture and prayer looking at the theme of evangelistic leadership. We spend part of a morning studying Matthew 13 – several parables about the Kingdom of God. The parable of the wheat and the weeds spoke to us about doing ministry in full contact with a messy world inhabited by the disruptive work of Satan.

The week I jumped into after landing in Omaha was lots more miles, but not on Southwest. After unpacking Friday, napping Saturday, I woke up early this Sunday morning inspired to make a batch of my best PBCC Monsters. After church I borrowed my son-in-law’s hard copy of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, downloaded an audible copy of How Not to Be Secular by J.K. A. Smith, and tore out of my driveway in our 2014 Honda Pilot (aka The Pearl). My staff member at the University of Kansas in Lawrence hosted a book discussion. A book discussion, discussing a book, about another book! Yes, this kind of thing happens in GFM (all the time). It was rather a drive-by of a campus visit, but my February schedule was just too full for any more overnights! I think my head hit the pillow back in Omaha about 1:30am.

One last event out of town this week – Tuesday night. Again in the Pearl, a trip over to Ames for a Veritas Forum co-sponsored by GFM’s faculty ministry at Iowa State. Our guest speaker was Duke professor and medical doctor Warren Kinghorn director of the Theology , Medicine and Culture Initiative. It was a full room and a wonderful dialogue with a former ISU Faculty member in Counselling. Head on my pillow ETA Tuesday night? 1:45am.

Thanks so much for your prayers!

Tuesday to Friday next week I’ll be in NOLA with my GFM Regional Leadership Team (that’s us above last year gathered in North Carolina for the same meetings). These are my teammates who lead GFM ministry with me in a massive 17 state region called the South-Central. We gather in person, just our team, just one time per year for team building and coordinating our leadership. A few things you could be mindful of when you pray for us:

• Leon Filyaw (light blue shirt, back row) is our new RD (Regional Director). He stepped in as our leader when our old boss Don Paul Gross(back row, cadigan, behind me) took an RD job in the West last year.
• Please track with us via the schedule below. We have two guest staff members joining us for the part of our gathering focused on Spiritual Formation (Kathy and Karen).
• We’re meeting in New Orleans! Looking forward to some time with my team in a fun city (and maybe some food Nebraskans like me don’t normally get to eat).
• I’ll be helping with a few things in the schedule – pray for me this week as I prep for a couple of discussions on evangelism and lead our team in a MS study of Matthew 13.
• One fun thing we’ve got planned is an outtrip to LSU over in Baton Rouge! Allison (one of our Area Directors, on Leon’s right in the pic above) lives and works there. We’re going to hang out on her campus for some meeting, eating and prayer-walking!

Please pray for our time together! I’m excited about looking at a couple of Evangelism Self-assessment tools that our region has been using for the past two years. IF you’d like to see them click the link below! Oh, hey, looks like they also talked me into doing some cooking Tuesday night when we first get there! I hope they don’t regret that! In my experience when they trust you to feed them, you better deliver! I’m bringing a pretty safe family favorite I’ve made a million times: Tim’s Chicken Chili.

Thanks so much for your terrific support, friendship, giving and praying. I couldn’t keep this thing going without you! If I’m not too busy, I’ll try to blog while I’m down there next week!

PS: February’s GCF Brunch

The topic of conversation at brunch was Conflict Management! If you’re an old-school IV staff director you’ll recognize both resources we used: Difficult Conversations (in it’s 3rd rendition) and the trusty-dusty Thomas-Kilman conflict profile. YES, I had them take the old-school version of the questionnairre and discover thier conflict strategies (Avoidance, Accommodation, Competition, Compromise, Collaboration). I dare you to download it and take it right now! You can use the QR code above.