October Update

Catching up...
October has been a pretty amazing month. We had the opportunity to see family as we made our way back to Eldorado for a few days. Spending time with family is always good for our hearts. Noah spent a couple days in Atlanta going through Power Plant coordinator training. Power Plant is a ministry of the North American Mission Board that connects church youth groups with church plants in cities across the US and Canada. The students spend a week learning about church planting and evangelism and the church planters get a week of free labor. Noah was asked to be the St. Louis ministry coordinator, recruiting church planters and teaching for the week. Directly after getting of the plane from Atlanta we rushed downtown STL to attend the second half of the “LEAD for the city” conference. At this conference we went through our final couples’ assessment with the Acts 29 Network. It went extremely well and we are even more excited about what God is doing and how He is orchestrating everything.

Harvest the City...

We get a lot of questions about the name “August Gate.” And rightly so; because that is exactly what we wanted when we came up with it in the spring of ’07. We want this new church to be about three things: loving God, loving people, and restoring the city. To do so, we believe that we must be a church that prepares people to be missionaries in their own daily context. Ephesians 4:11-16 explains that God gives the leaders of the Church to just this; to train people with the Gospel so they may live and speak the Gospel. Matthew 9: 35-38 explains that as Jesus looked upon the crowds of the cities He was moved with compassion for them because they were lost and without hope. We believe that God is moved with this same heart of compassion when He looks upon our cities today. Jesus’ next words are crucial for all of us, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.” We believe that we are just a few of those workers that God is sending out into the fields for the harvest. He has sent us to St. Louis, Missouri to harvest the city that is knows as “the gateway to the west.” Where are you called to? Where is God (literally) “thrusting” you?

We need your prayers. We don’t want to be ignorant of the tremendous amount of spiritual warfare that is going to begin and is already going on because we are walking in obedience to God’s call. We are planting in the area of St. Louis that holds one of the largest Mardi Gras celebrations in the world (2^nd only to New Orleans itself). We are going to a city with a high crime rate and low number of evangelical churches. But we are confident in what the Lord has in mind, for just this week I heard “the light is much brighter where the darkness is much darker.” We want to gather a group of people who will commit to daily and weekly prayer for us as a church and as individuals. If you are such a person, please contact us and we will tell you more.

There is a ton more going on in our lives... we will keep you updated :)

Thanks for taking the time to read our blog. We would like to know your questions, comments, thoughts and prayers. Feel free to leave us a comment.