December 2008

(HT: Scott Hodge)

I totally Dig Twitter!!! I am a Twittering fool. There, I said it. Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows you to shoot out little and regular updates of what you are doing, thinking, etc. People get to “follow” you and your twitter updates (Tweets), and you “follow” others as well. Granted, a community will form around banalities, and I do not know whether that is a good thing or not – Tweets have recently included a guy live blogging about his airplane crash as it happened (link).

Twitter is a platform that is increasingly being used via 3G and via SMS texts, thus taking a “web” technology offline and onto the streets, where life happens. Your Twitter can also be integrated with other Social Media such as Facebook, BeenUp2, Myspace, and Plaxo, among others, so your tweets appear as Status updates on these other platforms.

Twitter will not replace blogging, it will save it. There is a certain Darwinian element to twitter whereby most of the junk that I am bound to spew out loud will find its way into several Tweets everyday, thus leaving serious blog content to find its way onto this blog. Whereas there is a slowing down in post-frequency, the content of these posts tends to be of a better quality. It weeds-out the rubbish, leaving the way clear for some serious blogging thought. I would not have it any other way.

Do you Twitter? If not, you should. Go here, open an account and add me.

Celebrating that LOVE found a way to break open the Heavens, and come and live humbly among us! Celebrating that a little baby born in a dirty stable represented the highest hopes for the human race. Celebrating that LOVE encarnate will always triumph. God’s good and perfect gifts are laid out ready for you to take them.

If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him! - Matthew 7:11

Have a blessed Christmas.

We have just returned from a small but in my view extremely strategic gathering of people in Madrid Spain. Your Kingdom Come conference was organized by my peeps in Madrid, Centro Cristiano Cuatro Vientos, and the speaker was none other than Pastor Kris Vallotton, one of my heroes from Bethel Church. There were few in attendance, around 100, but the really significant thing for me is that the crowd gathered was a very homogeneous group of people – most share the same history, myself included, and we have known each other for years. Not your typical conference in that regard.

Kris comes at a time when most of the ones in attendance are either going through a time of transition, or are at a crossroads, in terms of pursuing renewal, revival, and the more of God. He ministered to us as if he had been observing us and taking notes for the past thirty years, and then speaking into our history, our circumstances, and calling forth our destiny.

Many words and promises were spoken over many there, and the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry students that travelled with him were an utter blast to be around!!!!!!! I hope to be able to stay in touch with some of these folks and follow their progress from being students to being world changers and history makers.

We then followed this conference with two days of r&r in Madrid with dear friends. Much needed rest among great company.

This past Wednesday 10th December saw one of our favourite peeps in the world, Dalton and Vicky Jantzen visit us in Gibraltar. This guy baptized me 12 years ago in a swimming pool in the Spanish city of Seville, and although we have maintained contact through the marvel of the internet, we had not had face-time all these years.

We started off by just hanging out in Gibraltar, visiting different places and just catching-up on 12 years worth of water flowing under our respective bridges. One of the highlights of the afternoon for me was finding a monkey inside my car…… I kid you not.

In the evening we held a service where we worshipped together, cranked it up, and then Dalton ministered a good word on humbling yourself and going low before God that He may exalt you in due time. It was in this going “lower still” that God meets you and does what only He can do. This is like a passport application where you have to fill in what areas of your heart God needs to work in, in this process of humbling yourself under the mighty hand of God.

What I really appreciate about Dalton and Vicky is that they portray this sense of being real. I guess that living 16 years as a missionary in the jungles of Colombia does that to you. You lose the appetite to play religious games, and the result is a process where you have often gone before God and asked Him to deal with your own heart, and change it. In my friends Dalton and Vicky, the fruit of that process is evident.

Guys, if you read this, I want to say thank you…..for being you – I needed that.

In 1975 Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade and Loren Cunningham, founder of Youth With a Mission, had lunch together. God simultaneously gave each of them a message to give to the other: “The culture is shaped by seven mind-molders or mountains in society. If we can influence each of these areas for Christ, we will win the culture of our nation.” Unfortunately, we have not been winning the culture since 1975, but losing precious ground.

Business.. Government.. Family.. Religion.. Media.. Education.. Entertainment

The above video clip touches on a message that has really been re-birthed in my heart as of late. These “mountains” represent spheres of influence that mold, or shape our culture. Whoever takes on these 7 mountains takes on the harvest of nations, and can really aspire to disciple nations. The Body of Christ has almost-exclusively focused on the “Religion” mountain, whereas our western culture is increasingly being shaped through the other “mountains”. It is time to change our focus.

But I must interject a small caveat here……….I have to be completely honest and say that in my reading of this subject, I am taken aback a little by some of the patronizing language coming out of some circles. The “taking-over-the-world” speak does not resonate with me at all ….. but maybe that is a thought for another post. What I really do witness to is the language that is proceeding from Bill Johnson’s pulpit that sees Christians as the salt of the earth who need to be sprinkled into situations and different contexts showing forth the power and wisdom of God’s Kingdom being at hand. Bill Johnson speaks of the importance of not approaching these “mountains” with an agenda to “rule” or “dominate”, but rather to go in really low and humble with a heart to serve and bless and further other kingpins’ agendas. Doors will open when people do not see you as a threat. Humility is so key in this message.

Back on the subject of the seven mountains of influence, I am seeing the mountain of business as a re-awakened dream in my life. In order to provide a little history, when I was a kid I wanted to be priest, or a businessman when I grew up. I believe that even at that tender age my two main areas of calling were already resonating within: church, and business (At six or seven years of age, and raised in a catholic home, I guess that becoming a priest was the closest my mind came to assimilating a call to the ministry). Many many moons later the calling to business was suppressed under a tonne of religious baloney, that only allowed for “ministry” within the context of “church” …. until a couple of words that I received recently powerfully shook this notion. In a “revival chat” video clip, Che Ahn (one of my favourite people in the world), mentions in passing, how people may be called to “multiple mountains” ….. that statement blew oxygen on the smoldering embers of a repressed dream…… that of succeeding in business. WOW! In the recent conference I went to in England he addressed this issue again and actually decreed prosperity and success over those who were called to the marketplace. I receive it all, enthusiastically.

So I guess that my horizons are being incredibly stretched here. On the one hand we are seeing awesome and mighty stuff starting to breakout at Living Waters Church…. and I say MORE! MORE! MORE! We are so hungry to see more!!!! On the other hand I am being challenged to pursue a calling in the marketplace…..and all I can say is MORE! MORE! MORE! I am hungry for more! Can God stretch out your horizons in such a ridiculous way that only He can have the slightest chance of fulfilling the dream? I am letting myself be stretched, and challenged. Bill Johnson says, “you know you have heard from God when the thought is so incredibly awesome and good that you could never have thought of it yourself”. All I can say to these two mountains is….. “here I am”…..”here I come!”

Please pray for me….. I am really getting messed up….. in a good way.

I have recently returned from a historic gathering of pastors, ministry leaders and national influencers that was held at the historic St. George’s College in Windsor Castle. A few months ago Jaydan was scouring the Internet and he came across this “roundtable”, and with the special speakers being Bill Johnson, Che Ahn, and John Arnott, it promised to be off the hook. The event was a 24 hour day of impartation and prayer for revival. At the same time a really prophetic guy at church kept on hearing and sensing the words “Windsor Castle” without even knowing that we were planning of attending. At that point in time I was sounding Jaydan out too in order to see whether he would join me as my associate pastor.

We promptly wrote-off and were just as promptly informed that the event was full, but we were welcome to attend the normal conference in Maidenhead that followed this roundtable. Not to be discouraged by a “no” we went ahead and booked our flights, and made our hotel reservations, really believing that God wanted us at that event. In the meantime all of our efforts, calls and emails kept returning the same answer – sorry, the event is full. I guess in the end God must have really liked our almost-foolish, child-like faith because not only did a spot become available for us to attend the event, but significantly, we were invited to actually stay overnight at the castle.

Just to be in the company of these men and women was in incredible privilege. It was mentioned at that event that the remains of an actual roundtable had been discovered in some archaeological dig in England. They had discovered that “parliament” was not a building where the Government met – Parliament was wherever the King went, and his roundtable of 300 to 400 knights went everywhere with him.

This roundtable at Windsor Castle was its spiritual equivalent. The times of impartation, teaching and prayer for renewal and revival in our land were off the hook, with vision imparted, dreams re-awakened, horizons extended, and possibilities becoming probabilities in this all-too-real unseen realm of the eternal.

We rounded it all off with a 3-day conference at Maidenhead that was awesome and was featured on God TV.

All in all we managed to make some really neat and strategic connections, and the seeds of some really significant relationships were sown there. We are really excited about the prospect of developing these relationships further and building something together.