New Life, Next Exit

Updates…

Reaching Ex-Prisoners: The Unwanted & Despised

Please be in prayer with us as we continue to pursue God’s will for a potential amazing way to continue training-up more leaders and planting more churches.  We are considering obtaining a house near our church to create a men’s home where 3-4 handpicked ex-prisoners could come and be mentored, trained-up and then empowered and released to plant more churches.  This would be a 2-year internship type program and we would partner with other agencies, such as Prison Fellowship, to help us with the administrative and other practical sides of things.  These men will have already been identified and begun their Bible school studies while inside the prison system. 

For the men’s house to be set up we’re looking at probably a year out, but there are a handful of men to be released as soon as this summer that Chad will be visiting with during the next month at the state prison. There are a lot of details and questions that still need to be worked out, but we wanted to include you in the prayerful process to discern what God would want to do through this ministry and through the church we are currently planting. 

Thank You!

·         T.V. Last month we asked for help and we received a great new large screen TV for one of our children’s classes at the church.  It has already been used a lot and really helps as they now can all see the screen when they do their worship videos and other teaching and fun material that they use there.  

BEFORE

AFTER

·   Yard Sale. We also received some donations for our yard sale – thank you to everyone that participated.  We had a very successful yard sale – the first one run solely by our emerging indigenous leaders.  Yeah!!!  They were able to welcome everyone into our property and invite them to come out for our services and Easter programs. 

·        Lobby/Youth Room Transformation.  Currently we’re still waiting on everything to come together for the couches and other elements to transform our youth room into a more comfortable and versatile space.  The goal is that the youth who meet on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays have a nice space that can also be used for our pastoral counseling times, prayer times, as a reception or lobby space after service and for the parents of our tutoring program to have a nice place to be while their children are in classes.

Also we will be starting an ESL (English as a Second Language) class for adult in this same space in May with or without the transform! 

Web Page Help

Do you know how to design or create web-pages?  Would like to donate your expertise to our church plant? We would like to get our web-site fixed up and running so that it can be another tool to connect us with more people. 

Family News:

Our son Beniah is here!  We are so blessed to have Beniah Benjamin in our lives.  Rebecca and Justice love to hold him and give him lots of kisses.  They have great plans for what they will do with him when he is a little bigger.  He was born on March 21^st – so he is just about 1 month old and seems to grow every single day.  We’re taking lots of pictures so you’ll probably see at least one in the next few updates.  J

 
 

Fabiola’s Birthday….is just around the corner!  [March 26^th to be exact.] 

Please Pray with Us…

·         Pray that we may effectively engage, equip and empower our church while we do outreach and ministry in the park, community and during our special services this weekend.  Pray with us that we would see our church engaged, matured and trained-up in God’s love to reach more people for Him. 

Good Friday service

Easter outreach at the park (Saturday)

Easter Sunday service

·         Please pray with us for salvations! We had a great evangelism training time last Sunday after service – the majority of the church stayed after for the training!  Pray that we might effectively share our faith with friends, family, neighbors and even people we've never seen before – so that God might get the glory. 

·         Family Series  - One of the biggest needs in our community is teaching, guidance, help and healing for the families.  God has such a great plan and purpose for us through the family and we will be teaching about that for the next few weeks.  Please pray for a lot of new visitors and for families to be healed and transformed by the Word and the Spirit. 

We are excited about this season, the Easter season, where we are able to really focus on what Christ did for us.  We have new life!  We have left the old and embrace the amazing new life that He has given to us….now let us pray together and labor together so that more people may exit their old ways and encounter this amazing life!

Happy Easter!

Chad, Fabiola, Rebecca, Justice and Beniah

Unity – Partnerships (God’s Our Drug)

While you pour into this ministry and our family we wanted to share how this fountain of blessing continues to extend further.  We have been pouring not only into our own community and church, but into other churches and communities as well.  We want to support others.  We can do more together—unity is powerful.  We are reaching out to see these new partnerships develop so that more people can know Jesus and grow in Him.

We have hosted prayer meetings with other area pastors. We have visited other churches and offered trainings to churches much larger than our own and even worked with some of them to put on outreaches in the park. We have had prayer and strategy meetings with Christian teachers that taught at the public school a few blocks from our church.  These teachers already know hundreds of the high schoolers that walk by our church every day.  We have opened the doors of our church so that through these partnerships we can reach more of these youth and help build a bridge in this community between cultures, languages, ages, and even rival gangs.  Together we can reach more youth for Christ. 

“That’s like your drug, huh?” said one of the youth with eyes wide open as he observed a prayer time.  “You guys just got high, didn’t you!?” he shouted out – amazed at what he had just witnessed.  This youth was trying to contextualize that peace that passes all understanding and that inexpressible joy that comes with being with Jesus.  The disciples were accused of being drunk after their prayer meeting in that upper room and now our youth are witnessing the internal change that takes place when our real, living God comes and meets with them.  We want more people to observe and experience that God is real and get to know and grow in Jesus. 

Lastly, we wanted to thank you for praying with us for marriages and families. As you may already know three couples from our church have gotten married in the last few months.  We held our first wedding at our church at the end of February (see picture in the last post) – it showcased powerfully the transformation that the Holy Spirit is causing in our community.  This couple was also baptized on the same day as their wedding!  It was a great day of celebration for our church family. 

Please pray with us for more baptisms and salvations – especially in this strategic Easter season.  We will be starting a teaching series on the family after Easter, so please pray for that to have a lasting impact as we penetrate deeper into enemy territory to proclaim that “Jesus is Alive!” 

We are thankful for Jesus giving us life and that He has given us you to partner with so that together we can reach even more people for Him! 

The Wolyn Family