Update #3 - Rock the Dock

Hey all! Hope I find you in good spirits whereever you are now. The past few days has been very sunny and beautiful here in Halifax! But, much like Vancouver, rain seems to be a "more-often-than-not" type of thing here as well. So I enjoy the sun as often as I can.

A quick report is that now there are "officially" 5 people who have received Christ as their Lord and Saviour since project started! 3 of them are being followed up, they are: Vivi, Denise, and Jack. As this is only the beginning of their faith journeys, please pray that they will be built up into mature Christ-followers!

Also, there are a good number of international students here at St. Mary's University who are very interested in Christianity, it's pretty amazing!


The Job Situation
Since the last update, the past 2 weeks have been very eventful, not least of which were some moments of discouragements.

Two weeks ago, I received a call from Payless Shoesource down at Bayers Lake (about an hour's bus ride away) for an interview. Even though it was raining very heavily, I was quite excited as it was the first call I got back from anyone after dropping off at least 25 resumes in the past few weeks. After a long busride and a bit of exploring on foot (honestly, shopping complexes here in Halifax are not meant for pedestrians), I finally met up with the manager and got ready for an interview. However, as soon as I informed her of my availabilities, it turned out that there wouldn't be an interview, because I simply cannot work on Saturdays, as we do all of our bigger scale outreaches and evangelism on Saturdays.

In addition to that, volunteering at the Psychology lab at Dalhousie University has been really slow and quite simply, unexciting. Summers at the universities here are very quiet (for instance, their food courts aren't closed during the summer), so as eager as I was to look for random tasks to do and meet students, there simply wasn't anything available.

But of course, God had other plans for me.

The day after the "interview", I got a chance to meet the key student leader for Dalhousie Campus for Christ, Luke, and it turns out his brother runs a brick-laying company and could use some extra hands for their project. So me, along with 2 other project guys, went and worked from 7am to 5pm the next day, meeting some young Haligonians there, as well as finally making some $$. It was physically very tiring, but I was really thankful that things turned around so quickly for me. Praise God!

Although that was only a one day job, things at the lab have also turned around. The lab at Dalhousie is now finally giving me some direction, as I am now getting to participate in one of their studies on visual attention. Additionally, after contacting one of the Psychology Profs here at Saint Mary's University (the university I live at), I am getting a chance to do some volunteering here as well.


PROJECT ROLES
The past two weeks also marked the assignment of roles for all of us on project. I am now appointed as one of the two Men's Discipleship Group leaders, responsible for leading smallgroup biblestudies and checking on how the other 3 guys in my group are doing on a weekly, one on one basis. I am really looking forward to this, as I will get the chance to build into three awesome guys.

In addition, our team of 30 is now divided into 2 different movement development areas (MDA), where one team is now responsible for Campus outreaches, and the other City outreaches.

Because I have never done any city outreaches, I chose to be on the City MDA team. So far, during the past three Saturdays, we went out in pairs into the city (mainly the downtown and waterfront areas), and performed surveys and shared our faith with Haligonians and tourists. Generally speaking, people here are quite open to share their thoughts, however, as always, there are also a lot of misconceptions about spiritual things, and quite simply, lots of weird theologies. In fact, during most of the conversations I have had so far, the most "popular" beliefs are:

- that there is heaven without hell
- the historical event of Jesus Christ crucified and raised after 3 days was just a nice fairytale
- that every religion leads to the same god
- that churches here (there are plenty, especially Catholic churches that have been around for more than 100 years) are all on the wane


IBS Training
Although these are all tough questions requiring good answers, God had made sure in advance that we would be well trained.

One of the most important activities we have been doing these past couple of weeks is IBS: Inductive Bible Study. We as a group are studying the whole book of 1 Corinthians, and it's simply the most fitting book for everything we are doing here.

For example, in 1Co1:17-18, the Apostle Paul says:
"For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God."



Also, in 1Co1:22-24:
"For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God."


So, no matter what beliefs Haligonians here carry, we know one thing for sure: that we are to preach Christ crucified: nothing more, nothing less. Not with words of eloquent wisdom, so that we do not take away the power of the cross.


Back to the MDA thing...
Back on the topic of the City MDA, because we are here as multipliers, and not just "evangelists", we will need support from local churches. So far, things have been going very well, as two churches (West End Baptist and First Congregational) are very, very eager to partner with us. Already we have two community barbeques scheduled with each of the two churches for late June and early July, and they are inviting our team to train their congregations on initiative evangelism in mid June! Praise God!

Lastly (I know, it sounds like I just won't stop, doesn't it), two weeks ago we also had the priviledge to be trained by the executive director of D.R.I.M.E. (Disciple Ready in Mobile Evangelism), which is a ministry actually based in Vancouver, where Christians perform Gospel-based mime dramas accompanied by popular music on city streets, an effective tool for getting people's attention and thus initiating spiritual conversations. This will be a very useful tool for the city MDA team, as many festivals will take place in Halifax allowing this type of performance on the city streets. We are really looking forward to putting the skits to use.


Evangelistic Contacts
One thing we are encouraged to do on project is to make friends and evangelise through friendship. So far, I have had the priviledge to make 5 friends who have left me with their contact information. It's a funny thing being in Halifax, it really isn't all that big, so whenever I go out everyday, I am almost guaranteed to bump into one of these friends randomly. Mouhanad, a Muslim guy from Saudi Arabia who is a student at Dalhousie, is the most interesting of all.

Although a Muslim, he claims that he needs to believe in Judaism and Christianity. So, me and some friends on the team have gotten the chance to share the Gospel with him on several different occasions, and in fact, we got a chance to do some studying of the Gospels with him yesterday morning. Although he believes that Jesus is essentially only a Prophet, he is open minded and is very eager to meetup with us to study the Gospels again in the coming weeks. Please pray that God will just open Mouhanad's heart and reveal to him who Jesus is! As Jesus says in Revelation 3:20:

"Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me."

I hope that this will be a reality for Mouhanad! I have yet to get the chance to have spiritual conversatoins with the other 4 contacts, but in the coming weeks I will be hoping to meetup with them over coffee or soccer (we invite students to play soccer with us every Tuesday evening), and hopefully striking into some intense spiritual conversations.




Thanks again for supporting me and praying for me! Please realize that your prayers are one of the most important parts of our project here! Again, please feel free to leave some comments, I'd love to hear from you!


As I end, I would like to leave you with a few photographs from the past 2 weeks:

St. Mary's Cathedral Basilica, Halifax

"Pizza Corner"

King of Donairs

There's actually some Chinese cuisines here!