McComas Ministry

We’re settled in Portland. Finally!

We moved into our new house on May 1st and are finally feeling like we’re getting settled in Portland. We’re learning a new culture and city…much like serving overseas somewhere. Just getting used to the new grocery stores and traffic is an adjustment!

All things considered we’re doing well and finally feeling like we can take a breath and enjoy the newness of it all and begin to plant some roots. Speaking of roots, we launched into the adventure of gardening a few weekend ago. We thought we’d take advantage of long growing season to get some tasty veggies going in our backyard.

On a personal note, we’re also in the midst of the adoption application process! More to come on this soon in the next newsletter. It’s an exciting story that we can only give God credit for.

So this summer we’ve launched into an intense time of expanding our ministry partner team here in Portland. We’re working hard to have this completed as quickly as possible so we can turn our attention to the school year that will be here before we know it.

We also continue to be amazed at the doors God is opening up for the ministry here in Portland. In fact just yesterday a fellow staff member and I started compiling the list of potential volunteers who would like to help reach college students with the message of Christ and it wouldn’t be a stretch to have 25 key volunteers by the end of summer. Praise the Lord for laborers.

Prayer requests:

• That God would open up doors for our financial support team to grow
• For wisdom as we do strategic planning for the school year
• Pray for our staff team to form well
• Pray for our adoption process, that God would be glorified in it all.
• Pray for all our staff and students that are on summer project around the world!

This years conference was an amazing time in the Word, worshiping, a day of outreach, fellowship and training times. Our newsletter and the video below do a great job telling more about the conference. Some other highlights of our time there were:

- Our new team was able to all be together for the first time. We are all in transition in some way this spring but it was fun to spend time together, talk about the future ministry of Portland and pray for the Lord to begin moving in new ways in the city.

- We had our first team time with students from the Portland area that came to the conference. It was encouraging that there were 4 students because there has been no staff on the campuses for almost 2 years now but also a bit disheartening because there are 100,000 students in the city who need to be reached. There is  much work to be done and we are trusting God to raise up hundreds of students who want to be involved in the ministry and serve the Lord in the city in the future.

Portland Metro Students

We had students text in one word or short descriptions of what they thought of the conference. Here are some of  the responses we received:

Answered prayer, Impacting, Revival!, Amazing!, Go!, Grace, Refreshing, Awesome, Life changing, Eye opening, Stretching, Genuine, Pivotal, Healing/Freeing, Transforming, Awakening, Powerful, Relationships, Seek God, Worship, Indescribable

We just finished our annual Winter Conference in Portland, Oregon. It was a fabulous time of calling students (and staff) to venture into the deep with Jesus (Luke 5). Check out the final video for the conference…it gives you a great picture of what the conference was like.

After an amazing Christmas in Bozeman, we’re hitting the road for January. We’re loading the bags as I write this and we’ve got some good house-sitters lined up for our house in Bozeman. (Pray that it sells soon!)

First stop will be our winter conference in Portland, Oregon, where us and 700 of our friends will gather in the Portland Convention Center to worship, learn and party in the New Year! 95 students from MSU are joining us! I’m teaching a seminar on transitioning to life after college as well as helping with some video production.

Next (Jan 2-8th) we’ll spend time in Prineville, Oregon visiting some of you! If you have time and are interested in touching base with us, please let us know

Finally, we have a couple housesitting gigs in Portland untill Feb 3rd, where we’ll be raising support, setting up some things for the Portland ministry and trying to figure out where we want to live. If you’re in the area, we’d love to meet with you!

Raft the Yellowstone River outreach. 120 students attended! Tons of spiritual conversations were had, and many students got plugged into lasting relationships.

We’re wrapping up the most important time of the year for our ministry….the first 6 weeks. We leave on friday for West Yellowstone and our annual Fall Retreat. Please pray that this would be a life changing time for all the students (hopefully 250) that attend.

We are so privileged to see God move in the hearts of students and continue to change the lives of these future leaders. Please pray for Sean, Cason and Chase who live in Langford Hall where I spend a lot of time reaching out to freshmen. All three of those guys recently gave their lives to Christ. Praise the Lord!
Thanks for your prayers during this hectic time. We couldn’t do this without your partnership!