The first week of Spring Break we hosted was a smashing success. Almost 30 staff and students joined us. They shared their faith a ton, served the city and helped launch movements on a number of campuses. At the end of the week was some of the coolest sharing time from Spring Breakers, including a freshmen from Montana who lead a person to Christ in downtown Portland. Life’s being changed while engaging the city!

Here’s our group enjoying Pioner Square in downtown Portland!

Here’s some spring breakers immersed on the MAX (light rail train)

For the whole story of our adoption, please visit Jody’s blog and check out the past posts that recap our story!

We’re launching ministries at Portland State University and University of Portland. So far so good! Today we gave out 300 Imaginary Jesus books and gathered contact information from a ton of students that want to hear more about Christ. It was a great time.

Please pray for us as this month is a critical and strategic time to setting us up for the year. More details to come!

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!

So the Lord has provided in his own unique way and timing. We trust his judgment and who knows, by renting our house for a while perhaps we can wait out the downturn in real estate a bit.

We’re incredibly excited to get settled in Portland, get some traction with the ministry there.

I (Matt) am headed to California for the Catalyst West conference along with my co-leader Justin this week to hopefully gain some insight and inspiration into the next steps of the ministry in Portland. And next week Jody is taking in the Orphan Care Summit where she’ll learn more about helping our ministry connect to the need of orphans worldwide.

As you can see we’re not bored around here! Thanks for all your prayers during this time. We continue to covet them for our sanity as we live out of suitcases for a couple more weeks. We give thanks for you daily!

Photo courstesy of PortlandGround

So right now our days are full of meetings, letters and phone calls to expand our ministry partner team. As well as meetings, conference calls, emails and strategic planning for the Portland ministry. We’re itching to get moving with the Portland ministry, but we’re also thanking the Lord for this time of laying the groundwork for a new day of ministry in Portland.

Please continue to pray for our sanity as we’re stuck in the limbo for the next couple of months. We’re doing really well personally, but we continue to need patience and trust in the Lord’s timing. Also, pray for the right buyer to fall in love with our house soon! We have an open house on Valentines day, so who knows!

Lastly, pray for the Portland ministry. The potential is off the charts for God to do something unique on the campuses in the city. Every day we hear from someone who is excited that we’re coming. We’re believing God to reach the campus for Christ on the way to seeing the city and the world transformed!

The last few weeks have been full of meetings as well as exploring the Portland metro area trying to figure out where we’d like to live. If you’re interested in some nuts and bolts of our relocation, check out a post from a series I started on my leadership blog over here.

Please continue to pray for our transition. We’re doing really well, but feeling unsettled in both Portland and Bozeman. We’re just waiting for our house to sell and then we’ll move full steam ahead. Please pray that God would lift that burden.

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

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!