This site is a platform for me to help resource young Christians in their pilgrimage as they wrestle with various questions. But who am I and why should you care?

A good friend, Leah, and I used to joke that I would be a 'lifer' in missions, a 'career YWAMer'. Though I have been outside of YWAM for a few years now, the truth is, at heart I am still a YWAMer, longing to engage once again with what God is doing in and through this particular agency.

What is more, Leah, who dedicated a significant portion of her realitively short life to the mission, recently passed away. This, perhaps more than anything else,  stirs my heart for the call of God for the nations; Leah's vision must not and will not die with her!

I left YWAM in order to pursue further training in ministry, always with the idea brewing in the back of my mind that someday I would return. In fact, that's the very reason I wanted further training - so that I would have more to offer, be better equipped to teach and train, and to become a better leader.

My vision is to train and equip young people for missions, to encourage and empower young leaders, and to teach on various discipleship programs.   Ultimately, I want to see nations impacted by passionate, motivated young people who have caught God's visions for the earth. Also, my wife and I have a heart for Darjeeling, a beautiful mountian city in the North East of India. We long to return there to engage with what YWAM is doing.

May we all dedicate our lives to the vision of God.

Testimony in brief:

Despite being raised in a Christian family, it wasn't until my teenage years that I 'discovered' God for myself. After that it didn't take long for me to begin dreaming about how my life could be spent serving God.

In 2003 I moved to Brisbane, Australia to do a Youth With A Mission (YWAM) Discipleship Training School (DTS). This was a revolutionary time in my life, though in many ways can be paralleled to the experience of a tall man riding a roller-coaster who, despite enjoying the ride, kept forgetting to duck! In other words, though it was life changing, my DTS brought to the surface many hidden doubts and fears related to my relationship with God. In 2004 I returned to Brisbane to join a band ministering in high schools across the nation and to join the DTS staff team. Asides from meeting with hundreds of young Australians, I lead outreach teams within Australia, India and the Middle East.

I staffed until 2007 when I moved to Norway to marry my amazing wife, Mari. We then spent a year with the MorningStar school of ministry in South Carolina, USA. We have now returned to Christchurch where I am enrolled at bible college.

My goal in life is to train and equip young people for both life and ministry, helping them get their thinking about God and life right, since the way we think determines how we live. Thus, my chief goal is to empower believers for ground-level, real-life Christianity.  Almost paradoxically,  I also desires to interact on a more 'intellectual' level, exploring deep theological and biblical issues. My conviction is that solid theological understanding will significantly strengthen the efforts of YWAM students and staff, along with all other believers; one can be spiritually empowered, encountering God, seeing God move AND firmly grounded in the truth.

Over the past few years I have had the opportunity to try my hand at teaching for a few days in a variety of settings, namely on DTS schools in Brisbane, Australia, and Oxford New Zealand, as well as at a folkehoyskole (folk school) in Norway.

Thus far topics have included (see synopsis for details):

- Intercession - how and why should we pray?
- Hearing God's voice.
- Introduction to cross-cultural issues (cultural anthropology for missions)

However, I am very open to consider if there is something else you would like me to teach on, (IE the Character and Nature of God, Hearing God, Holistic Missions, Holistic Salvation, various theological  and biblical topics and issues, the problem of evil, the Spirit, prophecy, Relationships, etc.)

The following is a brief description of the approach I have previously taken when teaching certain topics on YWAM schools.

Intercession:

Intercession is a fancy-pants word for 'praying for others.' One of the key reasons Christians tend to approach prayer with a degree of apathy is because we secretly don't believe that our prayers will accomplish anything. To address this problem we need to examine how God made the world and how he made humanity. In doing so we will discover that our prayers are necessary for God to do what he desires to do. God is absolutely sovereign and all powerful, but in his sovereignty he has decided to create the world in such a way that he 'requires' cooperation with humanity in order to act. This does not mean God is actually limited by humanity, but he has chosen to limit his actions based on the free decisions of free creatures. Effectivly, "God's hands are tied when we fail to pray."

Hearing God:

The key point we must learn is that an intimate relationship with God is available for every believer! Each of us desires to hear from God, but for a number of reasons many of us spend much of our walk with God feeling like we are somehow deaf to his voice. One chief problem that keeps us from hearing him is that we super-spiritualize the whole thing - our desire is for you to discover that hearing God is as natural as breathing because God created us to walk with him!

Cultural Issues:

We are all aware that different cultures do things differently, but are often unaware of how deep these differences really are, stretching beyond mere behaviors to our values, beliefs and worldview. Furthermore, a careful understanding of culture is a missional necessity - as Charles Kraft says, we missionaries must study culture in order to protect people in other cultures from ourselves. Missionaries have a bad track record of confusing their culture with the gospel, and have thus often presented a message which was unfortunately irrelivent to other peoples. Our goal is to make ourselves aware of our cultural assumptions to help us 'preach the gospel without any western garb.' It is also deeply fascinating to discover how  people of other cultures think, and especally to discover how they express and articulate their faith.