MissionConnexion Northwest 2024 will welcome Sean McDowell as one of our Keynote speakers this January! Additionally, Sean will also be directing our Leadership Connexion event, along with Mark Mittelberg, and his son Matthew Mittelberg.
Dr. Sean McDowell is the son of Josh and Dottie McDowell and a gifted communicator with a passion for equipping the church, and in particular young people, to make the case for the Christian faith.
MissionConnexion Northwest 2024 will welcome Mark Mittelberg as one of our Keynote speakers this January! Mark and his wife Heidi live near Denver, Colorado, and are the parents of Emma Jean and Matthew, both of whom serve in ministry roles.
Mark will also be opening our Leadership Connexion event, accompanied by his apologist son Matthew Mittelberg, and Sean McDowell!
In the fall of my second year of college, I had a weekend job from 12:00 AM (midnight) to 8:00 AM sitting behind a desk and buzzing people in the front door of a high-rise apartment building in downtown Philadelphia. With this late-night working shift, I was able to get a lot of reading assignments done. One weekend I had to read the entire book of Genesis and as I was coming to the end of both chapter 50 and my shift, I could not get the country of Scotland out of my mind.
In his bestselling book, The Treasure Principle, Randy Alcorn shares six keys that he and his wife Nanci learned when everything was taken away from them, including his ability to earn a living, due to a public stand he took for righteousness. As a result, over the course of three decades-plus, the Lord has multiplied his life, resources, and giving exponentially. Those keys include…
Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher from the city of Ephesus was famous for saying “The Only Constant in Life Is Change.”
There is no doubt that we have all been through change over the last 3 years, so I was recently very encouraged reviewing some data on the state of the church since significant change took place.
A church leader in the African American community was invited to a MissionConnexion event with other mission leaders for the first time. She was not sure what to expect and knew very little about MissionConnexion.
At the close of this luncheon, while everyone’s heads were bowed for the closing prayer, another leader representing a mission organization that places workers into Central Asia felt the Holy Spirit saying quite clearly that they should approach and ask for help in mobilizing African Americans into Central Asia. Neither one knew the other, though they had shaken hands just before the lunch.
Recently I was asked if I thought MissionConnexion operated “with excellence”, i.e… “The fact or state of excelling; superiority; eminence. An excellent quality or feature”. My first thought was to make a list of what things I thought we were striving to do with excellence. The kinds of things I listed included:
• being above reproach
• making Christ the lens through which we motivate our people
On April 14th, George Verwer, the self-deprecating, visionary-missionary who founded Operation Mobilization (OM), launched four ships dispensing Christian literature around the world, authored 20 books of which millions of copies have been distributed worldwide, went home to be with the Lord after a two-month battle with cancer.
While growing up in Ramsey, New Jersey, he attended church, but did not come to follow Christ until he attended a Billy Graham meeting in New York City on March 3, 1955.
The Bible is full of references to feet and the role they play when it comes to the spread of the good news both in the Old Testament as well as the New. In fact, when the familiar verse Romans 10:15 talks about “beautiful feet” it is referring to Isaiah 52:7 “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”
But who cares for those beautiful feet?
Tory Ruark serves as the Chief Operations Officer of MissionWorks, the Director of MissionExcellence,
and leads our annual Short-Term Mission Connexion, event, which was February 24-25, 2023. For the first time ever, it was held in Seattle, Washington, and took on the theme “Journey Together.”
Tory said: “Short-term mission trips shouldn’t be one sided or one directional. Mission trips are the expression of partners journeying together for a common purpose–God’s glory! By learning to live and work together as one church, we can learn to plan mission trips that honor God, honor our hosts, and honor those we’re serving!”
