August Update

Dear Friend of Mission Surge,

It has been a little while since I have last sent an update, so I wanted to take a brief moment this morning to bring you up to speed on what is happening and how you can pray for us.

I.  Oblivious

First, I ask you to continue to pray that God would use the Oblivious Documentary to awaken, challenge, and communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Please pray that God would use this film.  If you have not watched it yet, I would encourage you to take 28 minutes to view it.  Then share it on Facebook, Twitter, and/or through email and word of mouth.  

You can click here to watch:  http://www.obliviousfilm.com

You can also listen to a radio interview with Kevin Swanson’s Generations Radio program concerning the film here:  http://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=72141242161

Please help us to get this film out by sharing on Facebook…again and again, Twitter, and emails.  

You can purchase a download of the film that you can burn and distribute at http://www.obliviousfilm.com  Just click store, purchase the download, and we will send you instructions on how to download a copy to your computer.  You are free to burn and distribute as many copies from this download as you want!  Also if you would like to purchase a physical copy, you can do so at http://www.obliviousfilm.com by clicking on store and choosing DVD.  If you purchase one of the physical DVD’s, we will send you a second one free to give away.  All of the funds generated from this effort are used to produce more evangelistic material to distribute in an effort to continue getting the gospel out.  

Please pray for this effort!

II.  Speaking Engagements

I want to ask you to pray of me August 17th as I preach at Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Florence.  Also, remember me on Monday, September 7th and Tuesday, September 8th as I preach at FBC Lyman, MS on the holiness of God!  

I want to ask you to please join with me in prayer as well as I seek to schedule preaching engagements for 2015.  I am praying that God would open doors for me to preach harvest days, revivals, family discipleship conferences, and mission conferences.  I am praying that God would give opportunities to go and share about Mission Surge.  Please pray that my speaking schedule would fill up soon.  This is not just a desire, but a need!  Please say a prayer now if you will.  And, if your church could possibly use me next year, please let me know as soon as possible!  

You can listen to sermons at Providence and elsewhere by clicking on the following links.  Please listen and come back each week for more messages!

http://www.sermonaudio.com/search.asp?speakeronly=true&currsection=sermonsspeaker&keyword=Dr._A._Kevin_Ivy

http://www.sermonaudio.com/search.asp?speakeronly=true&currsection=sermonsspeaker&keyword=Kevin_Ivy

III.  Mission Work

Please pray for our partners, Coram Deo, RMI, and ECCI.  Pray for Giacomo Lerici, Andrea Artioli, Peter Vimal, and Jerry Marcellino as they seek to expand the Kingdom of God on earth!  You can learn more about their ministries by going to the Mission Surge website and exploring the “From the Field” tab.  http://www.missionsurge.com

We are still praying, planning and working towards God’s will in the Dominican Republic, Martinique, and in other areas of Latin America.  More news coming soon.  Please pray for God’s wisdom, discernment, insight, understanding, knowledge, leadership, guidance, direction, and power to prevail in this effort.

I covet your prayers!  I appreciate your support of Mission Surge!  I thank you for your emails and words of encouragement.  I thank those of you who have been led of God to give financially to help support me and my family directly as we have sought to devote ourselves to a church plant and Mission Surge.  God has used your prayers, gifts, and support to lift a weight off of us this year.  I am not sure how we would have made it without you.  God has been gracious to provide for our needs through you this year and we are grateful to God for you!

Please pray that God would do exceedingly, abundantly, above all that we could ask or imagine throughout the remainder of 2014 and into 2015.  Thanks again!

In Christ,

Kevin

April News and Update

Dear Friends of Mission Surge,

I wanted to give you an update before April turned into May. I depend so much on your faithful prayers! I appeal to you to please please take time to pray for us and our work. You do not know how much we appreciate it.

First, I want to give you an update on the Oblivious Documentary. It was our goal to have it complete by the middle to end of this month, however we are behind our original schedule. The winter months were so wet and cold that it made it difficult to get out on the street and interview people. We kept having to postpone our on-the-street interview again and again. If we can remain on schedule from this point on, all filming should be complete by mid May. Then the film can be edited and released. Please pray that we will not fall farther behind. I really believe that this is going to be a tool to help awaken the people of the Bible belt to their need for the gospel. Please pray.

I also want to ask you to pray for me as I speak at Hopewell Baptist Church in Crystal Springs this Sunday morning. I will be sharing about the Great Commission and the work of Mission Surge. I still have several Sundays available this year if God would lead you, or your pastor, to host a harvest day, revival, family discipleship conference, or missions conference. I am also available to come and share about the work of Mission Surge with your church on Sunday night or Wednesday night. Please pray that God would continue to open doors!

Before I traveled to the Dominican Republic I promised to blog some quotes and notes from the autobiography of John Paton. I will begin posting those notes and quotes on Tuesdays and Fridays beginning next week. Please go to kevinivy.blogspot.com on Tuesdays and Fridays if you are interested in gleaning from one of the richest missionary biographies I have ever read! You can also follow my blog there if you have not already done so!

We are laying the ground work for beginning a mission here in Crystal Springs. We covet your prayers for this endeavor as well. We hope to have a Back Yard Bible Club this summer and get a Good News Club started in the local elementary school next school year. We have also found a location for an evangelistic Bible study to be held on Sunday nights. Now, we just need help and some converts! Please pray that God would lead, guide, direct, and work through us to reach this area with the gospel.

Please pray for our partner ministries: Refugee Ministries International, Coram Deo, and ECCI. Our new website is set to launch over the weekend (barring technical difficulty). You will be able to go to www.missionsurge.com and click on “From the Field” and read about their respective ministries, follow them on Facebook, read their blogs, listen to sermons, and give as the Lord would lead. We all covet your prayers. I ask you to please be in prayer as well for a couple who are prayerfully considering going to Southeast Asia as full time missionaries with Mission Surge. They are out of the country now seeking God’s leadership, guidance, and direction in this endeavor. Please pray for them and for us that God’s will be done.

Finally, for the past several years I have been praying about and meditating on and thinking through an 8 part discipleship study based on 2 Peter 1:5-8. It says, “For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self- control, and self- control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Peter seems to make an outlandish promise in this text. He seems to be saying that if we make every effort to add to our faith these qualities and increase in them that they will keep us from being ineffective or unfruitful! This caught my attention because it seemed as though Peter was giving us a step by step process of growing into maturity. I wanted to take this list of qualities and formulate a discipleship study on each quality that would build upon the one before it. I wanted this to be something that was reproducible and geared for 1 on 1 or 1 on 2 discipleship. It has been like beating my head against a brick wall for the past 2-3 years! I could not get anywhere until 2014. God has been unfolding link after link in this chain over the past few months! I am overwhelmed at the progress that has been made. The rough drafts of the first 5 qualities have been completed! Each are 2 weeks in length (except for faith) and are easily reproducible and geared for 1 on 1 discipleship. I am super excited about utilizing this in our work in Crystal Springs and in our church as God would lead! This study will be available for down load as soon as the kinks are worked out. I hope that you will find it useful to you as well.

One of the kinks that needs to be worked out is a name for the study. I have come up with a few possibilities on my own, but I am not super “creative.” I have considered “The Matrix.” A matrix is like a womb, an environment perfectly suited for growth and development so I thought, this study, rooted in 2 Peter, would be like The Matrix of Spiritual growth. Another option is The Network. I want this study to be a net that fishers of men can cast into a lost community and make disciples with. I want it to be used for net-work so to speak. I also want it to be reproducible and used to form a network of disciple making disciples. Finally, since Peter (the rock) wrote the outline for the study, I thought about calling it Rock Solid. I am also open to suggestions. Are you willing to help me name this discipleship study? If so, I want to ask you to take 15 seconds, follow the link below, and choose the title that you think is the best…OR write your own suggestion! I would appreciate it if you would take time to follow the link and give me your opinion. I would appreciate it even more if you would lift me up and this study up in prayer. 

Name the Study here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FVX9PCW

Thank you so much for your prayer support, your financial gifts, and your willingness to spread the word about Mission Surge! If you know of someone that I can add to this newsletter, please have them email me at kevin@missionsurge.com We need all the prayer support we can get.  If you haven’t done so you can...

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/missionsurge 
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mission-Surge/145423062144598
Follow my blog: http://kevinivy.blogspot.com 
Listen to sermons online: http://www.sermonaudio.com/source_detail.asp?sourceid=missionsurge 

Thanks again for your faithfulness to pray for us and encourage us!

Until next time… 

Heartcry Missionaries to Partner with Mission Surge

Dear Friends of Mission Surge,

I have sent out two previous emails this week introducing you to our new ministry partners:  Peter Vimalasekaran (Vimal) with Refugee Ministries International in Germay and Pastor Jerry Marcellino with ECCI, a ministry to Italian and Philippine pastors.  I hope you took time to read those reports.  If not you can go to kevinivy.com and read the previous 2 blog posts and get the news.  I want to share two more partners with you today that we are very excited about as well as a couple of other reminders/announcements. 

First, I want to ask you to pray for an unreached and unengaged group of more than 3400 Haitians on the small island country of Martinique.  These people have no church and no gospel witness.  We are praying that God would raise up one of the Haitian pastors/church planters that we worked with over the last two weeks to go to them as a missionary/church planter on Martinique.  This will take God calling a pastor and his family to go.  It will require the Haitian churches in the Dominican Republic pooling their resources together in order to help send and support this couple.  And it will require us helping to fund, administrate, and assist the effort in Martinique.  There is a very tentative plan for Gene and I to incorporate a brief visit to Martinique the next time we teach in the Dominican.  We are praying for God’s guidance and providential hand to work out His perfect will in this endeavor.  Please pray with us.

Second, I want to remind you that I will soon be posting quotes and notes from John Paton’s 500 page autobiography.  I have read through the entire autobiography notating those things that really hit me.  I want to share those insights with you and hopefully encourage myself and others to be more of a missionary in our own families, communities, and ultimately to the ends of the earth.  I will be posting these notes and quotes at kevinivy.com and I hope you will make it a point to keep up with them as I post them.  If they are of half the benefit to you that they have been to me, I know you will be encouraged.

Finally, I want to introduce you to our newest partners in our effort to reach the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Meet Andrea Artioli and Giacomo Lerici. They are the founding members of Coram Deo Ministry and are planting a church (Chiesa Sola Grazia – Grace Alone Church) in Porto Mantovano.  (learn more at www.chiesasolagrazia.it ) The province of Mantova boasts a population of approximately 417,000 people, but there is little evangelical presence.  At the present, HeartCry Missionary Society is providing partial support to these two church-planting pastors.  Mission Surge will be partnering with HeartCry to support Andrea and Giacomo by handling the remainder of their support.  

You can learn more about this work and Coram Deo at:

http://www.heartcrymissionary.com/italy

We, at Mission Surge are excited to partner with Vimal (RMI), Jerry (ECCI), and now Andrea and Giacomo (Coram Deo)!  We will be helping to promote their ministries, raise awareness for their work, encourage prayer support, and financial support for their works. 

You can learn more about Andrea at:  http://www.heartcrymissionary.com/andrea-artioli

You can learn more about Giacomo at:  http://www.heartcrymissionary.com/giacomo-lerici

Please keep praying for us!  We are working through details with two other potential partners with Mission Surge and could use all of the prayer support that we can get.  

We are in the process of building a brand new website at Mission Surge where you can easily read updates about RMI, ECCI, and Andrea and Giacomo’s work.  You will also be able to donate online through paypal and/or secure instructions on mailing your donations.  We are excited to be a part of what God is doing around the world, and to be able to share it with you!  We covet your prayers.  Please pray for the work, and spread the word.  

If there is anyone that you think would benefit from receiving our email updates, please send me their email addresses!  I would love to keep the informed.  

In Christ,