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…
“And so began in his seventeenth year that blessed custom of Family Prayer, morning and evening, which my father practiced probably without one single avoidable omission till he lay on his deathbed, seventy-seven years of age; when, even to the last day of his life, a portion of Scripture was read, and his voice was heard softly joining in the Psalm, and his lips breathed the morning and evening Prayer, falling in sweet benediction on the heads of all his children, far away many of them over all the earth, but all meeting him there at the Throne of Grace. None of us can remember that any day ever passed unhallowed thus; no hurry for market, nor rush to business, no arrival of friend or guests, no trouble or sorrow, no joy or excitement ever prevented at least our kneeling around the family altar while the High Priest led our prayers to God and offered himself and his children there. And blessed to others, as well as to ourselves, was the light of such example!” (Page 14) 
