Oh man. I want to thank the Holy Spirit and everyone for making the first service of Anthem amazing. I really cant wait to see what God does with us. Theres something so great and rewarding about doing ministry with friends and people you care about. It’s fun. This ministry is a major time and energy sacrifice for a lot of people and I couldn’t be more thankful for the people that God has brought together for Anthem and their willingness to be a part of it. I know we’re gonna see God do major things in and through us at Anthem and I’m super grateful to be involved in this!

People keep asking that question. As Anthem starts tomorrow I figured its a good time to try and tackle it.

I’m known for being playfully vague in a lot of circumstances (keeps a mystery and intrigue about me) but I really haven’t had a good solid answer for this question… in fact because of this I haven’t really talked a lot about Anthem at all. not even to my friends.

The issue is we never really sat down and said, “this is what we want to do.” Anthem was more our responding and walking through some doors that God opened. 

The way I see it is we all love ministry and worshiping God and growing together and seeing lives changed and impacted. God knew this about us and heard us asking him for opportunities and he opened a path for it. So our plan of attack is to be a community that cares for and loves each other and use each one of the gifts that God has given us (worshipping, teaching, discipleship and others) to glorify him. 

To lay our aspirations aside. To take our principals and passions that we have absorbed and gained over the years through different and churches and people and to become a part of what God is already doing in Vancouver. Whatever it is that he is doing.

The good news is God is way more passionate than we are and he is almighty. The Almighty. So where we fall short in our game plans and strategies he has and will not.

Anthem is just an avenue for us to have an encounter with the Lord of everything. Whatever that looks like or turns into, we’re on board with. 

We have one week before Anthem starts on January 22nd. On top of working, this week will be full with meeting and praying with some of the leaders and people who have offered to make sure the ministry is up and running. Im so thankful for the friends I have an wouldnt want to do ministry with anyone else. That sounds generic reading back over it but I really do feel that way. I’m excited to see who else God will bring around to do ministry with us.

One of the founding principles that we’re starting this ministry with is not only to be a ministry that reaches out but to be a community that stays connected with the greater Church. That we never become our own kingdom or island but are intentional in supporting and staying involved with our friends in the Vancouver and Portland area. Jesus’ last prayer was that we will be one just like himself and the Father are one, and then the world will know him. We don’t want to replace the local church or transplant others from their current community to ours but rather be a place where we encourage eachother to connect in with what God is already doing the Portland/Vancouver area. Where people from different communities, churches or groups can gather to worship God, grow, and experience life together as The Church. To encourage and equip those who are already part of a church and to help those who are not connected find community.

I’ve decided to start blogging again and using this as a place to transparently document everything thats going on in life currently and not just random pictures or whatever.

Anthem is beginning in a couple weeks and I feel like God has been preparing me in a lot of ways to be back in ministry. There are definitely good changes happening but even with the good ones theres a bit of sadness because they are changes. I’ve felt it necessary lately to surround myself and seek out people that i feel encouraged and uplifted by. I’ve always been a very self-concious, self-critic which at times can be depressing and tough. Mostly the times I want to get good at something but don’t believe in myself enough to do it. I’m thankful that God is giving me a good understanding of this before diving headfirst into this ministry plant and I’m thankful for the people he has brought into my life recently to build me back up. I think self-realization gives us strength if we allow it to impact the way we think or react (otherwise it will turn into self pity).

Im excited about Anthem. The people that have stepped forward and offered to lead it, the churches that have been super supportive of it, the friends that have given there encouragement and wisdom. Its all been God and its all been perfectly timed. I don’t know what its going to look like ..but maybe God doesn’t want me to know.. after all theres the verse that says, “you can make many plans but the Lords purpose will prevail.” I mostly just want to stand in awe at his work at Anthem.

I know its going to be a ministry based around worshipping together because everyone involved in these start-up days are worshippers. Besides that we have a building (thanks to the amazing Compass Church) and a logo. January 22nd cant come soon enough. I hope everyone comes. God is so great and I’m so pumped.

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywher, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen.

It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing could save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit becasue they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference.

Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated.

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wantering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was amongst the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Source: Imperial War Museum.