Little Update!

Hi guys, just a quick update from Berlin. We have been busy busy busy so it's usually at midnight right before falling into a deep sleep that I think "gotta update that blog!" We have a little update on our living situation, we are still looking for a place of our own but we are under a new provision. I'm sure many of you know Adrian Edler, but maybe you don't know his awesome wife Olessya. Well these two took us in about one week ago, and converted their huge living room into a small living place for us. We are loving it for the time being. We are still looking for our own apartment, but it's been a lot of closed doors, so it is just God that we are with Adrian and Olessya right now because we are having so much fun. We are also right in the middle of planning concerts for the month of October. We have 2 groups coming to Berlin to do concerts and we are planning them. We have a group from Florida called Power Surge that will do 4 nights of concerts in the unreached villages of Eastern Germany. Then the following week we have a group of teens from Finland coming doing 3 nights of concerts in the Berlin/East German area. Please pray for these concerts and all of the details from housing to filling the seats at the concerts!

We are so blessed right now with awesome team life. We have Ann Margaret here for 3 more months, Mindy is here planning her wedding to Stephan in one month, and of course the Groenewolds and Stephan. Here is the link to Ann Margaret's new blog: http://annmargaretroe.blogspot.com/

Lastly we are SO excited about the upcoming conference in November in England. We are so excited to get to visit the body there, and be a part of the conference in Oxford with Pastor Schaller!

Thank you all for your prayer and continued support! ~Matt & Emily

Sunday Night Church in the Park

We had our first Sunday Night church service. We went to a park in Hackeshemarkt... it's the old Jewish section of the city. This park is awesome, right by the water, and it was a gorgeous night to have church. There were 10 of us, we sang a few songs and Pastor Gary spoke a message. After we handed out tracts to people in the park to tell them what we were doing and invited them to church. Please pray for Sunday night church services, we're trying to start doing these outdoor church services on a regular basis, as long as the weather permits

First Annual~ CAMP LEBEN DUETSCHLAND!

To say we were blessed with an amazing time at camp would be an incredible understatement. God POURED OUT on us. Where to begin besides THANK YOU for prayer. That camp was so padded in prayer that God had to bless it... and He did! Summarizing camp will have to start from the end to the beginning, because what is freshest in our minds is the testimonies of the campers. Our hearts were so full as we left the camp. We were hearing things like, "This was the most fun" ... "I'm so sad it's over already"... "When are we going to have another teen thing?" ... "I want to come to church when we go back to Berlin." It was so clear that God had done something very special in these kids/teens lives. Our theme for camp was "GET LIFE" ... not Get A Life, but Get Life... most of these kids don't know what it means to have life inside of you that pours out. And most of them had never heard the words that we are so used to hearing... like GRACE, MERCY, FINISHED WORK. If there is one thing that fills your heart and makes you want to devote your life to the missionfield it's a young girl asking you to explain grace to her, and having her listen to your every word.

We started our camping prepped for a full week of activities. We played dodgeball, Bible scavenger hunt, steal the bacon, capture the flag, balloon wars, and in between stole some naps and some awesome one on one time with the campers. We split the camp into two sides- red team and blue team, and every game we played had the campers against each other. We gave out extra points for remembering Bible verses, wearing your team colors, and the PERSONAL favorite... giving the counselors back rubs!

We are praying now for the teen ministry to keep up its momentum. For all these kids to get hid in the Teen Studies, come to church, and bring their friends out. We are also praying for us, for new ideas, and for a place to hold teen meetings. Please keep all these faces in your prayers! And visit our teen website if you'd like at ggberlinteens.webs.com !

Matt (with Stephan translating) explaining Overland/Overseas

Matt and the boys boating

The big kids helped out the young kids in the games!

Team Red Pride!

Awesome girls!

KNOW US

Our theme this past week has been "Know Us" from the verses John 17:21-23

"That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them as thou hast loved me."

Our main focus since we got back to Berlin has been knowing God and knowing others, and knowing others in God. We could spend 30 years on a missionfield and never let other people into our lives. God has put so many new people into our paths in just the past 10 days.

We started getting back into the swing of things last Thursday. We had a full group of team members with us on Thursday and we spent the day soul winning. We started at Nollendorfplatz, an outreach to foreign students we did last year. We set up two tables, one with literature from the Bible and how to get saved in many languages, and another with bracelets from the Christian Farmers Outreach (for anyone who is not familiar they are rubber armbands with the colors gold, black, red, white, and green on them that tell the gospel). We had people coming up to us and asking about the armbands before we could even put them out on the table fast enough. It was an awesome morning and many people learned about the gospel that day.

Us at the armband table

The two tables at Nollendorfplatz

Please pray for the Chinese girl that Matt is talking to here, she had never heard the gospel before and was very interested to hear all about how Jesus died for her sins.

We moved on from Nollendorfplatz to Alexanderplatz. Alex, as we call it, is a huge area right in the heart of the city where you'll find tourists and Berliners walking around and sitting down watching the world go by. We had some awesome conversations just walking up to people and asking them if they knew God. We had one salvation and one person we met came to church on Sunday morning. Please pray for these guys- Andy and Vladamir.

Outreach at Alexanderplatz

Pastor Gary & Matt talking with Andy, who prayed to receive Christ

The girls on outreach: Ann Margret, Emily, Kathie, Miia, Marianna & ZsoZsa

ZsoZsa from Budapest, Ann Margret & Emily, and Miia who visited us for 5 days from Finland

Friday night we had Ice Cream night at the church. The girls~ Miia, Ann Margret & Emily~ set up outside the church to give people walking by the church free ice cream. We made posters, chopped up toppings and in our best German asked people walking by "Mochtes du ein eis?" -Would you like an ice cream? We met some new people who lived in the area, had a lot of fun getting to know people in the church as we all sat outside the church and played music and sang songs.

Miia, Emily & Ann Margret set up to hand out ice cream

We were playing music on the street and the building's landlord asked us if we were American and gave us these lei's. Don't know what that has to do with being American, but we thought it was hilarious.

We ended the past week on a relaxing note. We spent the day Saturday biking to Potsdam, which is about 15 miles outside of Berlin. It's a gorgeous ride, through the woods. That night we hung out at the Groenewold's house and watched the World Championships in track and field... which are happening right now in Berlin... and saw a new world record for the 100m dash.

Us on a bike ride from Berlin to Potsdam

Miia showed Emily how to make real Finnish pulla

Prayer Requests for the next week:

• Continued great times on outreach, and to meet lots of new people
• Ease in moving! We are moving out of our apartment into a temporary situation as we continue to look for a permanent apartment for us.
• A new apartment! That God would provide us a 2 room apartment, in the areas that we are looking in, in the price range we are needing... all three of those requests have shown to be a tall order but we are fully confident that God has a perfect place for us.
• Planning for Teen Camp. Teen Camp starts on the 26th, so we need to finalize all of our plans this week. It has to be God because we have never done a teen camp on our own before! Please pray for amazing things to happen in these teens lives, we have 14 teens signed up... some of them we have never met before, and we want God to do great things in their hearts next week.

In Him,

Matt & Emily

God is in the details and He cares for us!

Okay this is just a quick little story... We've been having some serious jet lag these past 48 hours... and I mean SERIOUS jet lag, up until 5 in the morning, sleeping until 2 in the afternoon... we can't seem to get back on a normal schedule here. So this Saturday morning we decided no matter what time we fell asleep we were setting our alarms to 8am and getting up and going to outreach. Well after only 3 1/2 hours of sleep, when 8am rolled around, going on outreach was not exactly number one on the list of things I wanted to do. But we did it, got up, got ready and decided to ride the bikes down to the church to meet up for the outreach meeting. Well having not ridden the bikes since June we stopped on the way to get more air in our tires. Seems like a small enough task... well on the last tire of the last bike we could not get the cap back on to top off the air without totally deflating the tire. It was getting SO frustrating, one of those moments where you're thinking "Okay God I'm just trying to go to outreach, don't you WANT me to go to outreach?" Literally as I threw the air pump to the ground and said "This is NOT going to work" a man in a Vespa pulled up next to us and asked us what was wrong... it took him about .4 seconds to assess the situation and say that there was a piece inside broken. Now I'm really thinking "Oh great, now we're stuck here, thanks God, just wanted to get up early and go to outreach! JEEZ!" The mystery man on the Vespa then says, I'll go get one at the bike shop wait here about 2 minutes. He came back before we had to time to realize he was gone, and he had a new piece to attach on to my bike. He put it on and the tire filled up all the way. I wish now that I had said something so smooth as "we are actually on our way to outreach right now, do you know who Jesus is?" all I could do was look at him and say "wow.... thanks". The rest of the bike ride to outreach I was just thinking, God is for us. And I know, this is such a small detail, but if God cares about something so small as to send someone to me and take care of a situation that I was getting frustrated in, how much more does He see the big things in our life and have a plan for them just as well? Our plans our made so much by sight, by sight I say "God I woke up early to go on outreach and now I'm stuck" God sees the eternal and knows that He's sending someone to me to help. So that's my small story from today... I know that my God is faithful in the little things because He cares about me so deeply.

~Emily

Back in Berlin

What an amazing summer! It was a FAST 2 months in America and we are back in Germany! We arrived safe and sound in Berlin yesterday around 4:00pm our time (10:00am for all of you in the States). We had a great flight back, no problems or delays. Then after a few hours of settling in we went straight to Wednesday night service. Service was awesome. Pastor Gary spoke about the Spiritual life. We had a totally relaxing day today... day 1 of being back in Berlin, trying to get over the jet-lag and settle back in. Please keep in prayer some serious decisions coming up soon. We have to be out of the apartment we've been staying in in two weeks, August 20th. We have a back up studio apartment that someone in the church is letting us stay in, in case we don't find a new place in time, but we are looking for a long term, affordable apartment. We are asking God in specifics for a good, clean, safe area, a furnished apartment, and great price. It is a lot to ask for, but we are so confident in God's power to know the desires of our hearts and His desire to want to bless us above what we can ask or think! So please keep these details in prayer.

Heading Home

We can't believe that it's been 9 months already that we have been living in Berlin. God has done amazing things since we've been here in us, through us, and for us. We've experienced God's hand in our daily life, we've seen Him work in other peoples lives, we've watched Him provide for us when we had nothing, and we can both say that we have fallen deeper in love with Him and His plan. We've recently been speaking in church on gold, silver and precious stones. Gold speaks of thoughts with God, Silver speaks of failing and rebounding, and Precious Stones speak of being knit in the body. We have to always look for gold. Once God gives us gold, he will add silver, and he will add the precious stones. But first we think with God. God has given us gold in Berlin. 

We are looking forward to seeing friends and family in Baltimore, and anticipating a wonderful Convention. See you on the other side of the ocean! ~Matt and Emily