Papua New Guinea (just north of Australia)

Hello everyone!

A late Merry Christmas and Happy New Years to you all! Here is the latest with us!

Bethany and I spent 10 days over Christmas (Dec 21-31) in Papua New Guinea with one of our DTS outreach teams doing a pastoral visit. One of our staff, Gibson, is from PNG and he was co-leading the team so we went to be an encouragement to him and the team as well as to further solidify the connection between their YWAM base and YWAM Sunshine Coast.

We celebrated Christmas at the YWAM base in the mountain highlands of PNG

Luke read the Christmas story to everyone....

We surprised the students with Christmas presents their parents secretly mailed to us.. 

They were so happy

Our time in PNG was amazing! We joined the team in doing open-air evangelism and saw 18 people get saved! We also prayed for healing and saw several legs healed, saw jaundice reversed in one woman (right before our eyes) and even saw a little boy who was blind in one eye recover his sight 100%!! Praise God!!

Gibson, our staff guy who is from PNG, speaking at an open-air event

This lady had her leg healed and testified to everyone!! It was so cool!

Micha, one of our students, preaching with a translator

We also went to a village up in the highlands of PNG and God used us incredibly! Check out this story:

A week before we came to this village, the one little church that was there had decided to spend 5 days eating/living/sleeping in the church as they sought God's heart for their church in prayer. Well, things were going well until the unexpected happened. A woman named Janet who had been a part of their fellowship for some time rose up and started doing some interesting things. She began to run a time of ministry where she had the pastor and all the members of the church do certain prophetic acts (with knives, keys etc.). Before anyone knew what was going on they had all been deceived into giving themselves over to the enemy and came under a curse. The woman, Janet, was demonized and she had just wreaked havoc in their little church.

We arrived a few days after all this had happened. Our first worship time with them, a few of us perceived that something was seriously wrong. We prayed into it and spoke with some people and found out the whole story. Long story, short - the whole church ended up coming forward and repenting of what they had opened themselves up to. We got to pray over the pastor and the congregation and the sense of God's presence was powerful! He filled the place with his Holy Spirit! It was awesome!

Then the next day we got to go to Janet's house. She was fully manifesting demons. We found out more of the story. A year before we came, three men had come from another province in PNG. They claimed to be Christians and they said that they wanted to pray over the Christians in the village. Well, the people of this young fledgling church were deceived and Janet willingly received an impartation from hell! When asked, the spirit spoke and said: "We are the 7 spirits of comb". We walked into Janet's house and spent 4 hours trying to cast the thing out but we couldn't! We were all pretty frustrated. The spirit would obey whatever else we told it to do but it wouldn't leave. We were scheduled to leave the village that day (although none of us wanted to leave that woman trapped like that) but the church decided to fast and pray for a week and then try and kick that thing out! Please pray for them and for Janet.

One of our students had an interesting insight. She said "maybe God didn't want us to be the ones to cast the demon(s) out of her so the church wouldn't just be reliant upon 'the white saviors' and that they would learn that they themselves had the authority to do it".

Whatever the case, please pray that Janet gets free!

Members of the village church repenting before God...so beautiful!

Micha and I hanging outside the village church

After one open air we were surrounded by this crowd!! Eeeeek! =) nah they were really nice actually! About 8 people gave their lives to God later at a church that night because we preached the gospel to this crowd. 

The team riding in a convoy truck

Bethany getting her preach on!

When Bethany and I returned to Australia we were both feeling pretty sick. Bethany was showing symptoms that resembled malaria so I took her to the emergency room right away. We spent 9 hours in the ER waiting to be seen! People who were much drunker and bloodier than Bethany were given highest priority ha ha! It was a pretty wild scene! In the end, Bethany tested negative for Malaria and Dengue fever...praise God!

We are praising God for the amazing opportunity to go and serve him in the Nations! Please keep us in your prayers as we are now officially the DTS Directors of YWAM Sunshine Coast! As of Jan 1st! Yeeeew! We are also leading the February DTS so we would love your prayers for God's favor and direction as we plan and prepare for that!

Thanks so much guys...we love you!!!

See ya!