Rugby 101

Rugby season is in full swing. It's a great game to watch and all the professional games in New Zealand are televised on the local t.v. channels. Each major city in Nz has a professional home team that plays in a league called Super 14. Super 14 includes 14 rugby teams from the countries of Nz. Australia and South Africa. Our local team pro team in Auckland is called the Auckland Blues (in the picture, thanks espn).

It's relatively inexpensive to attend a pro rugby game at about $1o per person. A rugby field, called a pitch in Nz, is about the same size as an NFL field. Most of the stadiums are outdoor stadiums and seat between 30,000 to 60,000 people. It's best played in winter which is just around the corner. Each team puts 15 men on the field and no pads are needed except some of the linemen will wear a leather head-gear that looks like a throw-back to the NFL in the 1920's. The rules are simple... get the ball to the other end of the field. The catch... you can only pass the ball backwards unless you kick it. Any player can advance the ball and any player should be prepared to switch from offence to defense in the blink of an eye. If the ball crosses the end-zone line and is touched down to the ground while a players hand is on the ball it is called a TRY and scores 5 points. The proceeding kick through the upright post will gain an additional 2 points, like and extra point attempt in the NFL. We enjoy watching rugby and cheering for the Blues... later in the year the best Nz players will be selected for the International team called the "All Blacks". Now that's a big deal when the All Blacks play... it's like the entire country stands still to watch the All Blacks.

Speaking of the price of things in Nz... petrol or gas here is at 1.74 per liter. That's about $7 NZ per gallon and with the exchange rate over .80 right now that equals nearly $6 US per gallon. WoW! Housing prices in our area now average in the mid $500,000 for a four bedroom house. Dairy prices are sky-rocketing upward with one pound of butter now costing $5 and a one pound block of cheese at $10. Yeaow!

Church services went well this past Sunday.... I brought the morning message and then taught the discipleship class afterward. We were in the midst of a storm Saturday night and Sunday morning so our attendance was way down. The building project is getting done in record time. I can't believe how fast the construction is moving.

Genia and I will celebrate 22 years of marriage this weekend.... yes, we are getting away just the two of us. We have reservations at a nice hotel in the city with a romantic meal on the water way.

Joshua, Faith and Catherine are full-blown back to school now... Catherine received an honor to work in the office as a student staff. She's excited about helping and likes the attention that it brings. Joshua and Faith are still doing home-school years 11 and 9.

Ciao

Progress on the Building

This past week I didn't post anything on the blog.... no other reason than just too busy to think about it. Last week I had four teaching classes to prepare for: (1) Tuesday night Life Group where we are going through a study from the book "Changed Into His Image" by Jim Berg. (2) Saturday morning Men's Prayer Breakfast where I did a study on "The Danger of Deflecting Responsibility". We had 23 men for the morning breakfast and accountability meeting. (3) I am teaching a series called "Divorce Proof Your Marriage" (not from the book of the same title). This teaching series is held after our morning worship and kind of like doing a group marriage counselling session. We had 35 people attend the first session on Sunday. (4) My Sunday evening study called "Hot Topics" for young adults was on "Integrity". I usually have about 30 for this class. So I was pretty busy last week trying to get all the preparation done.... plus I had three counselling appointments last week that required quite a bit of time through the week.

Our worship services have been well attended for the past two weeks with 288 and 293 people in attendance... 300 people would be a new attendance record for a regular worship service. We've had 300 people to attend when something special is happening but our new norm for regular attendance is near 300.

The building project is moving quickly now that the foundation has been poured and the roof on the old building is completed. We can hardly wait until the building is finished and we definitely need the extra space. One possibility to put the new space to work through the week is to allow a Christian school to use the facilities.... at this point we don't have any definite plans for that but it might be a good idea for the future.

Genia and the kids are all well. Joshua and Faith reached a milestone with their help to the Chinese Bible distribution.... the team led by Mark has given out 1500 Bibles this month. Joshua, Faith, Joy and Gretchen have a song planned for this weeks worship service. It's the first time they have sang together as a group in front of the congregation. Catherine will be trying her hand at teaching tonight. We are having our Life Group at our house tonight and Joshau and faith will be away at their own Life Group so Catherine will be in charge of the little kids that come tonight with their parents. Genia had her first Ladies Bible Study of the year on Thursday afternoon. She had 17 ladies that came to the study and they all met in the church fellowship hall.

We have a man from IBC that went to the USA several years ago and now has returned to New Zealand and offered a two year work visa through International Baptist Church. We are hoping he can make an impact in the teen ministry for a time... so far he has shown interest to work with the teens. But ultimately he wants to plant new churches and we hope that if things works out well he will be able to help led one of the new churches we hope to plant through IBC. He is a great guy with a wife and three young daughters. They just arrived in NZ last week and originally he is from Indonesia while his wife is from Wisconsin. He was saved at IBC in 1995 soon after arriving in NZ and a few years later went to the USA on a student visa for Bible school where he met his wife. So, it looks like one of the church plants we have planned may be planted by a man originally saved at IBC and now ready to lead a church plant himself.

Ciao

Chinese New Year Worship

Sunday worship was a bit different today, sometimes different is good as it was in this case. In celebration of the Chinese New Year our Chinese choir sang most of the songs and shared testimonies. They spoke both Chinese and English so everyone pretty much knew what was being said. K.C. (in photo below) brought the message on this morning.... K.C. has been a member of IBC for about five years. He and his wife, Christina, are from Singapore and speak the Chinese language very fluently. K.C. is well respected in the Chinese community and was a practicing lawyer in Singapore but he sold his law practice and moved to NZ where he now devotes his full time to ministry. K.C. is not a staff pastor, although we would like for him to be, but he does the ministry and work just as if he was a paid staff pastor to the Chinese. His message was about how the Chinese written language was developed with the Bible. He mainly kept to the passages in Genesis and did a great job bringing his case before the congregation of the fact that Chinese language was written with Biblical influence. Many of the Chinese guests had to search their souls and examine the facts to determine if they believe or not.

In the evening service we took a break from our normal schedule and showed the movie "Facing The Giants".... I know, you've all seen it a hundred times but most people here had never seen the movie. We had a number of guests for the evening movie time. Hopefully they will have been impacted by the testimony in the movie. I guess it worked to some extent as I scheduled two meetings through the week to speak with several families that had questions about God.

Catherine and a few of her Chinese best friends enjoyed the day dressing up in Chinese clothes. They all had loads of fun trying to speak Chinese.
Ciao

Birthday Weekend

Friday was Joshua's 17th birthday! Hard to believe that Genia and I could be parents of a 17 year old.... but I guess reality is sometimes hard to swallow. It was a great day! I spent the first half of Friday at the office finishing my discipleship class-notes and in a counseling session while Genia and Faith did the birthday shopping and baked the cake. Earlier in the week Faith came up with a really cool idea for a cake, a guitar cake! We try to make a special cake each year for the kid's birthday and that has become half of the fun of the celebration to see what kind of cake we can make. Faith did most of the work on the cake which quickly became a piece of art as she made a life size replica of Joshua's Ibanez guitar. It took nearly two days to complete the cake. Then Friday night Joshua invited most of his Life Group to the party, I think it was about 15 people. They really were impressed with the cake and I think Faith got a few more offers to make cakes for future parties. Everybody told Joshua how fortunate he was to have a little sister who would devote so much time to make big brother a cake... I think Joshua really appreciated the cake and party.

Saturday was mainly yard work intermingled with a few things we had to do at the church like music practice in the morning time and a building project meeting later in the afternoon. Then Saturday evening Genia and I attended the Chinese Life Group dinner to help them celebrate Chinese New Year. The food was excellent and as usual we stuffed ourselves with Chinese dumplings and noodle. After the meal Ken and myself each shared a short testimony and devotion for encouragement to the Chinese group. One of the main purposes for the evening was for the Chinese group to practice for the program they had prepared for Sunday morning. The Chinese choir, with about 25 people, practiced songs while others rehearsed how to share their testimony. They really wanted to do a good job since we expected a few Chinese visitors.

Ciao

Chinese New Year

Holidays are so much fun... yesterday started with an early morning pre-marriage counselling session that Genia and I are doing with a young couple from our church. They have a lot going for them and have a heart for the Lord. Both the future husband and wife are actively involved in roles at IBC. After the session we met with Theuns and Tania at Eastern Beach for lunch and a South African Brai... it was soooo good with sausages, steak and some little bread thingy with syrup called a Twisted Sister, I guess it's called this because of the way the bread is made with two long peices interwined together. When they first told me the name was Twisted Sister it reminded me of the old heavy metal band from the 80's with the same name. It's amazing how the brain stores such useless information and things I'd rather forget. From that point onward I had the song "We're not gonna take it" by Twisted Sister stuck in my head all day.... it was driving me crazy to keep thinking about something i didn't want to think about. But finally after a while the battle of the mind was won over by the battle in the stomach and other great food... nothing like a good steak to get me thinking right. The weather was sunny and about 75 degrees but a cool Southerly wind kept us huddled between the beach and the grassy bank for shelter. Way too cold for swimming. The water temp here is always too cold for me. So we only stayed at the beach until about 3pm before coming home.

Today I have two counselling cases scheduled for the afternoon and just finished dealing with a issue where the police had to be involved with a domestic violence case... I got the phone call while Genia and I were having lunch together. I wonder why these kind of situations always seem to happen late at night or right in the middle of a meal?

Today is Chinese New Year.... the year of the RAT! I could think of better animals to have an entire year to celebrate about. While the Chinese New Year is not an official holiday in NZ it is a big deal for our congregation since at least half of them are Chinese or from a Chinese influenced country. In fact our life groups were cancelled tonight because of the celebration... I know, it would be better to have the life groups anyway, right? Well it don't always work that way and rather than try beating our heads against the wall to convince them to have life groups tonight, we will just go with the flow and meet with them when they are ready. Sunday will be a big deal in the worship service as the Chinese choir will be singing and we are all going to be dressed in Chinese clothes. Should be interesting to say the least. We are also going to a Chinese dinner Saturday night for the new year celebration... believe me they take this seriously. I found that out last week at our planning meeting when we were discussing ways we could make the Chinese New Year special and I 'tongue in cheek" suggested that we bring live rats to turn loose in the church auditorium. After a few seconds in which some of the Chinese men seriously were contemplating how we could do that... I said, hey, it's just a joke. But by then it wasn't funny because they kind of thought it might be a good idea. WoW!

Without the life groups tonight we are going to work on making Joshua a birthday cake for tomorrow. Faith and I are putting our artistic talent together to make a guitar cake. Hard to believe Josh will be 17 tomorrow. He has friends coming over tomorrow night for a cook-out and party... should be loads of fun.
Ciao

Another Holiday...

Monday is usually our day off... but the norm is that we seem to be more busy on Monday than other days. Yesterday (Monday) Genia drove Joy to a doctors appointment, kept Johna at our house all day and also watched the neighbor's little boy for several hours why the neighbor attended a doctors appointment. Of course Genia had Faith helping her for most of the day. I had Mark and Ken over to watch the Super Bowl. Mark is the guy that works in the Chinese Bible distribution and attends IBC. He and his wife are from Texas so we all got together to pull for the Giants. Oh yeah, the Super Bowl came on live here but it was Monday at 12noon since we are 18 hours ahead of EST.

Today, Tuesday, was rather quiet at the church office but Ken and I had our usual Tuesday assessment of the weekend. Then I was able to work on my discipleship course and a new class that I will be doing on Sunday afternoon about marriage. Joshua, Faith and Mark had an interesting day in the city giving out Chinese bibles. Faith was approached by a man that she thinks was planning to snatch her purse, but Faith is pretty street wise and spotted his intension before he could get too close. The man stopped and spoke to her briefly as she clutched her purse and backed away... Mark and Joshua was nearby so they came over and the man walked away. Joshua survived the advances of two drunken women that showed him more than he wanted to see. And then, the building where they were handing out the bibles was evacuated because of a bomb threat. So it was a good day and the kid's got kick out of the antics.. Oh yeah, one last thing, Faith was approached by a Chinese man that wanted to know how to become a "member of the Chistian faith". While Faith's Chinese is limited and the man's English was minimal she did try to explain the gospel but the Chinese man's tour bus was leaving and the driver grabbed the man and pulled him away. Faith was heart-broken that she didn't get to finish sharing the gospel but she did give the man a Chinese tract to go along with his Bible.

Tomorrow is Waitangi Day... another holiday. It's kind of like the 4th of July in the USA. Waitangi Day (February 6) is when New Zealand officially became part of the British empire and the Maori people inherited rights as British citizens. The treaty was signed in 1840 which also included a land deal that has become controversial over the years. While England and the NZ government had one version of the treaty, seems like somewhere along the way whether lost in translation or what the Maori people ended up with another version of the treaty. So while Waitangi Day should have been a day for celebration for all NZ it is now a controversial day where the terms of the treaty are questioned and the Maori activist usually make a statement about some land that was stolen from them. It's usually a day where the politicians and Maori activist meet together in Waitangi (the place where the treaty was signed) and try to have a peace summit... but more often than not it makes good news footage of a few fights and scuffles with some threatening behavior and a few threats against the current government. Go figure!

But for most New Zealanders it means the last summer holiday to spend at the beach. Which is precisly where we will be tomorrow as we have been invited to a Brai (South African BBQ) with our close friends from South Africa. Have you noticed that NZ has a lot of holidays? Well, they do. Just about every month has at least one public holiday.

Ciao

Leadership Conference

For some reason or another our internet was down at various times last week... each time I stopped to do the blog, guess what! The internet was not available. We usually have very reliable internet service but I guess this week we just had gimlins in the system.

Most of last week was preparation time for the International Baptist Church leadership conference (photo). We had the conference on Friday evening and most of the day Saturday. Pastor Ken and I challenged the entire IBC leadership team to "Value People" which is our year's focus. Our leadership team includes everyone from pastoral staff and deacons to teachers, music, hospitality and life group leaders.

We had a good turn out with most of our people attending the entire meeting... 30 people in all. We were pleased with the level of commitment and dedication that everyone is displaying to get the job done. Right now there is such a sweet spirit of unity in the leadership team and the church in general. We also saw major steps in the new building this week. For the past month the new roof on the existing building has been under construction... but now the dirt has been cleared away and the actual construction on the new classrooms has begun. If the weather co-operates we should be ready to use the new area of office space, fellowship hall, kitchen and classrooms by late May.

Other than preparation for the Leadership Conference we had a few other things happening. Our Life Group began on Thursday night with 12 young adults. Our group mainly has people that have graduated from University and started their career but have not married. It's a fun group to be around.

Joshua and Faith each went with Mark twice this past week to give away more Chinese Bibles and the Jesus film. Chinese New Year begins next week so we have heaps of Chinese people filtering through New Zealand and most are eager to take a bible and free movie. The bible group usually gives away about 100 of each (bibles and Jesus films)everytime they go out.

Speaking of Chinese New Year.... today after the morning worship service we had a Chinese lunch to peak interest for the Chinese New Year celebration and special activities for next week's worship service. Plus the lunch was a fund-raiser event with-in the congregation sponsored by the Chinese life group. They served traditional Chinese food and it was soooo good. I think they had 180 people stay for lunch at a cost of $15 per plate. The fund-raiser was to benefit the cost of the new building project which is estimated to run about $350,000.00. That's right! Three hundred and fifty thousand smack-a-roos. Nothing is cheap in Auckland - and by the way, this is a small building project which will only include a few offices, fellowship area and classrooms plus a re-modeled kitchen. This "high cost factor" is one of the reasons our two churches merged together so we could both utilized the power of a more people working together for a common goal. And just to let you know - the merger is going beautifully! Our two congregations took the merger just like two old friends visiting with each other on the front porch. They just love being together and have intergrated in every way. Today's worship service was good and Pastor Ken's message was about "Trials of Faith"... I led the closing time and as expected with such a powerful message many people responded. I usually open the service with initial greetings and welcome and then I close the service sometimes with an inviation and sometimes by simply leading in a group prayer with an offer of additional counseling as needed. It fits well with my pastoral care role because I usually have several people each Sunday to come up after the worship service for additional counsel. This opens the door for my weekday visits. Which by the way was very productive last week in getting several families that used to worship the Lord regularly to commit themselves back to the Lord... they came to church today so I guess the Lord is ministering in their heart.

Later today we have a home-stay girl coming to stay at our house for two weeks. This girl is between the age of our two daughters 9-14 and she is from New Caladonia. She speakes French and that's great for Catherine and Faith because they are studing French... this girl is in NZ to study English through the Auckland English Academy. It's a great way for the kids to make new friends from around the world. Plus over the past three years several of our other home-stays have come to know the Lord and our kid's stay in touch with them by e-mail and MSN.

Hope you all have a good week... hopefully I will get to write this week without the internet crashing down.

Ciao