Gilson Family News

This was a news and prayer email we just sent to members of our ministry partner team, including prayer partners. We have some exciting news to thank God for, and a prayer request.

The great news is that last night Jonathan was honored at a School Board meeting with a Student Service Award, based on excellent leadership he has taken at his high school. Mom and Dad are extremely proud of him, and Lisa told the board members during a break, “He’s the best big brother in the whole world!” Jonathan’s web design accomplishments were read during the presentation. As we were leaving, another county resident who happened to be there gave Jonathan his card and said, “Please call us, we’re looking for people like you to work with us.”

Actually he’s a busy young man right now. His high school is a small one that does not offer languages. He took the first semester of Spanish through home schooling and tutoring, and passed the test to enter the second semester at the local community college. One of our goals for him in this was that he would get a preview of what college is like. He is certainly getting that–he’s studying longer hours than he ever has. So please pray for him to stay caught up.

The other prayer request is for my health. I was one of many around here who caught bronchitis this winter. In my case it turned into pneumonia. The main symptom I’m having is being tired, and being tired of being tired (cabin fever, you might say). I should have asked you to pray for this sooner, since it’s been going on over 10 days now. Please pray it will pass quickly. Sara and the kids have been great during this period when I’ve had to lay low.

Thank you for your prayers and partnership–we’re praying for you, too.

Tom

I am scheduled to speak at two churches in the local area next week, on Monday and Wednesday evening, November 10 and 12. Please pray that God would be glorified and the listeners would be challenged in their faith. These are also for the purpose of finding new ministry partners to help support us financially, so please pray that God would bring that about as well.

Tom’s article on leaving legalistic religion behind has just been published in the November-December issue of Discipleship Journal. Unfortunately it’s not available online, but the magazine is sold at most major bookstores.

Here’s Life Inner City

• Tom just completed a strategic planning session with leaders of this nationwide ministry. HLIC is partnered with over 1,400 urban churches in America providing compassionate aid, after-school mentoring programs, leadership and character development programs for adults, and training in ministry for church leaders. All of this comes in the name of Jesus Christ and with an explanation of who He is.
• Our strategic planning work focused on developing a younger generation of leadership, on recruiting, on making HLIC’s expertise more broadly available and widely known, and more.
• In the process, Tom also brought a potential part-time team member along to orient him in ministry strategic planning and explore the possibility of him helping in the future. This proved very positive, and is likely to expand our own team’s effectiveness over the years to come.

Bright Media Foundation

• Brad Bright’s newly revised God Is the Issue: Recapturing the Cultural Initiative has just been mailed to 10,000 pastors in the U.S. now. (Our team was closely involved in strategizing for this and other Bright Media Foundation initiatives.)
• This book is not yet available for sale to the public, though soon it will be.
• Tom has spoken and written on this topic recently, and has submitted an article on it to a nationally known outlet. (A link to the talk will be added by Tuesday.)

Ministry Partner Development

• We are concentrating for several weeks on strengthening our team of ministry partners and our financial support for ministry.
• At this time we are in need of approximately $900 in new monthly support.
• The President’s Office matching grant is still available for new ministry partners, or for increased pledges from current partners.
• We are very encouraged by the progress we’re making, but we have considerably more distance to go with this.
• Our prayer is to see the full $900/month pledged by the middle of November.
• Please contact us if you have questions regarding the matching grant.

Community Ministry

• Sara is leading a women’s Bible study, helping them to understand basic and not-so-basic truths about faith and about God’s work in us through the Holy Spirit.
• She continues to be involved with youth through a local Christian club in Lisa’s school.

Family News

• Jonathan is learning Spanish through an independent study/tutoring program; he’s doing well in school.
• Lisa is having a great year, enjoying being in band and in stage band. She just submitted a homemade video to the PTA’s “Reflections” contest. She shot and edited it. The subjects of the video were Jonathan and a friend, both of whom have become rather accomplished jugglers.
• Michigan State (we’re all fans) is having a great football season!

We’ve just reached the halfway point on our $12,000 matching contribution opportunity! Thank you to you who have helped get us this far.

For clarity’s sake: we’re not yet halfway to our current goals for new support development this year. The total need was greater than what will be matched.

Nevertheless we are celebrating a milestone, and thanking God for his provision.

Tom is preparing again for strategic planning with Here’s Life Inner City, only this time with a larger scope than before. Last February he met with the Youth Development sector of Here’s Life Inner City; this time it is the entire national planning team for the ministry. These meetings will be in Baltimore, Sept. 22-25. He’ll be bringing along a long-time friend, Dave Fackler, to help with planning and possibly become an occasional future partner in more projects like these. Dave already has plenty to do as an assistant director of Keynote, but he has graciously agreed to come, participate, and see how God leads.

Meanwhile Sara is helping to start up the First Priority club at Lisa’s middle school again. We’re devoting extra time this month, and probably through most of November, to developing financial support for our ministry. The matching funds opportunity is still there for new support, and we want to take full advantage of it. Thank you for praying with us.

Our August newsletter is now online. Since writing that letter, I (Tom) have been to the meetings with Bright Media Foundation that we mentioned there.

Brad Bright, president of Bright Media Foundation, is a brilliant thinker and more importantly, deeply devoted to helping the world discover who God is and understand that God really is the issue that matters. We have an election approaching in the U.S. Part of Brad’s message is that whatever issues rise to the surface, our view of God is the foundation that lies underneath all of them. There is nothing that says more about a person than how they view God. He is currently revising a book, God Is the Issue, with hopes to mail copies to thousands of pastors before the election.

Our strategy sessions with his team were more positive even than we had expected. For me, one of the great victories was helping them decide not to do some things, so that they could focus on activities that will have the greatest impact.

I have a strong sense that you’ll be hearing about this from sources other than just us. They’re developing a website along with their publishing projects, and when it’s ready to go, I’ll let you know. It’s a bit early for that yet.

Meanwhile, since I travel a lot, I had some frequent flier miles available to share with our daughter, Lisa. She is still “best friends forever” with our former next-door neighbor in Orlando, and she was able to come along on this trip and spend a couple of days with Kelsey. We had some great daddy-daughter time, too!

And last Sunday was Youth Sunday at our church. Lisa sang in the choir, and Jonathan delivered one of the messages! Though it hasn’t been posted quite yet, be able to find it on the web soon at the church’s website.

Amber, Lisa’s 13-year-old friend who has been visiting us from Iowa for the past five weeks, was baptized tonight! Tom participated in the baptism, along with our church’s youth pastor, Jack Duffer.

Amber will be flying home tomorrow. We can’t really say we’ll be going back to normal, because she will be leaving a very powerfully positive mark behind with us all here. Thank God for his work in her life, and in ours as well.

Much of our news has been posted on our website homepage and in our newsletter, but it’s time to catch up here, too.

Sara and the three kids (I’ll explain that in a moment) just finished a week of ministry in a local economically-depressed community called Lackey. It was a youth mission “trip,” actually, though with considerable adult involvement. Last year our church led this youth-based outreach in partnership with one located right there, Rising Sun Baptist Church. This year Rising Sun led it, and our church helped. Jonathan was in charge of a Backyard Bible Study in an apartment complex, the first effort of the sort he has ever been in charge of. Sara led morning devotions all week. Lisa was involved in prayer-walking and the Backyard Bible Study.

Our third child this summer has been Amber, a 13-year-old friend of Lisa’s who had to move to Iowa last September. She has been spending the first part of the summer with us, five weeks in all. There’s a long story there that I cannot share here. It’s been a great time together. She has decided to be baptized this week, just before returning to Iowa on Thursday. We’re going to miss each other greatly.

I (Tom) have been working on a strategic assessment of Campus Crusade’s JESUS Film Project, strategic planning with Josh McDowell Ministry, and a web strategy proposal for William Lane Craig, along with my usual blogging. Jonathan and I went to a Christian conference in Washington, D.C. not long ago. Before that we stopped in at the headquarters of Prison Fellowship, to have lunch with the editor, Travis McSherley, who has been publishing articles of mine on Breakpoint.org. He took us on a tour of the offices, and we bumped into Charles Colson there. Travis introduced me to him as the author who wrote the article that had received more traffic than any other they had published on that website. That was the first I knew of that. That article was one I wrote on Scholastic’s attempts to market The Golden Compass as a curriculum resource in public schools.

We’ve planning a short trip to Charlotte soon to share in a supporting church there and to visit family members.

We’ve just finished our organizational assessment for The Orlando Institute, and we’re moving ahead with similar work with The Jesus Film.

And we’re working on ministry support development. Some very encouraging news there: a matching grant for new monthly, quarterly, or annual support. Please contact us for more information on how you can take part.

Meanwhile Jonathan is applying for what could be his first summer job, and we’re helping to host local outreaches by Campus Crusade’s music group, Blue Sky Nine, over the next several days.