We are excited about progress in moving toward our long term work with ReachGlobal Crisis Response. We’ve been remiss in the area of communication, but as our “more full time” date moves closer, we want to keep all of our friends and ministry partners up to date, especially so that you can pray.
Ministry Preparations:
Earlier this year we attended interviews to officially become “long term part time” missionaries with ReachGlobal Crisis Response. (See my previous post “Acronyms in Minnesota.”)
We were officially accepted just a few days later and began the ReachGlobal First Steps course. Actually Gail had already done most of these first steps and had like one item on her checklist. I had like fifteen. But I got most of them done within a few weeks. This included setting up my EFCA email address: bob.degray@efca.org. Feel free to send me a thrill-filled glad-to-catch-up personal note there – so far it’s mostly been rather dry checklist updates.
The next steps after first steps were a few other courses (Child Safety, Cyber-Security, etc.) and the very beginnings of Ministry Partnership Development. As I explained in the Minnesota post, this is the process where Gail and I develop relationships with people who can support us by prayer, encouragement and generosity. We will be raising a modest salary, though most of our living expenses will come out of our retirement savings and investments. We will also be raising an equal amount to support our ministry expenses, which will be significant as we pursue crises all across the United States and sometimes overseas.
Gail was in Florida in January working on the Hurricane Ian response in Fort Myers. She did some family travel in March, but has just gone back to Florida again for the rest of April and she’ll be in Lake Charles for a while in May. We’d really like to be doing some of this travel together, which brings us to:
Personal Preparations:
The big question is when Trinity Fellowship will be ready to call a new senior pastor. At this moment they have narrowed the list of candidates down to two and they are about to conduct more extensive interviews with them. This could lead to a candidate visit in June and a new pastor starting at the end of the summer. Thus I hope to finish up not later than September (after 31 years at Trinity). Even if a new senior pastor isn’t here by then, Trinity will probably bring in an interim pastor so I can move on to Crisis Response.
The other personal preparation is a vehicle. We’ve recently sold our Yukon and our little camper, so the funding is coming together for the Class B camper van that we plan to use for Crisis Response work, travel and family visits. Here are the two we’re most interested in.
If you don’t see much difference between them, that’s because all Class B’s look about the same on the outside. These two also look about the same on the inside because they both have the layout and features we want.
We really like that front seating area and the couch at the back that converts to twin beds or a queen bed but also has two three point seat belts.
Please be praying that God would provide the right vehicle at the right price at the right time. We’d really like to have it in place before July because we’ll be taking family vacation and working in Florida for a couple weeks that month.
Thanks for your prayers!
In Him
Bob
P. S. If you would like to help with our ministry expenses (travel, lodging, etc.) and ultimately with our monthly support, you can make one-time or ongoing gifts to our account at ReachGlobal: DeGray-2312. Thanks!