Deeper Well

I'll apologize in advance that this is a lot longer than I intended it to be. I figured I'd go ahead and post it as-is though. FINALLY, we're letting everyone in on the big story of what's next for Jesse and Amy!

No, we're not pregnant.

We’re planning to start a ministry in New Hampshire, which we’ll be calling Deeper Well.

The Mission Statement

Deeper well aims to transform the city of Dover, New Hampshire through mercy ministry, evangelism, and discipleship of both new and old believers. Rather than participating in individual mercy ministry events, we desire to live a lifestyle of dedication to our community and consistently recognizing the people around us and meeting needs where we see them. Evangelism will naturally but intentionally take place as we meet these people and come to care for them. As people come to know our living God and find hope in him, we will facilitate their growth through one-on-one mentoring, small groups and classroom-style teaching on the Scriptures. Since each worker has different gifts and a different God-given role, we aim to place people where they specifically have the gifts, passion and vision to help people be transformed to reflect God’s character. Our long-term goal is to see those we have evangelized to eventually become evangelists and teachers and disciplers themselves.

The Back-story

During our time in Africa, we felt God leading us toward a future ministry of some kind, though we didn't know what. The closest we could figure was that we might plant a YWAM base in New Hampshire.

We did a 6-week leadership seminar last summer called DTS Equip, where learned more about how our personalities and gifts and passions factor into the calling that God has for us. There we realized the huge role that teaching would play in our future. That time also confirmed our desire to disciple Christians to discover all that God has for them.

Throughout our 9 months in SBS, we’ve uncovered a deep desire to give people solid biblical teaching, and the tools to study the Bible correctly on their own. During these last few months God has given incredible clarity to the vague vision that we had in mind when we started in September.

The Vision

As the mission statement describes, we want to focus on evangelism, mercy ministry and discipleship. Evangelism, because our desire isn’t to lure bored Christians away from their churches into a more ‘exciting’ looking thing. Actually, we want to do the opposite. We want discontent Christians to rediscover what Christianity is all about so that they’re more active in their own churches and in the lives of the people around them. We want them to realize that there is always more we can learn about God; we shouldn’t ever have the chance to be bored! As we see more people coming to Christ, we’ll need to make sure they learn more about who God is—his nature and character, the necessity of sharing the gospel, of learning his Word, etc. We have dreams of small groups and of evening classes or multi-week seminars to pass on some of the things we have learned about studying the Bible. We want people to discover their own spiritual gifts and begin to use them as part of the body of Christ. We have lots of BIG dreams too—of full-time ministry, of seeing people saved and healed, of taking outreach teams to other countries. We dream of having a large group of people on board with us who all want to see the same changes in our city, who donate their time and money to see it happen. It’s sometimes hard to know what to call our ministry. It’s part church, part not. Our goal certainly isn’t a Sunday morning service, but it’s easy to see it ending up there. We could talk for hours about the many different ways that this could look, but we’ll spare you the ramblings! All we know is that God will reveal more and more as we go along.

I’ve heard of people starting house churches and quoting Acts 2 as their little motto of why they do it, and I don’t want to sound cliché, but I can’t help but quote this as we dream of what our ministry could look like:

“And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.” Acts 2:42-47

The People

We’re excited to have our good friend Ben joining us for this endeavor! He is one of the ones who has been there since the beginning of SBS, staying up late many nights talking with us about all of our dreams for the future. Even though New Hampshire is our home and not his, this is just as much his dream as it is ours. He’s ready to make Dover his home and be committed to seeing change in this area.

We also have a couple of other friends who are seriously praying about joining us. Even if they don’t come right away, we’re excited about the possibility of them coming along in the future to help us get things off the ground.

The Timeline

6 months – 1 year:

We’ll get settled back into “real life” after being in the YWAM bubble (off and on) for 3 years. Amy is returning to UNH to finish her computer science degree. Jesse and Ben will be working with a landscaping company to open up a new division of work there. This is one of the ways that we plan to support ourselves as we won’t be in full-time ministry at this point and won’t be raising support. Jesse and Ben are both considering their options for further education and praying about what path to take.

During this time we plan to be intentional about the friendships that we make and the mentoring relationships that we seek.

1-3 years:

We have a lot of goals for this stage. We would like to start up small groups at this point, and possibly start up small bible classes through existing churches for people who feel inclined to learn more than they get at small groups and Sunday sermons (And no, we’re not bashing either one, but young/immature Christians could certainly benefit from learning early on how to study the Bible). At this stage we plan to be spending a significant amount of time teaching and helping people grow, but we will still be finishing up school and working part-time. We may raise support during this stage, but that’s still unclear at the moment.

If possible we would also love to travel and teach in Schools of Biblical Studies around the world. Second and Third World countries often have a very difficult time getting teachers to come to their schools because of the cost of travel, but we have a big heart to raise our own support and help in these places if possible. In many of these countries, pastors earn their positions simply because they were the first convert in their village. They desperately need solid biblical teaching, and by taking a week or two to go and invest in one of those SBSs we could actually be helping many different ‘pastors’ how to correctly study the Bible and lead their congregations in truth.

3-5 years:

By this time we hope to have a building in which to hold classes and have group meetings. We hope to have a group of people who are enthusiastic about evangelism and reaching out to their neighbors. We want to make teaching a nearly full-time job. Again, when possible we hope to travel to teach in other countries and/or bring teams to do outreaches. 


Video
For those of you who missed it the first time around, we got to share our vision with our SBS a couple of weeks ago and we got video of it. It's basically the same information as above, but if you're interested, here it is!