RHM June 2016 Newsletter

Posted by Dion Todd June 23rd, 2016 4,437 Views 0 Comments

Then the LORD answered me and said: “Write the vision And make it plain on tablets, That he may run who reads it. (Habakkuk 2:2 NKJV)

June Newsletter - 2016

Hello there,

Thank you for reading our devotional and being a part of Refreshing Hope Ministries. This is our monthly update on what has been happening here during the last month and I thank you for taking time to read it.

The last month has been exciting, but also a lot of scrambling to try and make the live interactive church services over the Internet, become a reality. We have been working hard to try and bring a word of encouragement from the Lord right into people’s houses, where they live. It has been our vision to bring hope to the crippled, the maimed, the broken, the lost, those in the military, those alienated from God, those wandering without a church. Each step has been a challenge to get this far, but we have now done our first church service and our second will be happening this Sunday.

God has been faithful to bring the messages He would like to have shared. The message for the first full service, “My Door is Now Open” (If you missed the live service you can go to the website and click “Watch” on the top menu), started with one word from Him: “Welcome”. When I asked what that meant, He provided the entire sermon at once. I believe that the Lord is calling His people to come in, before the door is shut. The message for this coming week, “Who Told You That?”, began with a vision of a single image of Adam hiding in the garden. Again, He used that one piece to provide a whole message in a moment.

For those who may doubt that He can communicate in this way, God is speaking, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” Is it biblical? Yes. When Nebuchadnezzar had a dream that no one could interpret, God gave Daniel the message in a vision during the night: “Then the secret was revealed to Daniel in a night vision. So Daniel blessed the God of heaven.” (Daniel 2:19 NKJV). Jesus told us: “My sheep hear My voice” (John 10:3, 10:16, 10:27). Today, too many have simply stopped listening.

While God has granted us grace with the messages, in the technical areas, It has been attack after attack, so we would appreciate your prayers. For instance, when I walked into my prayer room on Sunday morning, where we broadcast from, the wall-mounted camera was lying on the floor, instead of the wall. The broadcast computer had no sound. The keyboard no longer worked. It was panic mode right up until the service began, but we managed to pull everything together and had a decent service in spite of it. We then had personal ministry time, and prayed for each person at the end. All in all, it was a success. You can watch a recorded church service almost anywhere, but having live, interactive, personal ministry time over the web is unique.

Some of the other challenges we have been working with involved the music during the services. We originally wanted to have live praise and worship, but the platform that we are using, which was thankfully donated to us, seems to stream at telephone quality. It is low bandwidth designed mainly for speaking. If you try to run live music over it, then it becomes distorted, wavy, cuts in and out, skips segments, and overall, sounds awful. We then tried pre-recording the praise and worship to video, but then tablets and phones could not see anything but a black screen. On top of that, the message started half way through for some people, and then ended ten minutes early. So music is just not working out on this current platform, live or recorded. For this coming week, we are going to run the service completely live, with no music, which should work around the issues until we can resolve them in another way. Building something meaningful, is never easy.

Attendance: We had about 50 people show up for the service on Sunday, while we had probably 30 hours invested in preparing the content for it. On the other hand, I may spend 2 hours writing a devotional, and 7,000 to 10,000 people will read it. I am not expecting everyone to be able to attend, but we need to see more people interested and involved to make the time invested worthwhile for us.

Support: We could upgrade to a better streaming service, like livestream.com, but to embed it into our website like we would want will cost $400 per month, or $2400 a year, and at the moment we just cannot afford that. To be honest, RHM has been staying just above the water since last August when the site went down for two weeks. We lost a lot of members then. We have people that support us, but very few that faithfully tithe. If we all pulled together, we could do probably do something great, but it is difficult alone.

Poll: I guess what we would like to find out is: are the live services something that are meaningful to you, and is there anything we can do to make attending easier? To find out, we have created a poll to get an idea of the interest in the live meetings. Would it be better on Saturday? Perhaps people already attend a church and maybe they would attend on a different day. Should we change it to monthly? Are we trying to push something that people don’t want? Please answer this poll and leave your comments on it so that we can get an idea of where we stand.

Here is a direct link to the poll: http://www.refreshinghope.org/polls/view/2/live-services-poll

So today, I just want to say that we are straddling the fence on this project. We have enough financial support to stay a float and pay the bills, but not enough to move forward with it. At the same time, we are working very hard, and very long to try and make the live meetings work at all, and it wears on us. We have decided to give it four weeks to see how to goes with the meetings. We will run them completely live, drop the music for now as it just not working out on this system, have prayer, a message, and ministry time together. Then we will watch and see if the interest, attendance and support climbs, or if it dives. I want to do what the Lord calls us to do, but I also know that He is well able to provide for our needs and when He is not, then we need to stop and look at the big picture. I hear Him regularly, but I am not above being wrong about anything. While we think it is great, what do you think about it?

Thank you so much for reading this far, now here is what is happening at RHM:

Refreshing Hope Ministries was mentioned in the July edition of Guideposts magazine:

Online Church News: www.refreshinghope.org - We have grown to 3,297 members and 13,858 friendships. We have had 140 prayer requests and sent 575 replies to them. A big thanks to our ministry team.

New things added:

We have a wonderful new group at RHM called “Laughter, God’s Medicine”! It is a place for posting funny pics, clean jokes, funny videos, and funny stories. If it’s funny it is welcome here! Sometimes we forget that God created laughter. Think about it. When God was creating mankind, He equipped us to experience a special burst of enjoyment...a way to release stress and relish the unusual, crazy things in life. Laughter also brings many health benefits, such as improved blood flow, blood sugar levels, sleep patterns and immune system response. God tells us in Proverbs 17:22 that "A merry heart does good like a medicine" and He means it. Let laughter sweep through your soul today and improve your overall health.

The FAAD group is hosting a 30-day Christian Music challenge, where we commit to only listening to Christian music for a month! We believe that soaking in music that glorifies our God will reap wonderful benefits in our spirits and our health!

If you are in need of prayer, be sure to send in your needs to our prayer network (just click the “Prayer” link on the site menu). We and our prayer team are blessed each week to be able to lift up your needs. Also, if you would like to join the prayer team, please let us know!

Thank you so much for being part of Refreshing Hope Ministries. All of you who have supported us throughout the month with prayer, encouragement and financial resources are truly a blessing. Thank you also for the wonderful and encouraging emails, cards and letters! We pray over them whenever we receive them and are blessed whenever we see them on their special wall.

I pray that the Lord richly blesses you this month. May He guide your every step and fan the flames within us both. May the Lord lead us all into everything that He has for us, and give us a fresh vision as we follow Him one step at a time, in the name of Jesus Christ I pray.

Pastor Dion