I think the church is going from a place of judgement in America to the happiest most loving place in every city across our country!  Our cities are actually going to be blessed by how many churches they have because of how the men and women of those churches love their neighbor!

Anyways…Robyn and I are pumped for this next year…we are still in the process of getting some more specific promises and direction over our year…but will definately update everyone soon!

In the mean time…here is our Christmas card if you have not received it!

Blessings

xmas 2011printthisone

It’s been an awesome holiday season and Robyn and I are looking forward to the semester starting back up!  Love you all

enjoy the pics!

We moved out here in June of 2010 to plant this church, in all reality the church has been planted, its healthy its growing…praise God!  However as we sought the Lord as a staff before coming out here, we really felt like the Lord talked a lot about how this is not church in the sense of building a group of people that gather a few times a week, tithe, love Jesus together and thats great.  The Lord really challenged us to believe Him for the impossible…things like:

1. we are actually going to build a church that disciples Fort Collins

2. we are actually going to build a church that disciple Colorado STate University

3. we are actually going to create a movement and structure that can send people into every realm of society and every nation to see whole society’s and nations transformed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ….woah…

so…this last year Robyn and I have been in process of taking our crazy pills and deciding yes, we are going to believe God, do what He says, and see this actually come to pass.

Well, as Robyn and I were talking through this last semester, we have set out obeying the Lord, doing what we know how to do: discipling students, sharing the Gospel, building a lifegroup, risking on people…and we were thinking…

We have about 15 students, that are pumped out of their mind to go share the Gospel on Friday nights, and go encounter Jesus together on Tuesday nights at this Pursue event.  Both of these events have come from Jesus speaking to students and Robyn and I telling them they are not crazy and that we believe in them!     Its like we have a group of students that have come alive at a level they have never been.  They are encountering God, being transformed and their is this incredible momentum stewing right under the surface…its like collectively the students are feeling this desire to give away what they have, but they dont entirely know how…but everyone knows the lid is about to come off…

Mean while…Robyn and I are blown away at what is happening right before our eyes.  We are consistently challenged and blown away that the Lord is allowing us to steward this revival on CSU…its crazy…

anyways…thanks for following us…please pray for us…

a. that we wouldn’t succumb to control…but Robyn and I would continue to lead in abidance with the Holy Spirit

b. that our family would thrive…we are currently…so that that would continue

c. that we would laugh more then anyone else on the planet…

bless you guys

austin

Hey Friends!  Hit the link above if your interested in our latest newsletter.

It has been an awesome week!  This has officially been the end of the Fall push for the college staff, and Robyn and I are wiped.  We set out in August to start 2 new LG’s with one already running, and while we didn’t see any brand new LG’s start it has been an amazing season of momentum.  We have seemed to tap into 4 different groups of college students that have been coming to LG faithfully and are for the most part all being discipled!  I think we are formally discipling around 14 students!  Robyn more then anyone has been a rockstar, with two kids, building another one and seemingly always having college girls around the house!

The most exciting thing in all of this has been the nature of discipleship.  It seems like all of our discipleship relationships have been really well defined, all of our students are meeting with Jesus and its like we get to watch growth unfold at an exponetial rate with every meeting!

One of my favorite things that’s happened, was last Friday I invited a few of the doods to come chill at my place that night b/c Robyn was going to be out and they informed me that they couldn’t because they were going to share the Gospel that night!   Come to find out, they (three of them) have decided to share the Gospel every Friday night for the rest of the semester!  Totally unprompted by anyone but Jesus!

So needless to say, watching life transformation is a lot of fun!

Robyn and the family are doing awesome!  We are looking forward to the holidays and enjoying the momentum of what God is doing here in Fort Collins!

Bless you guys…thanks for investing in us!

austin

If you have not experienced a treasure hunt its basically a tool we use to share the Gospel.  We meet before hand, ask God for a treasure map.  So for example “God who do you want us to find tonight, give us names, places, needs, clothing, anything”  then we write down what he tells us and go and find those people and tell them basically God told me to come find you…here you are on my list…then we love them as best as possible…which usually entails sharing how much JC loves them….

So two fun stories from the night.  The first one, was in the first 5 minutes.  I was with two people that had never done anything like this before and so they were slightly nervous to say the least…well we walked by this bar and one of the guys noticed basically everything on his list.   Well about 100 yards past the guys…he was like I gotta go talk to these guys.  So we walk up to this bar with outdoor seating and there was a bench outside right by the fence.  So he walks up and just starts talking to them from behind the 4 ft fence.  He had blue shirt, a bandana and joseph on his list, and of the six people sitting there 4 of them had blue softball type jersey’s on, one guy had a bandana and the other guy’s last name was joseph!  So we basically tell them that God sent us here to them and asked if they needed anything…and after the inital shock of how did you know my name wore off, we ended up talking to them for 10 minutes or so…and while none of them opened up their lives to us or expressed any real needs…we were able to tell them that God really likes them and they actually received it, said thank you for stopping!   it was awesome!

another cool story is that we were walking through a parking lot heading toward campus and asked two guys walking toward us if their name was Tim (because I had Tim on my list)  and they were like no but were going to meet Tim right now.  And we were like sweet where?  and they said Qdoba which is the place that the girl with me had on her list!  So we ask if we can go with them and end up hanging with them for like 30 minutes they introduce us to Tim, and unfortunaltly none of them were super hungry for JEsus we were again able to tell them that God thinks they are sweet and invited them to Lifegroup.

The crazy thing that I noticed from all my interactions from the night is that generally when I have done this people have been turned off by me, or by the remark of Jesus or church.  Well this night it seemed like everyone we talked to…especially the two interactions above people were genuinely blessed that we stopped and engaged them.  It was like they actually liked us BECUASE of JEsus!!!   which is crazy!  But hey we have been praying both for favor on ourselves as well as just the reality that the church is the best thing happening in Fort Collins….

Boo Yah!  its true!!!  HA!!!!!

ps you can pray for our church this Friday night…we are doing a church wide treasure hunt…

Hi guys!

Here is a quick family photo update!  Enjoy

1) Austin and I on our 4th anniversary date to the Melting Pot! We have now gone the last 3 out of 4 years there and its been wonderful to sit and chat and reminisce and fondue it up.

2 & 3) Getting into WW2 garb with some friends from our church here in ACC:FC.  Celebrating a 30th birthday! Not ours…. Austin’s 27th bday is coming up October 15th!

4-14) The kiddos.  I love seeing their personalities emerge & hopefully you’ll see it through these photos.  The first pic is of our new play room (Thanks MiMi!) and train table (Thanks Bradys)! The kids loooooooooooove the trains and it provides so much entertainment.

Halle and I are doing pre-school at home this year and she loves to learn! We recently made an “H” in class the other day.  Also shown is Halle Lue’s two personality traits! Sweet & gentle… such a pretty dancer! And fierce warrior princess.  Check out that face!

And Jack is loving to learn.  He loves to try and brush his teeth, play hide and go seek in Halle’s tent, and play games with Daddy.

Lastly is our 2nd baby boy on the way, due Dec. 27th.  His name is going to be Benjamin James.  Ben for short.  We feel like this little dude is going to see the world through a different set of eyes, see it’s potential and have a desire to bring change… a lot like his dad, and he is going to have a neat relationship with the FATHER God and his earthly daddy.  So Benjamin means son of my right hand, and James is Austin’s middle name that we are passing down that means supplanter.   I’m so excited to meet this little guy.

love you all and hope you enjoy!

~robyn

bless you guys!

We have been on campus looking for hungry freshman that want to be disciples of Jesus.

While we have not had much direct success in meeting hungry freshman, we have in the mean time…had….

one of our students from last year bring his two roomates to LG…they have both gotten rocked by Jesus in new ways and are thriving!

had a constant stream of students coming through out service…the jury is still out on students sticking and jumping in with us…that will be a bit clearer come late october.

Our Wednesday night LG picking up from last year is booming away…with a solid core of six with consistent guests…

and lastly I got a call from a student about a month ago, and she told me that God wanted her to start this thing called pursue…the basic gist is create a place for college students to get together in the presents of God and then go and give it away (a meeting every two weeks or so)…..well she called me she told me God told her to get Robyn and I’s help.  There are basically 6 college students that are building this thing…that for the most part have no real church family, nobody helping to lead them, and are just trying to be obedient to God.                 While we still don’t entirely know how our presents is going to play out in speaking into this thing…it feels like we are with 6 of the hungriest students on campus and i can only imagine they will gather more hungry students….so it should be fruitful to say the least…

you can pray for wisdom in how to navigate this…Robyn and I feel like our role is to believe in them and help get this thing off the ground and invite the leaders and anyone that comes into the meetings to join our family (antioch)…

thats a quick rundown on the last two weeks…its going to be another month of fast paced life…we are enjoying it and our kids and marriage are thriving!

and i passed my first college test in 7 years last friday!  boo yah…

and i got to preach again last Sunday…you can check it out at www.antiochfc.org

and sweet pics of our kids will be attached to the next blog post…

thanks for follwing us…u rock!

While we have started no new Lifegroups and really had solid connection with no freshman.  Our returning LG is blowing up all over the place, and we are on the verge of starting a Discipleship house with some sophomores!

Our first two LG’s have had several new students with the common theme on people leaving LG is “I don’t know what’s different about this place but I have to have what ever it is…”  which is really encouraging…logistically speaking our LG’s have been less then average to say the least…I’ve felt akward…but the Holy Spirit keeps showing up……halleluia…

We are going to continue to push into freshman for six more weeks, hoping to find the one guy or girl that wants to see CSU reached…in six weeks we will re-evaluate our small groups and move into a more building phase and less of a starting phase.

You can pray for Robyn and I…we are on campus 4 out of 7 nights during the week and have had to literally flip our family schedule around.  To this point we seem to be doing well…but pray that we can keep it up the next 6 weeks!

bless you guys

A few sweet things of note, Robyn and I had a goal of raising another $650 of support to get our healthcare covered as well as me getting on campus as an official student at CSU (trying to finish my degree) and we got it!  It only took about a week, and we were able to raise $700/month!  thank you Lord, and thank you everyone that has given to this!

Robyn and I are also going to be starting a resources page on our blog.  It will be updated periodically with the books/music/articles that are fueling our relationship with Jesus.  We hope it to be helpful for anyone looking for new things to catalyze their relationship with Jesus.

LAstly, and most importantly…Robyn and I found out this week that we are having another son!  I am so jazzed!  He is healthy and growing great…we are due on December 27th and cant wait!

Bless you guys, thanks for following our lives and what God is doing in us and through us!