Jay Bauman has spent years developing relationships within Brazil as he served as the Executive and Worship Pastor of Crosspointe. A Acts 29 church in Orlando. Recently he moved to Rio de Janeiro and founded Restore Brazil to facilitate church-planting, social justice and cultural transformation through the gospel.

Compassion Connection was our hosting organization in Ecuador. In this video you’ll meet Steve Youngren, founder and director of Compassion Connection, as he introduces himself, explains a bit of what they do and how you can help.

Here, we will see how those roll right into justification, Christ’s righteousness imputed to you. Martin Luther calls this the great exchange:
“This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners: wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christ¹s, and the righteousness of Christ not Christ¹s but ours. He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it; and he has taken our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them.”

One of my goals was to initiate conversation regarding potential partnerships with like-minded churches and organizations to which we send teams to aid in their local mission. Though we don’t believe in “short term mission” (because mission isn’t something you turn “on” and “off”) we are open to sending teams of people who are living on mission in Seattle to Latin America to help those who…

In this post I’ll explain the goals of our trip, introduce the Latin America leadership team, and recount some of the highlights of our brief, yet productive, trip that lasted a total of four days (with a day of travel on each end). It was a quick, hard-hitting, Spirit-led adventure.

Continuing on from the previous weeks, we will talk about two more themes in the atonement and apply them to counseling. The themes are propitiation and expiation. Propitiation is God’s wrath satisfied, the payment of sin accounted for and God’s wrath turned into favor. Expiation is the wiping away of sin. The debt of sin no longer stands against us. The debt is cancelled; the sin is removed.

I have the humbling and exciting responsibility of serving as the US Area Director for Acts 29 International over Latin America. Two weeks ago I, along with several other key leaders, traveled to Ecuador to help lead and teach the very first Acts 29 church planting conference in Latin America. Its taken a couple weeks to process my time there. This blog series will tell you a bit of the story. In this post I’ll explain a little about our work in Latin America.

Halloween provides an opportunity to be missional. (Mt 28:19-20; Acts 1:8; John 20:21; Mt 11:19) Our God is a sending God who sent his Son to live, die and rise again for the forgiveness of sin and redeemed life with God. As God’s people, we too are now sent. That means we should be where the community is, doing what the community is doing. This was Jesus’ model and he was called a glutton and drunkard because of it.

So, what do we do with Halloween? First, we shouldn’t merely accept it nor quickly dismiss it. The history of Halloween is muddled and unclear. As scripture is unclear on the matter, each of us must give careful thought to the question. The issue we’re dealing with here is one of conscience, which means the end product may differ from Christian to Christian. This also means we have to be careful when speaking to others whose consciences may be weak in this area (1 Cor 8). Ultimately this is an open-handed issue.

Let’s first cover a bit of the history of his sugar-coated holiday. (Disclaimer: The history of this holiday is long, complex, interwoven and often debated. This is my attempt at synthesizing my research and findings.)
There are signs that in the early 4th century the church had a day, the specific day is unknown, during which they celebrated the lives of well-known Christians. Several hundred years later on May 13th, 610 AD, Pope Boniface IV consecrated the Pantheon and established that day to specifically celebrate Mary and the martyrs of the Church.