Christmas News!!

Merry Christmas everyone!! Hope you all had a great Christmas and have a happy, blessed New Year…

So its been a while since we updated this, its hard to get the time to sit down and write when we have school- with class, homework, outreach and everything else. But we are now on Christmas holidays for 3 weeks, so there are no excuses….

Its hard to believe we’ve been here for 3, nearly 4 months now, it’s gone so fast but God has done so much it’s hard to know where to start. We now feel really at home here, we love the environment, the people, the church and the whole Bethel culture (as they call it)!! It really is a unique place, with teaching and beliefs that are so fresh and transforming. We feel so blessed to be here, especially at this time when so much is happening, so thank you to everyone who helped us get here financially or prayerfully!

So here’s just some of the things we’ve been doing/ learning etc…

Since November we have been doing the Church leadership and School Planting track in school. Tracks are advanced ministry training in different areas which you go to each week until the end of the school year. We really felt God leading us to do this track as it’s something we feel called to after our time here and it has been so good. For the first 5 weeks we have been learning about leadership in ministry in general by one of the pastors here called Steve Backland. His favourite phrase is “Lets just laugh at that”, which he has written a book on. He exposes a lot of lies from the enemy, which we often believe as Christians (especially Christian leaders) and end up partnering with which really holds us back. Some examples of these lies are: “Good things can’t last” or “There are no solutions for this situation” and he gets us to physically laugh at them as the lie the enemy plants is laughable when we see it from God perspective! And it’s even scriptural – Psalm 2:4- “God laughs in heaven” at what his enemies are saying and planning. He then believes in the power of declaring the truth, as the lie must be replaced with a truth and by declaring it out loud it renews our mind to this truth! We’ve been really learning the power of declarations and refusing to partner with lies and know these are great tools for leadership in the future.

Another thing we love at Bethel and have been growing in a lot is the prophetic. We’ve had a lot of teaching on it by Kris Vallotton- the associate Pastor here and a recognised prophet. What we love here is that they believe the prophetic is for everyone, that we can all operate in this gift in some measure. We are all prophetic people, just some people have a greater anointing in that gift or are actually called to the office of prophet. So we have both been really developing our prophetic gift just by simply practicing it and being stretched in it (which our revival group pastor is really good at doing). An example of this is in our revival group (which is a group of about 65 students which really is our community here) for Christmas we did a secret Santa but instead of just getting them gifts we had to give them a prophetic word, a piece of prophetic art and a prophetic gift.

We’ve also really been using the prophetic when we’re out doing outreach. One week we did prophetic art the whole night and then the next week we went out on the street to give our art to people. I’m not very artistic so this was a big risk for me, but as soon as I got out of the car I saw this man walking towards us and I knew I was meant to speak to him. I had a picture of a house and a windy road leading up to it and had the word that “God will lead you to a place that feels like home”.  So I gave it to him and asked him if it meant anything to him and although he was quite nervous he said it definitely did. We talked to him more and found out he had a terminal illness so we prayed for him and got some more prophetic words for him and he left so encouraged. He had been baptised at Bethel a few years ago but had fallen away from the Lord and was pretty lost but after we encountered him he said that his mood had really been lifted and it had made his day- that’s the power of the prophetic on the streets.

So that’s a little of what’s been going on here and what we’re learning. We’ll be updating more over the next 2 weeks. Thank you for all your support, please keep remembering us in prayer, that we would continue to grow and learn everything that God has for us this year!!

Christine and Daniel

Mission Trip!!

So Mission trips are out, we get to go to LA – California and work with a organization called ‘Hope for the Homeless’ and serve them for a week, sweet huh?

So the way things work with missions is, we had a list of around 50 trips they gave us about a month ago and we had a week to choose the top five that we wanted to go on. There are mission trips to literally everywhere around the Globe, Asia, Europe, Africa, South America and on.  There are usually around 20 people that are taken on each trip, some are less, some are more, it does vary, but usually they're small, so with 950 other people its actually a little hard to get into some trips, but Christine and I both got into our first choices, which is pretty excited!!

Our mission trip won’t happen till April/12, so there’s enough time for you guys to keep us in prayers, so that we would make the most out of What God has for us, and also what God has for the people we’ll be ministering to. Also, if any one would like to donate to our trip, we would feel so blessed as it costs a extra $1500 for both of us, you can do so online at ibssm.com and click on the part that says give online then choose missions trip and then put one of our names in.

www.ibssm.com

We will be talking about more about our mission trip and what we’ll be doing soon.

That’s the latest news from our side of the globe and hope you guys have a great Full Blessed Weekend!

The Oliveiras.

Sunday night Glory!!

So this is more like a bit of our journal than an update, just something personal we wanted to share.

So here’s the story, it’s a normal Sunday night service at Bethel, good hour of worship with Jenn Johnson, people get crazy (in a good spiritual way), then Pr. Bill comes up the stage to pray for people, this time he starts up calling people with body injuries caused by accidents, some people stand, the rest of us gather around them and pray for healing, Heaven invades earth, people gets healed, sweet! So far, all good, a normal Sunday night service. 

Just as Bill prepares to call the second group of people to get prayed for, a group of people on the right front side of the church starts to shout, we all look towards them and notice how they are all staring at the ceiling, and there it is, Heaven totally invades the room now, a cloud of gold dust and feathers starts to get thicker and thicker right above our heads, the sense of God’s presence in the room erupts in form of shout and spontaneous songs of praise and adoration, for the next two hours or so, all we could do was sing songs and as Bill said, ‘camp around the glory’. I would say that night is one of the highlights of our life so far, a surreal experience in Gods presence.

Here’s the beautiful scene though, while all this was happening, I kept looking at Pr. Bill, here’s the man whose passion and values triggered this whole movement, by far one of the most anointed and wise speakers, pastors and teachers of this generation, literally the guy everyone in this culture looks up too, there he is, for about two hours he just stood there, looking around the crowd and back up to the cloud. Not for a second he tried to interfere or take control back to him, talking about honouring the presence of God huh?

Not to forget that this is a day before the Leaders Advance Conference starts, the room is full of visitors, leaders from all over the world that came to get some of what God is doing here. The pressure to do something would probably freak most of us out, but after that, pretty much what he said is ‘I really don’t know what to do...’ followed by another moment of silence. Then he said something that I don’t think I will ever forget, he said something like this ‘This is different, it’s hard to know what to do, to be honest, I really don’t know what to do, but I know this much, the most important thing has finally become the Most Important Thing’, in another worlds, the Presence of God has finally become more important than our agenda! Come on right??

All together, Pr. Bill probably spoke for 10mins or less that night, yet on that night I learned one of the greatest lessons of my life on what it looks like to value the presence of God more than our own agenda, more than our programs, more than our plans. What it looks like when the thing that should matter the most actually becomes the thing that matters the most.  Perhaps that’s why things seems to be easier around here, not because this people are the best people in the world, or perfect or anything, but because someone decided that if the glory comes, our job isn’t to add it to our stuff, but to camp around it until He tell us to move, no matter what it looks like.

As I said before, last Sunday night is one of the highlights of our walk with God, that’s for sure, we feel honoured and amazed that we’re getting to see this things happening right before our eyes, signs and wonders, creative miracles are all soooo good, specially when you’re one of the people being used to deliver them, but the lessons we’re learning about stewardship, about hosting Gods presence and dwelling in that place is so much better. When our focus is God and not what He can do, things get so much easier, so much better!!

daniel

Living Naturally Supernaturally.

Just thought I’d let you know about some of the supernatural things that are happening here in Bethel at the moment.

Well…there are healings that happen daily here. Last Sunday night we were at the church service and Bill felt to pray for people for healing. Here, they usually get words of knowledge of what God is healing so for example they feel God wants to heal back problems so they get everyone with back pain to stand up and the people around them begin to proclaim healing over them and the person tests it out and if needs be prays again and a lot of people are usually healed- its that simple!! So that night people were healed from back pain, injuries from all sorts of accidents- a woman who was in a car crash years ago and was crippled with pain and couldn’t lift her arms very high was waving her hands over her head etc. I was praying for a woman’s bottom teeth to grow back which was a first for me, they didn’t that night but here they believe that every time someone is prayed for something happens- a seed is planted. However two stories really stood out for me that night, Bill had a word of knowledge about people feeling guilt and like illnesses were the result of them doing something wrong so he brought them through just forgiving themselves and felt God would release healing through that. In the congregation there was a woman whose son was killed in a car accident and she felt responsible and guilty and had depression for years but when she forgive herself she felt joy and peace for the first time in years. Then there was a girl who’d been in a bad car crash with a few friends a few years ago and everyone in the car but her died, she’d had back problems and whiplash since it but always felt its something she just had to live with because after all she had survived and had to be thankful for that and felt some sort of guilt that she lived and the others died. But that night she felt released from that guilt and all the pain she had left.

I’ve been learning a lot in the healing class I’m taking at the moment. The thing that’s most sticking out is its not about me and the prayers I’m praying and how good they are its just about letting Gods grace in us and flowing through us. Jesus is the healer and he’s really good at His job so in praying for healing its not about a perfect polished prayer trying to convince God to heal it’s about trusting who he is and that he is really good at his job. So we don’t really need to do that much, but just release His love, who He is and His kingdom over people saying ‘Be healed’!! This is simple but its deep revelation to me that the “Kingdom of God lives in me” so I don’t need to perform all I need to do is be and release that kingdom.

Last week there was a conference here at Bethel with John and Carol Arnott. On the last night at the end of worship a cloud of gold dust appeared in the church and stayed there for 45 mins- exploding every so often. We weren’t there but its been captured on video and is so visible. Its appeared before but never for that long. Also that night quite a lot of people’s teeth/ fillings I think turned gold. Our friend was there and a woman near him got 4 gold teeth that he said were glowing. Bill Johnson always says that there are signs and wonders in the Bible, and sometimes these ones are signs that make you wonder…but its just God manifesting himself, getting our attention of how real and good He is.

So hope that’s been encouraging to read, God is moving and the supernatural is becoming part of everyday life. Here it is normal but it wasn’t like this even 10 years ago its been a gradual increase as kingdom minded people constantly and consistently seek God for the more…so lets do it and believe for it.

Here's the link to the 'gold dust' video:

Bethel church/ Open Heavens Conference

Christine Oliveira.

Hey guys!!

Hey everybody, greetings from the USA!!

Sorry it’s taken so long for us to update this but we have been so busy here. We have been reading loads and doing a lot of books and Bible reports already. We’ve now had 3 weeks of school and we are loving it! The first 2 weeks were a lot of information about the year as well as great teaching and worship. We had either Bill Johnson or Kris Vallotton everyday so there was a lot of really good stuff to take in and to try to process (and trust, 4 hours of Bill Johnson and Kris Vallotton a day really is a lot to take in). We also had amazing worship times, there is so much freedom here so there have been times when 1000 people have been dancing and jumping up and down which has been so powerful and a lot of fun.

We are loving the environment here, Bethel has amazing core values that they really live by. There is such a family environment, were everyone is accepted and loved. They encourage us to be so open and vulnerable with each other without any judgement but just acceptance. This has been fun to get used to but we love it, this really is a safe environment to be open, especially in our revival group, which is a group of about 70 students who we meet with once a week and is really our family here. (will talk more about this in a different post soon)

Last week we went on a retreat for 3 days with our revival group. We went to a Ranch in Northern California which was really beautiful. This was just a time to get to know each other better and we also had meetings at night. Last week we also had a day were the 2^nd years at the school prophesied over us for this year and our futures which was really encouraging.

This week we are back in school and it’s the first week of our regular schedule. We  start our chosen classes (which are called Advanced Ministry Training) and also our outreach. Daniel is doing the class on prophecy and I am doing one on healing and we don’t know yet what kind of outreach we’ll be doing but we are really excited to put all we’re learning into practice. At the minute we are also trying to decide which mission trips to sign up for. At the end of March we have the opportunity to go on a mission trip for a week or so, there are about 60 different ones to choose from going all over the world so please pray for us in the decisions we have to make.

We are really settling into life in America now, we love where we live and our housemates and we’re even getting used to the food. Also, we were able to buy a car which has been such blessing, especially now that its starting to get quite rainy here. We got a 1994 Volvo Station wagon, which is a lovely green colour and who we’ve named him Burt. We bought it of a lovely Christian couple for a really good price, so now we’re trying to figure out how all the paperwork works here!

Please continue to pray for us that we’ll continue to grow in our relationship with God and be stretched in everyway, that we’ll be able to process and really apply all the great teaching we are getting and that we’ll see God use us as we start our outreach etc.

From now on we’ll be updating this blog more often, so you guys can keep up with what God is doing here and with us, and send us some prayers.

Love from the Oliveiras!!

Finally Here!!

Hi everyone,

This is just a quick update to let you know we’ve arrived safe and sound and are settling into life in California . There has been a heat wave here since we arrived so its been around 40 degrees which is very hot but we are enjoying it!

The house we’re staying at is lovely, it’s really big and has everything we need. The family and 2 guys who are living in the garage are great and we’re all getting along well. Another house mate arrived today and we may be getting another one soon so it’s a full house but there is such a good atmosphere here. Food shopping has been challenging as everything is very different, supersized and really bad for you but we are learning where to shop. It’s a beautiful area with mountains surrounding it and lakes, so we went for a swim in one to cool down on Thursday and explored the area a bit while we still had our rental car.

Already, we are seeing that its such a good environment to be in- the couple we live with welcomed us by praying and prophesying over us and it’s a lifestyle of just asking God in faith for everything and seeing so much breakthrough. We can already feel the affects of that in us which is exciting. We went to our first Bethel church service last night, it was amazing to finally be there. The worship was so free and everyone just goes for it 100%. The school starts on Monday which we are very excited about so we’ll let you know how it goes.

Please pray that we’d continue to settle in well, make good relationships with people as we start school and continue to be transformed and stretched by the environment and the teaching here. Also, that we’d be able to get around ok as we no longer have a car and that God would provide lifts or some sort of transportation.

Thank you for all your love and support