Dear Ministry Partners:

I hope you are enjoying this warm weather!

I wanted to keep you in the loop of what is happening with this ministry. We just concluded our last Community Leaders Breakfast on May 6 at Recovery Point. It was a very inspiring and deeply touching gathering. It ended with a moving testimony of one of the graduates of Recovery Point. You can mark your calendar for the first of our next season Community Leaders Breakfast which will take place September 2 at Christ Temple Church.

Most of you know that MTS hosts a semi-annual retreat for our core team. The goal of these retreats is to seek God's guidance for this ministry's prayer focus and outreach for the upcoming year. Below is a summary of our last retreat that took place in May at Heritage Farms.
The leadership team of Mission Tri-State felt that God was convicting us that this retreat was launching a new season of removing a dimension of spiritual darkness from our community and the Appalachian region. We believe that this daylong session was the first step in this process.

We felt convicted that this first step was less about removing darkness and wrong spiritual mindsets as it was about establishing the right spiritual atmosphere to accomplish the eventual removal of certain detentions of darkness.

 One of our team members was given a simple three-step process that we felt was to be the  focus of this retreat.

1)   Seek God’s glory and allow it to fill us as the Temple of the God on earth today.

If we are to be used to remove darkness, we need to ask God to give us a special impartation of His light and glory. “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (I Cor. 3:16 NKJV)
Just like God filled the physical Temple with His glory, He can fill His present temple (we the Body of Christ) with His glory. “ The priests could not continue their service because of the cloud, for the glorious presence of the Lord filled the Temple of the Lord.” (I Kings.8:11 NLT)

2)   Having been filled with His glory, we declare His words over our lives, this community and region of Appalachia .

We are the Body of Christ, His “called-out ones” (Ecclesia) who have been given the authority to change our  part of the earth to look like heaven by advancing His Kingdom of God on earth. We do this through prayer and declarations. Jesus created through His words. He resisted the forces of darkness through declaring God’s word. It was when Peter was speaking the words of God, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message. (Acts10:42-45)
Jesus told His disciples that if they would speak to their “mountain” with just a little faith, it would be cast into the sea or be removed as a hindrance. “For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says.” (Mark 11:23 NKJV))

3)   Ask God to give us pure hearts motivated by the love of God for our community and the Appalachian region.

      We know that Paul explained in this letter to the Church in Corinth  that if something was not motivated by love, it would have no lasting value. So it is when we are motivated by God's love, we can have an eternal impact. “ If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it;[a] but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.” (I Cor. 13:3 NLT)
Also, when we come against darkness and evil with love, it has no recourse. We know that Jesus was the personification of God’s love. When He referred to the evil on or the ruler of this world, He commented that because He was motivated by God's love, the evil had nothing in Him or no access to Him. “…for the ruler of this world is coming, and he has nothing in Me.” (John 14:30 NKVV)

I hope you have enjoyed this summary of our retreat. I do pray that it may speak to you as you join us in praying for our community and the Appalachian region. 

We want to thank you again for all your support for this ministry and our mission to help transform our community and region. We also want to thank those of you who have supported us financially. 

Blessings,

Mike Greider
Director of Mission Tri-State