Yesterday after our morning church service, several of us at Grace Fellowship got together and went ~30 miles out to the coast (Shell Beach in Northern California, in case you were wondering) for a casual time of fellowship. For a couple of hours, we sang, we prayed, we talked, we loved on each other and most importantly on our blessed Creator.

(BTW, I don’t know about you, but I have an easier time appreciating the creativity of God when I am looking His creation, flawed though it currently may be. Church buildings just place a slight damper on that.)

Besides just having a nice time together, it was a meeting with a purpose. We are a new group with a fresh vision: we want to combine the prophetic gift with creative arts (music, painting, photography, and who knows what else) and reach people in our region to share the passionate love and inspirational artistry of Christ. We are itching to be a part of the local community which is highly “New Age” in flavor and very much centered around communal, artistic living. They’re not interested in the typical evangelical church not because they “hate Jesus” or even ignore him but because their culture and priorities are completely different. Some of it I might object to, but some of it is valid (another post for another time).

Even more to the point: we owe them a demonstration of the Kingdom of Heaven and of supernatural power. New Age people understand the spirit realm better than many Christians, which is disturbing. Yes, we know the true God and Lord of all, and we know the path to salvation, but the Western church has had a severe deficiency in the knowledge of the spirit realm and of supernatural manifestations and power. Thankfully, the tide is turning, and we’re not afraid to swim into uncharted waters and demonstrate the validity of the Gospel with signs and wonders. New Age people are hungry for anything beyond the mundane materialism of the modern world, and we have what they want — they just don’t know it yet.

Our next step is to meet in a local redwood grove (Armstrong Redwoods) for another time of prayer and fellowship. We feel like we need to invest our energy into changing the spiritual atmosphere of the county before we jump headfirst into outreach. We also want to go in a spirit of humility and be careful not to take things too far too fast. God is patient and we should be as well.

Please pray for us! We’re still in the beginning stages of preparation, training, and empowerment. It’s terribly exciting and little bit scary, but if God is for us, who can be against us?