Epic Bay Area Project 2006 - Part 4

June 27 - Weekend Recap

First, a recap of the weekend. Saturday was spent in San Francisco, where Keoke King (SF Metro Ministry Director and tour guide extraordinaire) showed us around his town and the Chinatown area, in particular. He did a great job of helping us to see how some of the historical events that impacted the area can still impact Asian Americans today. It was kinda cold in SF, which was actually a welcomed relief (San Jose is cooling down, though, after the heat wave last week). Had lunch with Jaeson Ma on Sunday, which was unexpected (in a positive, I-just-found-my-car-keys kind of way...not in a negative, my-puppy-just-died kind of way). J-Ma has a CRAZY schedule. Anyway, we had a short, but good, conversation about why it has been hard to sustain movements in the San Jose area. We're both eager to see how things pan out this summer.

Shane Deike (my boss) is in town. Some of the staff were joking that one benefit to being on a new Epic project is that you get a visit from a big-dog like Shane. Along with a visit from Shane comes, of course, the always-welcome perk of being treated to some type of meal or dessert. This time, Shane treated the Project to Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream just by campus. I think Shane would have a great time if he were to be part of our Project. You would hardly notice that he's a 6'5" red-headed white dude in the midst of a bunch of Asian Americans!

All througout this week, we will be going to campus. As a starting off point, we are stressing the act of prayer as ministry. What that means is that we want to spend our time praying on campus, with prayerwalks and in groups, for the coming weeks. Often, it is tempting to see our time on a Missions trip as too valuable to merely pray. So, we say we will pray but, in fact, we often go and DO before or even in place of praying. It'll be a chance to practice the discipline of prayer and will challenge all of our performance-oriented sensibilities. The truth is that prayer IS ministry...you could say that prayer is the PRIMARY form of ministry. We started our week of prayer yesterday and will continue it tomorrow and for the rest of the week.