Dear praying friends,

This week I had the opportunity to sit down with a potential ministry partner in our part of Berlin. She has been here for a couple of years and has been working hard to build community in our neighborhood. She has a real passion to see her and her team starting a neighborhood church that is primarily composed of house churches (sounds familiar!)

We have chatted a few times, and they asked me to lead worship for them a couple of weeks ago - but this meeting was different. She wanted to really dig into what we were doing and why we were here.

We spent about an hour together, unpacking our vision, our programs, and why we were doing what we were doing. She was super encouraging (to be honest, she almost always is!) - but her encouragement about us building community and doing what we have sensed God calling us to do, and the way it fits into her belief on how ministry should work in former East Germany was great.

Because, friends, we are doing it! Your prayers have been such a huge part of seeing this community begin to be changed. We have a lot of work to do, but as people stop into the gallery or visit our events or are impacted by materials we produce - things are changing. We are also working hard to be known entities in our community, and it's such a great feeling to have people recognize us on the streets.

We haven't made it public yet - but we have just released a second edition of one of our books. Commissioned to Love is a really great book, writen by John P. Perkins and Anthony D. Bobo. They ask "what it means to do justice, to move into reconciliation, to live out evangelism, and to make disciples." I really enjoyed reading it, and if you are interested in checking it out, you can buy it at bookshop.org. (It's available elsewhere, but bookshop.org is friendlier to small publishing houses, like us.)

Here are some prayer requests for this week:

1. Pray for us as we explore partnerships with other like-minded organizations in the city!
2. Our office sharing space is almost ready to open to people to start renting. Some construction delays and problems getting the software set up have delayed us a little. Pray for us as we iron out the last of the bugs.
3. Did you know that US and European daylight savings times don't line up? For example, you have already sprung forward in the US, but we won't until March 29th. That has created some snafu's in scheduling. Pray for us as we have to do some pivoting to figure new meeting times out!
4. Pray for Caleb as he works on his thesis for his Bacherlor's degree.

Well, that seems like enough for now! Thank you so much for your prayers!

Blessings,

mike