Jesus House- 2 weeks late!

Better late than never, I suppose. Two weeks ago, I volunteered three out of the five days of Jesus House. Jesus House is a youth event that is held every three years and Hamburg successfully won the bid to host it this year.

The lady in charge of the event came to IBC's Young Adults Group one night beforehand to share about the volunteer opportunities and what God had done already. I knew that it was something that I wanted to get involved with when I heard the story of how they got the location. They wanted a place that was distinctly Hamburg. The first place they thought of was the Fischauktionshalle. Every Sunday starting at 3 AM there is a fish market and party down at the docks. This market is a Hamburg landmark. The hall has bands and food service. However, when they went to see how much it cost, they found that it cost way over budget. Headquarters told the local organizing team to find another location. They started praying for a new location. They didn't find anything that fit their budget or their dream. On a whim, they went back to the hall. Since they first went, they hall had gotten a new manager. He was a Christian. He ended up pulling some strings and giving them the hall for 1/2 the original price. Go God!

God answered prayers to get me there as well. No one from our church was doing catering. I put my name in and started getting all of these e-mails in German. Each had 3-10 attachments. It would take hours to use the 500 word a shot translating software to translate it all. Once I translated it, I realized that I had to go to a series of meetings and get food handling certified by attending a doctor's training course- all in German. I nearly backed out. I finally prayed, "Lord, if you want me to do this, you're going to have to provide me with people who can translate for me." He was faithful to me as well. He first provided Leonie and Heidi to help me through the meetings and then Brianna (cutting fruit above with me) and Sally (and a slew of others) during the actual volunteer days. The doctor even spoke English so he could give me the food handling training in English.

While I volunteered, I was on the fruit plate team every day. We would slice fruit for the band and the AV folks who rehearsed and prepared all afternoon long. At 5, we would serve dinner to all of the volunteers. You can see our "kitchen" on the left. I served meat, arranged meat trays, sliced veggies, and did trash duty.

So what happened? Hundreds of youth came for music and speakers. Many lives were changed. There was a volunteer dinner afterwards, and here is a translation of what was said. A guy in our church e-mailed this report out. "Dear all! As promised here is some further information regarding Jesus House: A couple of us Young Adults attended the celebration service on Sunday. The testimonies were a blessing. In total, over 150 people committed their lives to Christ (excluding recommitments!) and over 400 counselling sessions were reported! But apart from these quantitative results, 43+ participating churches have worked together in unity, and so it would seem that God also planned Jesus House 2007 to establish a broad foundation of believers for His continued work in Hamburg. He did great miracles during Jesus House, bringing many people even from the streets to the cross and providing for the many practical needs of the event, and we may be encouraged that this is only the beginning... "

Our catering leader Jörg said, "The youth are the carrier of the revival in Germany." Re-reading that quote, I think of the question that Patrick asked Ken and me yesterday. He asked if Germany was really as spiritually dead as is assumed in the US. My answer to him was that I thought it would be a lot worse. From my perspective, it is probably in the same place that the US is though I have no statistics. God is moving in many places here. It is exciting to see.