daveingland.com

The Latte Challenge

It’s official! My wife and I are moving to Beaverton, Oregon (A suburb of Portland) at the end of February. Through talking with some friends there along with a lot of prayer, we feel like the Lord is leading us to take a humongous step of faith and make this move.

As a former atheist for 37 years of my life, I feel a calling to connect with those outside of the church and even outside of the Christian faith. Through our labor in planting a church in Sacramento, CA in 2009 it became abundantly clear to me that I needed to focus more on people than building a church. I previously put more attention on building God’s church instead of loving people first. Therefore, this move to the Northwestern United States makes a lot of sense as there are a tremendous number of people that do not know Jesus, nor are part of a church there. The greater Portland/Beaverton area is one of the most unchurched parts of the country.

As we place our trust in God and step out in obedience to share his love for the people of Beaverton, Oregon we do this with no savings and no promise of employment once we get there. In fact, as I write this, I just got word that the house we were planning on moving into has since been leased to someone else. With so much uncertainty, yet a strong leading to make this move, we are faced with trusting God more than we ever have in the past. To see this happen in the short amount of time we have left, it must be by God’s hand and not ours. We are operating in a position of complete faith in the Lord. With nothing firm in our future, we gave 30-days notice on our current house in Sacramento and are trusting that everything will work out.

Question: Have you ever thought about going out into a community of unbelievers and sharing the unconditional love of Christ with them? Isn’t it an intimidating proposition? Would you leave the comfort of your home and family to do it? I can’t explain this well in words, but this is exactly what I feel God is calling my wife and I to do right now. As crazy as this sounds, connecting with people that are where I once was in life is incredibly exciting to me! With that in mind, ‘d like to ask you to consider partnering with us as we take this radical change in our ministry and relocate from Sacramento, CA to Beaverton, OR at the end of this month. To make it easy for you to partner with us, I’m issuing you a simple challenge…The Latte Challenge!

I was inspired to create The Latte Challenge to make it as simple as possible for you to partner with us in this mission. Most of you go out for lattes or mochas during the course of your day. If you bought one latte a day, 6 days per week that ends up being around $25. Would you consider helping us in this missions trip to the Pacific Northwest by partnering in this cause with one month’s worth of latte– which is $100? If we can find 50 partners willing to support us in the next couple of weeks in this missions journey, we will be able to make the move and get started March 1st in Beaverton.

If the full $100 contribution is a bit much for your current situation (I completely understand if it is), would you consider partnering with us for just one week at $25 and then maybe ask three friends to join you, so you can then collectively send in $100? Remember, we’re just asking in faith for your one-time offering to make it possible for us make this move. Once we get there we’ll be doing what we can to gain employment and provide for our expenses. However, without your partnership I don’t see any way we’ll have enough to fund the move from California to Oregon.

In addition to your $100 partnership, I’d like to ask a favor of you. Would be kind enough to help us get the word out through twitter, facebook, email, blogging–whichever networking tools you use–so that your connections with other friends with a heart to see a largely unchurched population reached with Jesus’ love can become aware of our missions journey? Here is an abbreviated link you can post to this webpage: http://bit.ly/dcEsGy (just copy & paste). If just a few of you shared this opportunity with a few other friends, or just one pastor shared this with their church members, I believe we could easily meet our goal of covering our moving and initial move-in expenses.

To partner with us, just click on the “ChipIn” button below which will link to our PayPal account. Know that it’s not necessary to have a PayPal account in order to partner with us though. Just click the button and you’ll be walked through the simple process to send your partnership amount.

Thank you for taking the time to consider partnering with us through The Latte Challenge!!! We are truly relying on God’s provision as we have no other means to make this move right now, but believing that he wants to see this trip happen through the faithfulness of his people. Thank you again so much!!!

For those of you that can’t help support us financially at this time, would you consider praying for us during this new season? An easy way to partner with us in prayer is to remember that this is The Latte Challenge. So, whenever you have a latte or coffee, if you could take a moment to pray on our behalf, we would be so grateful.