Pierre Family Update

Merry Christmas to our friends and family!

We wanted to take the time in the midst of this wonderful season to stop and share our thankfulness for each of you for the love and support you have offered and provided for us at different time throughout our lives.

We wanted to share a quick update about the past year of our life and share some things to pray with us about:

* We celebrated our first year anniversary in August! Our first year of marriage was incredible and so much fun. We were truly blessed by the Lord as he spent our first year of marriage knitting our hearts together and revealing more of himself to us each day. Please pray that the Lord would be glorified in our marriage and that our family and home would be a tool for God to minister to others through.

* We have recently completed all of our classes and paperwork to become foster parents. The next step is to get our home licensed so we can have children placed with us. We are currently reading and praying a lot about parenting and are looking forward with anticipation to the children God may bring our way! Please pray that God would provide us with a place to live with a third bedroom (we want to be able to take siblings and due to state licensing standards would need a third bedroom).

* Dennae spent most of the year working as a family advocate with children at Sojourner Center (a domestic violence shelter) and recently was promoted to be the Program Coordinator, overseeing the transitional housing programs. It has been a challenging and wonderful learning experience and she enjoys being able to be a part of the women and children's healing and growth. Please continue to pray that God would use her greatly in the lives of these women and children to holistically heal from the trauma and abuse they have experienced.

* Vermon continues to serve as the lead pastor of Roosevelt Community Church in downtown Phoenix. This past year was the first year in which the church existed without support from her mother church, Camelback Bible Church. We saw the Lord provide for our needs and continue to build us into a church family with people coming from many different social, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds but united together around the great gospel of Christ. It has been a challenging and even at times overwhelming task to effectively lead this young church, but above all it's been exciting to see the Lord so clearly at work within our body. Vermon is thankful to the Lord to be where he is, doing what he's doing. Please continue to pray that the Lord would grow Vermon and the other leaders at Roosevelt in wisdom and courage as they follow God's will for the church.

* Lastly, we have been praying and thinking a lot about how to minister and reach out into the community we are living in. We live in downtown Phoenix and are praying for God to open up many doors to minister to the diverse populations downtown. Please pray with us for God to deepen our love for these people we are called to and that he would mightily move in Phoenix and call many to himself!



We hope you had a wonderful Christmas.

Blessings,
Dennae and Vermon Pierre

Be pro-life in deed, not just word

The political season is finally over and I have heard so many Christians passionately discussing the abortion issue. I am thankful they are discussing it, because it is THE social injustice of our time, but something great is missing.

As I reflect back to many other great social evils in our country’s history such as slavery, lynching, segregation, slaughtering of Natives, etc…abortion stands out to me as yet another great, great evil that continues to flourish in our nation.

The election season really saddened me as I hear Christians by the thousands get passionate about an issue they are willing to do very little about. Why is it only during the election season that we have outspoken individuals who are suddenly indignant about the issue, yet do very little about the issue the rest of the year? Why can we spend hours at a dinner table talking about it, but can’t spend one hour a week volunteering to do anything about it?

I keep hearing a very sad phrase, “they were called to adoption/fostering” or “they didn’t feel called to adopt.” My bible does not say you have to be “called” to foster or adopt. In fact, my Bible says to "care for the orphans." Christians keep saying that they care about the life of the millions of unborn, but do they? How much can you care about the life of the unborn if you are not caring for the life of the born, especially the abused, neglected, and abandoned.

During slavery, when the underground railroad was happening and slaves were trying to escape from the south into the North, Christian men and women risked all that they had to help them. It would have been ridiculous for someone to sit back and say, “God hasn’t called me to help my black brother” yet passionately discuss the need to end slavery. And it is equally ridiculous for someone to sit back and say, “God hasn’t called me” to take care of the orphans we already have, meanwhile passionately discussing the need to end abortion.

If you are passionate about abortion ending…yes, it is important to look at who we elect and what they want to do about the issue, but way, way, way more important then that, we need to actually take action. There are many different ways to do this, but every pro-life Christian should and needs to do more then just talk about the Republican vs. Democrat issue.

Take Action:
1) Be a foster parent
2) Adopt a child(ren)
3) Come along side a foster/adoptive family and go above and beyond to support them
4) Be a mentor (Big Brother/Big Sister) to a child who is living in poverty (which means they are at high risk of getting pregnant, getting someone else pregnant, and having an abortion)
5) Be a CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) and advocate for a child who is currently being abused
6) Volunteer at Crisis Pregnancy Center and counsel and pray for young girls who face this issue
7) Come together with your friends, fast and pray about this issue and talk about what you can do to end it.
8) Go to law school, be a social worker, or find a way to dedicate your life to this issue

I was talking with a friend at church on Sunday who is from Indonesia. She was talking about her experience being a Christian in a county that has such limited religious freedom. We talked about people she knew who had been beaten for their faith, churches that had been burned down, and pastors that had been killed. She told me a story about this major Muslim political party that is represented by holding up your finger, making a number one sign. If you do not hold up the sign back to them when they show it to you, you may get beaten. She talked about the tension of having to decide if that was worth getting beaten for, or is it wiser to just do it and if you get beaten, get beaten for worshiping Christ.

...it makes my struggles about when to talk about my faith and with who seem ridiculous. I just wonder how different our life would be if we could go to eternity and look backwards at our life. The fear we had to share the love of Christ with a student or co-worker because they might be offended or think less of us, seems pretty insignificant in light of eternity. How many people work and live along side us on a daily basis and have no idea what we believe and how our belief in Christ shapes our entire being and everything that we do?

Christianity that just blends into everything else is pretty empty and meaningless. If our understanding that the creator of the universe wants to be in relationship with us is not enough to embolden us to preach the gospel every minute of our lives, why even be a Christian? If our fear is keeping us from telling others about God, then that means we really do not believe God to be who he says he is.

Acts 1

It had been an exhausting and invigorating month and a half for Jesus’ disciples. Their time was filled with days of rejoicing and peace along with days of darkness and fear. I imagine there was much confusion those last days that Jesus walked the earth, but there was also much revelation as Jesus opened the disciple’s eyes and taught them from the scripture and showed them how everything in the law and the prophets pointed directly toward a Messiah.

If we were watching this drama unfold from the disciple’s eyes, Acts chapter one would be such a beautiful twist in the plot. The disciples had just spent forty days with the resurrected Jesus listening to him speak of the kingdom of God, not to mention years previously following Christ and listening to his teachings. They had already mourned his death once, and now he prepared to ascend into heaven and again they would be left. But Jesus leaves them with a promise: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

I wonder if the disciples left Mount Olivet rejoicing and praising the Lord or in solemn silence? Were they filled with fear and suffering from loosing the tangible Jesus or were they hopeful in anticipation of this great gift that was about to come? We do not have much detail as to the mood of the disciples, but we do know that the disciples returned to Jerusalem to await the promised Spirit in an attitude of prayer.

These men and women gather together in an up stairs room from where they were staying and devoted themselves to prayer. Howard Marshal writes, “If the Holy Spirit is the divine gift which empowers and guides the church, the corresponding human attitude toward God is prayer. It is as the church prays that it receives the Spirit.”

As I have been studying and meditating on these passages in Acts, I am struck and convicted again and again by how closely prayer is connected to the Spirit moving and how much the children of God should long for the Holy Spirit to move in their life.

John 16:7-11, Jesus says, “Nevertheless, I tell you the truth; it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father and you will see me no longer; concerning judgment because the ruler of this world is judged.”

What a powerful thought! Believers today are at greater advantage to understand and live the gospel then the disciples that were in the physical presence of Jesus because we have the Holy Spirit. Yet so often, we live our Christian life not empowered by the Spirit because we do not take the time to seek God and pray.

Tim Keller poses a question in a study he wrote on Acts, “If the Holy Spirit left your life today, would it look any different?”

Are you convicted of sin? Are the fruits of the spirit evident in your life (Galatians 5)? Do your conversations with friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers exhibit a life filled with the Holy Spirit? Do you long to spend time in the word of God? Does God’s word pierce your heart like a sword? Do you make decisions about how you will spend your time, money, and life based on obedience to the Lord? Are you moved with compassion for all the lost around you? Is your boldness to proclaim the gospel growing?

The answers to these questions point to whether your life is a Spirit-led life or not. And we cannot force ourselves to have the "right" answers...this is not a check list of do's and don'ts, when we examine a spirit led life we should be humbled and broken to know that we cannot do this just by willing it ourselves, it is only through the power of God and the holy spirit...so let us continue to pray for that in our lives. May we as Christian brothers and sisters be devoted to prayer. May our church and our lives be directed and guided by the Holy Spirit and nothing less.

Six months of bliss…

I know it has been a while since I have posted! Married life is slowing me down. :) Actually, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Life is going at lightning speed. I really cannot believe Vermon and I have been married for six months.

(Disclaimer: What I am about to say is simply how marriage has illustrated some things to me, I am not saying that you can know God deeper if you are married. In fact, I encourage every single person not to waste a moment of the precious gift of singleness to questioning God's plans for your life...but to embrace this special time to be one with your God.)

I have never experienced such a sweet unity and oneness with anyone before as I have in marriage with Vermon. It has been such a wonderful and fun journey to see God knit our hearts together and make us more and more like-minded. As we are growing together in our marriage I have had many opportunities to examine what communion with the Lord should look like in my life. I look at my marriage and see how many of my decisions and actions are motivated by a desire to stay one, to love Vermon, and to serve and minister with him in this life. When I examine my marriage, it gives me many examples that I can look at to judge if my decisions and actions are in alignment with my even greater desire to be one with the Lord.

Something that has really struck me over the last six months is just how precious and sweet life can be when you are truly living in communion with the Lord. I look at the sacrifices I am willing to make to spend time with my husband and I see such great fruit in our marriage and feel so satisfied. How much more satisfied would we be if we made time to spend with our God. I think the greatest gift that God has given me in marriage is helping me to see a glimpse of the depth and union I can have with my heavenly father. More and more I am seeing that my motivation in life cannot be anything other then glorifying and worshiping my God. When that is the focus of my life, I find myself in the midst of this beautiful and meaningful life, no matter our circumstances.

The purpose of marriage is to point people toward Jesus. When a marriage is Christ-centered, it gives the community they are in a small glimmer of what life within the church should be like. Instead of our children within the church growing up cynical and hesitant about marriage, they grow up seeing this beautiful sacrificial love as a physical example of what a relationship with Jesus is like. Instead of single people feeling forgotten, they are surrounded by marriages that constantly remind them of the most intimate and whole union they can have only with Christ. When our friends that do not know Christ struggle, they can look to a self-sacrificial and unconditional love exhibited between two people and long to know this God that can produce such beauty.

I just want to continue to thank all of you who pray for us, our marriage, and the ministry that God is doing all around us. It means so much to us and we see God working. :)