To kick off our blog for the coming year, we thought we’d share some news about our organization and ministry. So many have reached out to us and asked how things are going, especially in light of the break in and arson in our office building this June. So we’ll touch on that as well as some pretty exciting updates.
OFFICE FIRE
The biggest question we hear at Never The Same these days is, “Did they ever find out who started the fire in your building?” In case you didn’t know, someone broke into our office building and set it on fire just 3 days before NTS Camp started this summer. There are no updates as of yet, and we are not expecting to ever know exactly what happened. I often get asked if I think that this was intentional, targeted towards us. I tend to believe it was “random” and not someone who knew they were attacking us. But we do see it as a spiritual attack on our ministry, and we have treated it as such.
Even though this has caused great challenges, we are not discouraged, distracted or disillusioned about it. Rather, we have more resolve that our ministry to students must continue even stronger than it has ever been. We believe it was no coincidence about WHEN it happened, just before our camp season. The miracle was that of literally every day in a year, it was the ONLY DAY when our camp gear was safely loaded in our moving truck AND our staff was physically all in Grand Rapids where our headquarters are located. We see God’s Hand in that.
Our damaged office building that we leased is currently a few months from being completed. In the mean time we are in a temporary space, considering our next move. Please pray for us that we would see open doors as to what we need to do next.
NTS CAMP
Once again, God was so faithful and good this summer at camp. Every year there is a special sense of His presence that cannot be explained. Thousands of students’ lives were touched by the presence of God, and we are grateful for His amazing grace shown to all of us who were a part of it. We thank Him for safety for all of our teams and churches who traveled throughout the United States to attend and lead camp.
We added a location in the “Great Plains”, and had a wonderful week under the leadership of our newest site director, Ian Nacy. Attendance continues to grow and we still have not invited or advertised a single time in our 15-year history as a camp. God continues to bring new churches and locations to us. Again, this is another miracle in our story.
Prayer continues to take precedence during camp, and we are seeing more and more excitement and involvement during camp with students praying, by the hundreds, for their peers and school campuses back home.
CLAIM YOUR CAMPUS
Speaking of prayer, we were able to launch our new CYC mobile app this summer at camp. This is a massive breakthrough for the student prayer movement and we are thrilled with the response so far. This essentially caused a “reboot” for CYC, as all of our school and student registration and participation goes through the app. In our initial stage, we have more than 400 schools from across the United States registered and praying on their campus weekly. This is an incredible start in just the first few weeks!
God was faithful to provide the funds for this 2-year project, and we watched Him again provide for our efforts to put the app on the Android/Google platform, which will be available after January 1st of 2016.
Feel free to download the app, currently on the Apple iOS platform, to stay in touch with the student prayer movement and to see what this app does to train, equip, and organize students to lead prayer movements on their school campus.
MORE NEWS
We have some more exciting news to share, so look for updates in the coming weeks about some things that we are working on. I can’t wait to share more!
Thanks to all of you who are connected to our ministry and who pray for us. We are grateful for you!
Jeff Eckart, CEO
Never The Same
© 2015, Never The Same