Life with Purpose: In the World
Globally, we know that true heart and community transformation does not happen overnight. If we want to make a lasting difference somewhere in the world, we're going to have to send people to live there. Our plan, God willing, is to raise up, send out, and coach long-term teams from Real Life in suffering and strategic places. We are praying, God willing (and He IS willing), to launch an organic movement of hundreds and thousands of people to experience the transforming power of the Kingdom of God and the ways and person of Jesus.
Our path to raising up long-term teams, as well as giving people here a role in reaching the nations, looks like this:
Go on a Global Connection Trip
We know that most people don’t just wake up one day and say, hey, let’s sell everything we have and move to Africa or India for ten years. We also know that the average American has a limited worldview simply because of lack of exposure to anything global. We know that immersion in another culture and intentional time spent serving and relating to people of other cultures, rips apart our paradigms and brings us closer to the heart of God. We know that God wants everyone to be involved in loving and serving the poor, the suffering, the hopeless, the victims of injustice in the nations of the world. So each year we train and send several short-term teams for two weeks to experience a global connection. Real Life has sent five teams in the last year.
Stop by the Life with Purpose table to hear about future Global Connection trips and to pick up a Trip application.
Befriend a New Refugee Family (Here)
The nations are at our doorstep. Over 700 educated Iraqi families will be moving into Phoenix in the next year, as refugees. Displaced families, many of them women with children, from places like Sudan, Nigeria, and Bhutan, are arriving with nothing but the clothes on their back, few English language skills, and years of camp living. Jesus said to welcome the foreigners and to care for the orphans and the widows and the helpless. We partner with a social service and humanitarian agency to match up our families with a new, incoming refugee family.
Our Real Life families help furnish their apartment, meet them at the airport and welcome them to our country. We spend time helping them adjust in the first three months by practicing conversational English, learn to get around, taking them to job interviews and medical appointments, and encouraging them in their new life here as friends and advocates.
Befriend a New International Student (Here)
We also partner with an agency at Arizona State University that matches up new International Students with a Real Life family. These are usually highly educated, influential students who come here to study. 80% of them will leave our country without ever entering an American home. This is a great opportunity to build friendships and relationships with future leaders from other countries. We will go as far as to say that these kinds of friendships ultimately contribute to world peace.
Families simply include your international student in anything that you normally do (like dinner at your house) or fun events that you normally do (like Thanksgiving or Christmas or a camping trip). You can help them adjust to our culture, be there to listen, and be a ‘home’ while they are away from family.
Sign up in July to Befriend a New Student -- or in October to invite a student to your family Thanksgiving Dinner.
Get More Training and Education
PathWays to Global Understanding is a 13-week intensive course on global strategy, tools, history, case studies, and lectures from speakers all over the world. You will not read the words of God the same again. Your mind will be flipped inside out as you learn God’s heart for the peoples of the world. Sign up at www.Pathways2.org
Champion a People Group
As a group of believers who fear God and follow the ways of Jesus the Messiah, we are praying for the Mappila of South India, the Saharawi of North Africa and the Bihari of Bangladesh. Both of the latter groups are displaced refugees, victims of the injustice of war and feuding nations. Both groups have lived in desperate poverty and living circumstances for over thirty years, waiting for someone to be their voice and restore their homeland to them. They have great dignity and hope, as they suffer in silence and call on God to save them and to reveal Himself to them.
We believe that God will hear their cries and will bring his Kingdom transformation to their hearts and to their everyday lives and to their communities.
Contact Jeanne Zahn at for more information on any of these opportunities.