By now you have likely seen at least some of the horrific news footage of the devastation unfolding in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, after the city was hit with a 7.0 earthquake. It is estimated that the death toll could be in the tens of thousands.

This afternoon my heart was breaking as I watched a video update of a terrified little girl who was desperately crying for her mother and father as she lay trapped under the wreckage. The reporter made sure to share that sending a Bible through a crack in the rock was one of the first “lifelines” extended. We pray that God will show Himself strong on her behalf.

While we thank God for ALL the relief workers who are sacrificing themselves to help bring various forms of relief and rescue to the Haitian people, I would also humbly draw your attention to one particular missions organization that God has been using powefully in Haiti for a number of years called Mission Possible (MP).

MP President, Kurt Bishop, candidly shares his heart as follows:

“This is a very tragic time for Haiti. Mission Possible is doing everything we can within the limitations of communications and the scale of disaster.”

As local missionaries, it’s times like these that we can feel as helpless as the rest of the world in the wake of disaster. However, with God there is always hope. Please click here to visit and bookmark MP’s site and begin to pray for rescue, relief, and repentance of all those involved with this terrible tragedy.

In Him,

Cory

Dear partners in the gospel:

On behalf of our family and the ministry team of The Cross Current, we wish you and your loved ones a very Merry Christmas and a joyous holiday season!

The McKenna’s (l to r: Caleb, Cory, Dawn, and Joshua)

We would greatly appreciate you printing off this blog posting and placing the above picture of our family in your Bible or on your fridge as a constant reminder that we need your prayer. Please pray that God will continue protecting and providing for our family and ministry as we faithfully step out onto the local mission field again this year.

I again personally thank God for you and for your partnership with us! Let’s look forward to another exciting year of working together to make His Name great in Canada.

For His Glory,

Cory McKenna (Founder) & The Cross Current Team

TCC Radio has officially gone LIVE for Christmas!

This past Friday December 4th, “Captain” Dale Elliott of 105.9 Grace FM welcomed in the studio TCC founder Cory McKenna and special guest Donna Feica of Harvest Bible Chapel London.

Click here to listen to a 3-minute “teaser” of this TCC Radio LIVE! show! (Note: The entire episode will soon be available on www.tccradio.com)

Left: Donna Feica of Harvest Bible Chapel London joins Cory McKenna and “Captain” Dale Elliott in the studio of Grace FM this past Friday.

This special series is called “Giving the Greatest Gift” and our goal is to help Christians keep the Cross current and keep the Christ in Christmas with family, friends, and the community this holiday season.

Right: Cory McKenna goes “wireless witnessing” during the second segment of our LIVE program this past Friday night.

In addition to enjoying great, Gospel-focused conversation together about personal evangelism, TCC Rep Chris Wood also contacted a young man named Daniel who gladly took part in our “wireless witnessing” encounter. During this segment of the show, we share the Gospel with a stranger on the street via cell phone!

Left: TCC Rep Chris Wood enjoys a hot drink with Daniel; this week’s “wireless witnessing” guest on TCC Radio LIVE!

Make sure to tune in to our broadcast or podcast this coming Friday December 11th as we report live onsite at Victoria Park in London at the Harvest Bible Chapel GO Team hosts our hometown to a special Christmas outreach. This evangelistic event will include caroling, gift-giveaways, and even a live, open air preaching message!

You can also click here to access your very own TCC Radio Listener’s Resources. These simple outreach resources have been specially designed by our production team to help you witness to your loved ones using the same basic tools our field reps use throughout the production of each radio series.

Please also be praying that the Lord opens the hearts and minds of all those who will hear the Gospel message throughout this most wonderful time of year for witnessing!

“Happy Birthday to you…Happy Birthday to you…Happy Birthday dear Chucky and Origin of Species…<dramatic pause>…Happy Birthday to you!”

Did you know that 2010 marks the anniversary of a double birthday? This year is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th birthday of his book, Origin of Species. In fact, in addition to the outreach resource discussed in this posting,  if you want to pick up a fantastic documentary and witnessing tool on the subject, I encourage you to visit the homepage of Creation Ministries International and buy the video called “Darwin: The Voyage That Shook the World”. Our friends at CMI have definitely succeeded in putting together a very accurate and gracious autobiographical tool on one of the most enigmatic figures of the last couple hundred years!

However, tomorrow afternoon, we’re really getting “Origin Into Schools”. TCC and the Harvest Bible Chapel of London Gospel Outreach “GO” Team will be crashing the gates of the University of Western Ontario armed with origin/worldview scripts, Bibles, and free (”Gospelized”) copies of Chuck Darwin’s Origin of Species books. Wait! Before you log off our blog, rest assured that this is no unique complementary copy of the classic…and this is no unique outreach either!

Please take a moment to watch this promo video on “Origin Into Schools” with Kirk Cameron of Living Waters.

Now, while the video mainly focuses on schools south of the border, I trust you all know that things are just as bad or worse across our home and native land! That’s why we’re asking you to partner with us in prayer tomorrow and all this coming week.

Will you set aside time from 12pm to 4pm tomorrow to pray for our Gospel outreach team and all the other outreach teams across North America who will partnering together to preach the truth on university and colleges campuses? As you may or may not know, the “free speech zones” that our American brothers and sisters in Christ enjoy while preaching the Gospel at schools are not quite as common or accessible in Canada. That’s just one of the many reasons why we need your prayer! As we always say at TCC: “If you pray without witnessing you’re a hypocrite. If you witness without praying you’re a lunatic. The battle is won in the prayer time!”

I also encourage you to check back to this blog often for more news and updates as the Canadian “Origins into Schools” initiative unfolds.

Finally, please take full advantage of the following resources for finding common conversational ground in the origins issue as you share the Gospel with all those in your personal relationships and beyond!

TCC Radio series | “What On Earth Is Going On?”

CMI article | “Hitting the Nail on the Head”

Partners in the Gospel,

Cory

Our team is TOTALLY STOKED about our trip to the Together for the Gospel Conference on April 13 – 15, 2010 in Louisville, Kentucky! What better place for our little army of Gospel preachers to sharpen our swords for a few days?

Here’s where their website says that we’re headed together at this conference:

The (Unadjusted) Gospel. That’s a topic worth thinking about for several days with several thousand other pastors and church leaders. Don’t you think?

The good news does not adjust. It’s always the same and it’s always good. Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever proclaims a message that’s the same yesterday, today, and forever.  So should we.

We hope you will join us in Louisville April 2010 to think about that message and why it’s the heart of ministry.

Amen! We have to continue defending and confirming the unchanging truth of the Gospel that those who have gone before us have died to preach!

Are you interested in coming together for the Gospel in April 2010? This conference only happens every two years…so please consider joining us! You never know…maybe…just maybe…we’ll spill out onto the streets of Louisville afterward to see the power of our foolish preaching in action!

Click here to register for the 2010 conference

Click here to access audio from the speakers of 2008

Partners in the Gospel,

Cory

Before God our faith is declared, before man our faith is demonstrated. Halloween is a wonderful night to express conviction without compromise. A night where death and suffering are animated especially among our young with a celebration mentality of all that is opposed to God’s  purpose and plan for our lives.  In a radically tolerant climate of this evening I pray that we might repudiate error with truth by Gods word in a humble loving manner. I know I need a reminder sometimes of something I have recently learned and that is, what makes are witness more effective is sharing out of our brokenness and not out of our judgement .

Seeking and Saving

Thomas Woodburn

This past Tuesday October 20th, TCC Rep Chris Wood and I teamed up for a road trip to The Stream TV/Quick Study Studio 34 in Orangeville, Ontario. We were warmly welcomed by Program Director, Simen Solberg and his team, who hosted us for the day for the purpose of helping us professionally video record our 7-session Witnessing Workshop training program which is scheduled for release in the new year. The Cross Current reality television program will also soon begin production in preparation for a 2010 release on The Stream TV network.

This small group video version of our onsite Witnessing Workshop training is designed to help Christians and their churches leverage our experience in the local mission field to “normalize” sharing their faith in all personal relationships and beyond. The series will be available for purchase in the most affordable format possible and supplemented with a multitude of online tools and resources via a passcode protected witnessing website.

Special thanks to the entire production team at “The Stream” for your ongoing ministry and partnership in the Gospel!

PS: Keep checking back to our blog for more info on this series!

For His Glory,

Cory

As  we delivered the Gospel, the message of Grace Saturday, it is so heartbreaking to see individuals that know the bible very well but DO NOT know Jesus at all. If I see a stranger on the street, say hello and keep walking, do I truly know that person. I would have to stop and talk to and spend time with that person in order to know what that person is really like. Friendship and emotional intimacy would have to be estsblished by making that persons needs more important than my own. My prayer for our churches,our witness and our lives would be the focus of Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour, that we spend our entire lives getting to know, while living with and in the living person of Jesus Christ. The gospel must be the target and bulls eye that we aim for in every witness, and we shall not be ashamed to deliver that arrow right to the heart of those whom God has chosen. Praise God that he would trust any of us with his precous word and Gospel as a penetrating arrow that may plant a seed leading to repentance of sin and everlasting life.

Thomas Woodburn

Please click here to listen to “a conversation about Christ cut short” between Tom and Kim onsite at the London Psychic Expo

Cory McKenna, Chris Wood and I traveled to the London Psychic Expo this past Saturday, October 3^rd. The Psychic Expo was held downtown at a popular local event centre called Centennial Hall. We were, in a sense, “breaking new ground” for The Cross Current Ministry. No neutral turf here; we ventured right into an enemy stronghold: All three of us at the site acknowledged a feeling of some sort of demonic presence and resistance.

Our main objective, as always,  was to preach the Gospel, focusing on salvation and eternal life fulfilled only in Christ. In addition, our approach this time stressed biblical prophecy and its fulfillment of past and future events. All three of us had some interesting encounters and learned quite a bit about psychic phenomena and the occult. By definition, psychic/occult practices pertain to mental phenomena that go beyond normal sensory stimuli, using magical arts to help disclose secret or hidden realities. Seekers and/or adherents partake in occult practices to discover their own personal past, present, and future “realities”.

It was so tragic to see just a sampling of the vast number of people throughout the world today who are “seeking reality, direction and purpose in life in all of the wrong places”. Self-centeredness certainly blinds the eye, plugs the ear and hardens the heart to the reality of God, to the true sense and purpose of life and to the eternal reality to come: “This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk in the vanity of their mind, Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.” EPHESIANS 4:17-18 KJV.

The occult is such an abomination to God: “…There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch… For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord…” Please read all of DEUTERONOMY 18:9-14 KJV.

There continues to be a cycle of exploitation which traps the vulnerable, the ignorant and the hurting: It was sickening to see the promoters displaying their occult books and paraphernalia for profit and gain at the expense of others entrapped in this form of darkness. This reminds me of the two accounts in the book of ACTS: In ACTS 13:6-12, it tells of a Jewish sorcerer by the name of Barjesus. Barjesus (a.k.a. Elymas) sought to keep a local government official by the name of Sergius Paulus from coming to faith in Christ. Paul rebuked Barjesus and called him a “child of the devil” and an “enemy of all righteousness”. God blinded Barjesus which later was a factor in the government official coming to faith. In ACTS 16:16-20, a woman (who through “divination” and “soothsaying”; i.e., forecasting future events) was used by her masters for their monetary gain. Paul rebuked the evil spirit in her in the name of Jesus, and she was delivered (v.18). Through the power of God in me, I will more intentionally use that power to rebuke the enemy of all souls (1^st JOHN 4:4).

I was reminded once again at this psychic fair that there are so-called Christians who partake in occult practices. It is shameful to see “Christians” embracing their religious liberties, individuality and independent thinking over God’s will and purpose for their lives. Many seek charismatic leaders to help shape and expand their identity of self and of God (2^nd TIMOTHY 4:3-5). In the name of love, tolerance, accepting and being accepted, many are willing to please all people, compromise their faith, worship at different shrines and embrace worldly idols. This often takes many into the occult and far beyond. We see manifestations of this in the professions and practices of churchgoers who espouse “New Age” teachings, secular humanism, Universalism, various idols of materialism and a variety of other non-biblical teachings (MATTHEW 22:29; JAMES 4:4-7). Sadly, there is often no warning, correction or discipline from those who should love and be concerned the most; i.e., the family and the Church (EZEKIEL 3:18; JAMES 5:19-20).

My fervent hope and prayer for those reading this blog is of a two-fold nature: First, if you are at all involved with things of the occult, please flee from that which would bring you spiritual harm and jeopardize your eternal future (EPHESIANS 5:11-12; HEBREWS 10:26-31). Finally, if you are truly free in Christ, then please avail yourself to God in order for Him to use you as an instrument and work to reach out to those who are on “the broad road that leads to destruction” (GALATIANS 6:1-9).

Shalom in Christ,

Tom Briggs

Our sincerest apologies for the shortage of blog info and updates over the past several weeks! We have been experiencing extreme technical difficulties and have been unable to add any new posts. However, now that the problem has finally been solved, you can expect to experience our newest summertime newsletter here later this week!

Partners in the Gospel,

The Cross Current Team