Well this has been quite a month. Two months actually. The result is that any blog updates have been pretty sparse. If you are watching for multi-cultural stuff, sorry about that. My world has been pretty consumed with family stuff. You can see the posts below. I am finally caught up from being buried, and am gearing for several weeks of mission trips. I am leading trips to New Orleans and to the Appalachia mountains the week after. Pastor Amado is leading a group to Arizona to work on an Apache Indian reservation. We are definitely broadening our Missio Dei horizons. Please pray for our teams. The week we get back, Pastor Rick is taking 20 High School students to the city of Chicago for a week as well. Please lift them up in prayer. We’ve celebrated as a family and we’re getting back in the groove. This week Pastor Rob and I are in Louisville, KY for the North American Christian Convention. Every where I turn someone is stopping and probing about doing multicultural ministry. And I just saw a new website that looks pretty interesting. I am going to find some time to look deeper into it. Check it out: www.thenewculture.org. Please be faithful to Missio Dei!

Heading to vacation with the family.  See you soon!

Hey Cyberworld… I know it’s been like forever since I posted anything on here. I’m still alive and kicking. It has been a crazy bunch of weeks since my last post. The big dealio is that Christie and I now have a high school graduate. I’ll put pictures on after tomorrow. And after tomorrow night we’ll have a second high schooler. We are so proud of Tyler (just graduated from Plainfield Central High School- in the top 20 of his graduating class of 670 students If I can brag). He’s headed to Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids in a few months. We are equally proud of Reid who graduates tomorrow PM from Indian Trail Middle School. He’s headed to Plainfield East High School in the fall.

We have been running with the boys, graduation parties and all that goes with this time of year. Baseball games are keeping us busy as well. The Dodgers are 5-8-1 after todays game. I missed becuase of spoke for Gente Unida today after preaching the morning three services…. Talk about being wiped. I kicked off our summer series entitled Missio Dei. The summer at Westbrook is all about the Sending of God. I mean who really cares how many people come to our church, if we don’t leave our church and serve the very people that He died for!

It has been a full and rich weekend. To the graduates in our family to the hundreds of people who came to help us celebrate to the worship time today…. Praise the Lord!

We’re at the airport getting ready to head home from Exponential.   This years conference was awesome.  From Erwin McManus to Francis Chan I was challenged all week long.  And the way Eric Bramlett set up and introduced Francis Chan ~ priceless!.  The Multi-Ethnic track that we led for the week was also engaging.  The people seemed to be into more than ever before.  I really think this movement is going somewhere!  It was also great to spend significant time with Mark DeYmaz and Harry Li from Mosiac Church in Little Rock.  They did the bulk of the Pre-Conference session and led two sessions during the main track.  Also thanks to Rob and Amado from the Westbrook world of the Multi-Ethnic ministry,  Dianne Padilla, (see post below) and Jay Pankratz from Sonrise Church in Rialto, CA.  It was a pleasure to serve alongside you all as we promote unity and oneness in the local church.

The hot theme of the day at Exponential (at least in the Multi-Ethnic track) was immigration.  It was great to have Dianne Padilla join us to share some amazing legal insights relative to  the ever challenging issue of immigration.  I was blessed to meet Dianne and her husband Brian last summer at a graduation party of all places.  As we were talking she shared that she was an Immigration lawyer.  After spending some time with her she graciously agreed to join us in Orlando this year to address this screaming issue and how it affects the church.  Did you know that there are approximately 31 million foreign born people living in the US and about 11 million of them are undocumented?  What can the church do and not do for undocumented folks.  Dianne was fascinating as she answered these any many more questions.  In fact people tossed questions at Dianne for about 40 minutes.  Be sure to watch the Exponential website for info about the podcast of this great session.  After this session Westbrook will certainly become more and more Immigrational.

Today was the unofficial official kick-off for Exponential 2009.  I arrived last evening into Orlando and the conference was officially kicked off at 1:00 PM with the Pre-Conference Intensive workshops.  It is great to spend some quality time with Mark DeYmaz and Harry Li of Mosaic Church of Little Rock.  We are doing the Multi-Ethnic church planting conference together.  Actually they are doing the bulk of the teaching.  I just get to help make it all happen.  Several guys from Westbrook are now in for the duration of the conference.  It’s going to be great.  I’m looking forward to hearing Erwin McManus, Craig Groeschel, Bob Roberts, Ajai Lall and Francis Chan among others.

OK, tonight was a first…  My first game as a  coach of a real life baseball team.  I played ball all through college, but have enjoyed a bunch of years being the faithful dad who sat in the bag chair at every game rooting my kids on.  This season I entered the ranks of a Mustang division coach.  Griffin is 9 and we are the Dodgers.  We’ve practiced hard, work on a lot of great stuff…  and overall the boys did great.  BUT:  we lost game one 15-3.

Anyone want to give some advice?

Well it’s Sunday night.  A full weekend of Easter worship is behind us, I was able to have a great nap and an awesome Easter dinner with my family this evening.  What’s greater still is that God showed up in an amazing way this weekend.  People were everywhere and while we thought we saw our biggest crowd ever in the history of our church at our 10:00 AM service.  That number was shattered at our 11:30AM service.  We had rows of chairs in the lobby.  It was crazy.  Please pray that God will draw all of our guests back to Westbrook as we continue to preach Christ.    Thank you Jesus for letting your Resurrection power fall upon us!

Tyler Bennett Mitchell was born 18 years ago. Man- how fast time has passed. I remember the day when our first born came into this world. You may just think that I’m a doting dad, but the world is a better place because of this kid. Happy Birthday son!