Small Steps. Big Faith.

Agape held its national staff and volunteer conference a the end of May 2022 in El Escorial, outside of Madrid.  Our family and FamilyLife Spain's new staff member, Dani Sanmartin, traveled together by car to join the over 100 staff and volunteers to worship the Lord together, to reconnect with others from around the country and to be refreshed. God keeps adding to our numbers by raising up more laborers for the harvest.  In the last 18 months we have had 12 new people join our staff plus.  Each of these people passed through a rigorous application process, several of which I guided and facilitated. The process includes gathering and synthesizing many documents including the staff application, self-evaluation, a doctrinal questionnaire, and multiple references,  as well as a face-to-face interview. At our conference in May, we celebrated this incoming class of new staff who have joined us. Several of the volunteers who attended our conference were convinced of God's ...

This past weekend 6 special couples who have said, "I do!" and are preparing to tie the knot gathered online with us to receive healthy perspective and practical tools as the begin their lifetime journey together. I served behind the scenes with the planning, organizing and communication before the event, as well as the technical hosting on Zoom during the event. Dani Sanmartin and his wife, Raquel Pérez, were amazing emcees, presenting our speakers with energy, grace and flexibility as last-minute changes came up. Please pray for these 12 young couples: that the Lord would burden their hearts of their crucial roles as husband and wife and the importance of putting into practice the wise advice they received during this S.O.M.  

Although this entry is posted in March 2022, just a few weeks after Michael's death, it was actually written 6 months after he passed away. On February 26th, I flew to Florida to meet with my parents and my brother, Mark, Michael's twin and Mark's family, as well as Mark's family and Michael's surviving daughter, Sydney.  Generous friends and family made it possible for me to buy a round-trip ticket so that I could be there with my family. As it is often said in situations like this, it was a surreal experience. My dad and I spent 5 days filtering through Michael's business paperwork and financial records. The funeral details were also prepared during this time: driving across town for the viewing of Michael's body, picking up his ashes, greeting Michael's ex-wife, Sydney's mom. The memorial service near Mark's place of residence was non-religious, but special. There were friends and business associates of Michael's as well as many friends o...

Michael Carter Patterson died of a heart attack in Ft. Pierce, Florida  on Friday, February 18, 2022 at the age of 49.  Read more about Michael's professional projects on Linked In .  A gathering will be held in south Florida (probably Boca Raton, FL) on Sunday, March 6.  The funeral will be held in Burlington, NC on March 19 at Holy Comforter Episcopal Church . More information soon.  

It was July 2020 and we had just finished up our end of the year lunch with fellow Ágape staff in Barcelona. Ágape's national director, Nacho Marques, was visiting from Valencia to help us say good-bye to a fellow staff couple that was leaving staff to serve God in the secular world. With their departure, there was a big hole left in the leadership of Family Life, Agape Spain's ministry to married couples and families which we call De Familia a Familia or Dfaf . "Jill, could I talk with you for a minute?" Nacho asked. "Because of your love for building teams and your passion for developing leaders, I thought you would be the best person to rally a handful of couples  and build a team to reach married couples and families in Spain." I was surprised but motivated by the challenge and so, I said, "yes" to the opportunity. 18 months later, God has raised up one of those couples as a "key couple" to spearhead initiatives that will not only rea...

After being exposed to the principles of effective teamwork (seen above) taken from Pat Macmillan's book,  The Performance Factor   at our School of Servant Leadership, Benji Galvez, the local director Ágape+  (pronounced Áh ga pay mahs) in Barcelona, invited me to facilitate a team building workshop for his team of 8 staff.  From the beginning, it became clear that the Ágape+   team is a family. They like being together and they share a common passion to to minister to people at-risk of social exclusion such as homeless men and women, refugees and people in exile. Their particular challenge is that, as the minsitry has grown, they have added more and more services for their users, but have not had the time to develop the internal processes necessary for the interdependent work of a highly effective team. The objective of the workshop was to learn the 6 principles of highly effective teams and identify one or two practical steps that they could begin to ta...

In January 2020, when we still were unaware of the deadly pandemic that was about to hit, Garrick Roegner and I began to create the structure and curriculum for our experimental "Escuela de Lidreazgo Siervo/E.L.S."  or School of Servant Leadership : a space for 14 current and emerging leaders to come together to read and discuss important aspects of leadership: leading oneself, leading a team and leading a movement.  Because the leaders were spread out across the country, the format would be online, which worked out great even in the midst of the COVID lockdown. We held our first gathering online in September 2020.  After preparing our readings and reflections each month, we met online  to listen to an guest expert on a given topic and then we broke into small groups to share our thoughts, doubts, questions and plans on how we want to apply the information. This Nov 2-4, after more than a year, we gathered together in the same space at Mon Sant Benet  (which I ...