It has been a month since DTS graduation and it has been so good to look back on our time spent in Coatesville and the Middle East and to see the ways that God was and continues to be faithful.

After leaving Cairo, our outreach team travelled to Israel for our remaining three weeks. It was very different from the time we spent in Egypt as we moved four times in those three weeks and worked with four different ministries.

We lived in Bethlehem in the West Bank for ten days. It was surreal to be in the City of David, to look around and imagine what it was like when David wandered the hills as a shepherd boy and to stand in The Shepherds’ Field reading the story of the angel’s announcement of the birth of the Messiah.

The barrier separating the West Bank from Israel runs along the outskirts of Bethlehem, and so the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians concerning rights of land ownership is impossible to escape. During our time in Bethlehem, we listened to many stories of Palestinians and praying for restoration of relationship, particularly within the body of Christ.

Then we moved to Tel Aviv. We stayed in a hostel in Old Jaffa and worked with a Messianic congregation, serving in their soup kitchen and packing bags of food for distribution. In Old Jaffa there is a very large Russian immigrant community, many of whom are elderly and homeless. Refugees from Sudan and other African countries have also taken up residence in cities like Tel Aviv and there is a great need for ministries like that of the Tel Aviv Messianic Center.

After three days in Tel Aviv, we packed our bags and took a bus to Jerusalem. We spent three days at the Jerusalem House of Prayer for All Nations, a 24/7 prayer community on the Mount of Olives. Every afternoon between four and six, we participated in a prayer watch for the Jaffa Gate (United States and Canada), interceding on behalf of the church of Christ in those nations and praying for revival. We also had the opportunity to walk into Old City, Jerusalem. We walked the Via Dolorosa and visited the Garden Tomb near the hill that is said to be Golgotha. Having seen those places, the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection comes to life in an incredible way.

We spent our last week of outreach doing service projects on a moshav (a farming community similar to a kibbutz) near Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. Unlike in Bethlehem and Jerusalem where churches have been built at so many biblically significant places, Galilee is still mostly farmland and looking around, we could almost see Jesus and his followers walking from place to place, doing ministry and teaching the kingdom. It was so good.

And now it is time for the next chapter.  Jyoti has plans to travel to Asia in the fall, visiting her brother and sister-in-law in Laos and serving a missionary family in her home country of Nepal. On April 1, I (Tanya) will begin a one year internship with Restoration Ministries in Washington, DC, working with girls who have been trafficked. We hold onto the faithfulness of God and who he has proven himself to be. The stories of His provision encourage us and grow our faith as we begin the new things to which God has called us.  ~Tanya

Greetings from YWAM Coatesville!

We have just celebrated Thanksgiving, the day to express our gratitude for all the Lord has done.  Our thanks continues year round, however,  as we  look forward to celebrating the birth of our dear Savior Who died to save us and give us abundant life through Him and anticipate the blessings of the New Year!  Here is our latest update:

Property Purchase

We so appreciate the patience and flexibility of HOHC as we have navigated the sometimes turbulent waters of fund-raising for our Buck Run Road property.  As of the writing of this e-mail, we have only a few more papers to sign before we will close on the property at $70,000 instead of the original $117,000 as stated in the original agreement.

We are so thankful to the Lord for this house and land where we plan to build a small training center for world missions. We eagerly anticipate seeing how the Lord will bring to pass His dreams for this place. We invite you to be part of this exciting process through your prayers and financial support.

Celebration Banquet, November 4

Hard work and attention to the details and especially prayer, paid off as close to 700 supporters of YWAM Coatesville and YWAM Haiti met at Shady Maple Banquet facilities on November 4th.   It was such a precious time of fellowship as we lifted up the Lord as the glorious, living God that He is.  We rejoiced along with Island Breeze and their lively, colorful expressions of worship in their own unique culture!  Many of you were there and we thank you again for your generous giving on that night and your continued support of our ministry here.  Together with supporters of YWAM Haiti,  we raised $65,000 for YWAM Haiti and YWAM Coatesville; this amount includes table sponsorships.  May the Name of the Lord be praised!

Discipleship Training School

The weeks have flown by and we have observed the personal and spiritual growth in each of our four students.  Their understanding of God and their walk with Christ have been stretched and expanded as they were exposed to such topics as: “The Father Heart of God,” “The Nature and Character of God,”  “The Cost of Following Christ,” “The Cross, Sin and Repentance,” and “The Marriage of Prayer and Missions.”  It has been an exciting and sometimes challenging time for both staff and students.

After a short break for Christmas, staff and students will leave for the Middle East for eight weeks.  They will return in mid-February for a time of debriefing and end with a graduation dinner and ceremony on February 25!  Please pray for the school as they prepare for outreach and raise the needed funds of $3500 each!

YWAM Coatesville Welcomes New Staff Family

We are excited to welcome a new staff family here at YWAM Coatesville.  Samuel and Mamatha Jacob and their three children are from Bangelore, India and will arrive sometime in January.  We hope that many of you will get to meet and welcome them!
Ministry Training and Opportunity
YWAM Coatesville along with members of the local faith community are exploring the possibility of a half-way house ministry for veterans dealing with substance abuse and for former in-mates transitioning back into main-stream life. In preparation for this possibility our base will host a seminar on January 6-8 that offers training in counseling individuals with these types of needs. The seminar will be open to YWAM Coatesville staff and anyone who feels called to this kind of outreach. If you are interested in attending the seminar, please call 610-384-1001 for further information.

May you all have a blessed Christmas and New Year!

Prayer Requests

-For the Lord to miraculously provide the finances needed to pay off our Buck Run Road property.

-For financial provision for outreach for our DTS staff and students.

-Safe arrival for our new staff family and grace to adjust to a new culture.

-For the Lord to lead and guide in the formation of the counseling ministry to ex-prisoners and substance addicted veterans.

And, as always, we extend our appreciation to all of you who continue to stand by us with your friendship, giving and prayers.

Hi everyone! Sorry to once again take to long to send an update. It’s really starting to get busy around here with the last few weeks of lecture phase and thanksgiving break and christmas break coming up. Here’s a quick overview of the last three weeks:

Please continue to be in prayer for my team and I as we finish up the last few weeks of lecture phase (focus!). Also pray that God would be at work in the hearts of those we will pour into on outreach now, so that the soil of their hearts is ready to hear Jesus. ~Tanya Huyard

And here i am at the end of week three! it has been a serious amount of intense! this week three different speakers came to teach intercession and spiritual warfare. So much. So good.
Corey Martin has been working in south Lancaster for about four and a half years. He and his wife are currently associate pastoring Threshold Church. He’s passionate about the city and about believers
recognizing who they are in God and the authority they have in the spiritual realm because of who they are in God. Jimmy Nimon directs the Gateway House of Prayer in Ephrata. He spent Tuesday and Wednesday with us, talking to us about the importance of BEING with God and how vital that is to spiritual warriors. Leo and Kathy Neff joined us Tuesday and Thursday night. Kathy’s heart is equipping believers with the knowledge of their spiritual giftings and how to come to their fullest potential that God has for them. She is a co-founder of
Crossroads Counseling ministry in Leola and while she was with us, she spoke into our hearts with incredible love and honesty. Good good things. It’s incredible that this week has been so intense and we’ve
only just begun our discipleship school. It’s like God wants to get all the nasty stuff out of the way in the beginning so that he can really pour into us so that we can really pour out on outreach. I’m
really excited to see what God’s going to do through us!

Thoughts from the week:

*We were born into a war. We are a family. we are an army. And we do war Braveheart style. As a daughter of God, I’m royalty. I’m not a lowly foot soldier. I ride into battle on a white horse beside my Father God, the Commander and Chief! (i loved loved loved that!)

*Paul prays Apokolupsis (unveiling, disclosure, manifestation, appearing) over the super faithful Ephesian church. Faith means believing in the things that we cannot see and God wants us to believe by faith but he also wants to reveal to us why we believe. The more time we spend just BEING with God in silence and waiting, the more we will begin to recognize God showing himself to us.

*One of the most amazing things that i learned this week and that really really changed the way i thought about spiritual warfare was the teaching we received about the keys of authority. When God created
man in the beginning, he gave them authority over all the earth. (Genesis 1: 28-30) When man gave into the temptation to know all good and to know all evil, he gave the keys of authority to Satan. So when Satan came to Jesus in the wilderness and tempted him with all the kingdoms of the world, they really did belong to him. But Jesus the Son had become man to take the authority back. When he died on the cross, rose from the dead and became the ultimate sacrifice, he took the keys back. We as believers and brothers and sisters of Christ have the authority!

God is doing so much in my heart. i appreciate those of you who have sent me emails and letters and packages and encouraged me. it means so much! keep us in your prayers as we go into the Biblical Worldview
week. Much love! ~ Tanya Huyard

Hi everyone! The weeks are going by so quickly. It’s hard to believe week three has already begun.
Last week David Welther joined us from YWAM Madison in Wisconsin and we spent class time really getting a new picture of what the word of God is and how incredibly valuable it is. there is so much about the way that we are taught the Bible at an early age (for those of us who have been raised in Christian homes) that can get in the way of us seeing Scripture as the people of Israel or even the early church saw Scripture-as powerful and completely authoritative because of the story it tells of God and His people and the way that they did relationship. ‘As common as it is, there is nothing like the Bible in terms of how it has affected history and how people throughout history have responded to it.’
*The church over generations has come to view the Bible more as an instruction manual, a how-to guide. More and more though, my generation is beginning to see that we don’t have a relationship with God through an instruction manual, but by listening to God’s word to us and then DOING it. There are grassroots movements like the Simple Way and the Ordinary Radicals that are doing the hard things and moving into the ghettos and giving up their rights to pursue the American Dream so that they can be the hands and feet of Jesus. Incredible challenge.
*There are so many awe-inspiring things that we learned during our Passion for the Word week. One of my favorite things was the day we spent studying Jesus and his ministry in the light of history and the culture of Galilee at the time. We talked about the Torah education Jesus would have received and how he followed the process of becoming a rabbi just like so many other men but that he was radical in the sense that he lived the Torah not only in action but in the thoughts of the heart. Also, unlike other rabbis at the time, Jesus chose his disciples-and not only that, he chose the failures and outcasts. On those men, Jesus built his church. It was such a challenge to me to really see the faith that Christ has that he has chosen me and chosen me correctly.
We spent some time doing street evangelism in Coatesville and then last Saturday God seriously blessed me with an opportunity to go with Donna McKim to clean her sister’s apartment. God gave me such a love for Laura and he just kept telling me *THIS, THIS IS IT, TANYA! THIS IS WHAT REAL EVANGELISM IS!!!* So good. so good.

Keep praying! God’s been here! ~ Tanya Huyard

Hi everyone!
It’s hard to believe that the first week of DTS is over. Crazy!
This first week of class was focus on the Father Heart of God. It was an incredible lecture phase taught by Mike Oman, a native Englishman who grew up in Zimbabwe and transplanted about a decade ago to Ireland where he and his wife are continuing the work. His testimony of the ways the Spirit has spoken in his life is incredible (he has a new book called My Father’s Heart that is the written form of the material he shared with us this week). It was a beautiful challenge to really look at God the Father in a whole new light and to learn to have a relationship with God the Father with a new understanding of His heart for us.
There were so many things that were incredible to me this week during the teaching, but i will just pick a few things out of my notes to share.
*Like the Children of Israel in their slavery in Egypt, our society that wants nothing to do with God has stolen who we are. It has inflicted a corrupt value system on us that has seeped into our families and relationships and is destroying us. God wants to give us a NEW identity, a NEW understanding of what it means to be a child in him. He wants to give us back our wealth.
*Everything we have came from God in the first place. We cannot give him anything he doesn’t already have. What blesses God when we as his children give him a gift is the motivation behind that gift, our love. This is love; not that we loved God, but that he first loved us. Our Christianity is us responding to that love.
*God values us, loves us, protects us, disciplines us, forgives us (on and on and on). But we cannot simply hold that inside of us. We must be channels of God’s love to us, not reservoirs.
Mike also spoke to us of a twofold anointing on my generation (this is so exciting to me!) 1. the Moses anointing: I am called to lead my generation out of brokenness and bondage and into freedom. 2. the Elijah anointing: I am called, with confidence in my power and authority in God, to confront the false religions keeping my generation in bondage.

I’m very excited for next week’s teaching (Passion for the Word of God) and the way it will build on what we learned this week. Please be in prayer for us!
I appreciate your support so much! ~ Tanya Huyard

YWAM’s 50th Anniversary!

Celebrations of the 50th anniversary of YWAM’s founding are going on all over the world.  Youth With A Mission Coatesville is hosting a celebration night here in Lancaster County, PA on November 4th, 2010.  The purpose of this gathering is to honor the Lord, churches and families that have sent missionaries from Pennsylvania to the nations through YWAM and various mission organizations over the past fifty years.  Though Loren and Darlene Cunningham, our founders, will not be at this location, we will have YWAMers representing every continent, joining in to celebrate what God has done, is doing, and will do in the completion of the Great Commission in our generation.  So, mark your calendar for November 4 2010 and we look forward to having you celebrate with us!     More Information