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How do we determine what are supposed to do with our life? Does God have a particular plan for me? Maybe the Universe is pointing me in a particular direction? What is my calling? Perhaps the things that frustrate us about the world are the very things that God wants us to be involved in fixing. In this seminar, Jamie helps you to examine how God has made you, how the experiences from your past have formed you, and the possible destiny that God has for you in bringing heaven to earth.

This seminar is best experienced in two parts. In the first session, Jamie gives an overview of the needs of the world, tells some of her own experiences among poor and marginalized people, and then gives some tools for examining your own personal history—pains and joys—looking for catalyzing moments that formed who you are. As Frederick Buechner said, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” The tools that Jamie gives will help you to find this place and ignite a fire within you to live your holy obsession.

In the second session, Jamie gives tools for sustaining your passion. Our natural instinct when we encounter pain is to protect our hearts, to numb our feelings, to even run away from the injustices that we see. As we do, the passion wanes and we can find ourselves settling for a life that is less fulfilling, less enjoyable, and one that most certainly does not change the world. Jamie will leave you with encouragement for sustaining the holy obsession that the Spirit of God has placed within your soul.

This seminar is experienced best when there are times for contemplation and retreat between and after the two teaching sessions that Jamie gives. An ideal schedule for the retreat would be over two days, with teaching times in the morning and contemplation in the afternoons. However, adjustment can be made to this schedule based on the setting and the needs of the hosting church or group.

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More than 2000 verses in the Christian Scriptures speak of God’s special heart for the poor. In this seminar Jamie tells stories of the injustices that the poor are experiencing around the world, gives a vision of the Kingdom of God and invites everyone to join in the hopeful work of bringing heaven to earth.

“God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill… I hope so. But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.” Bono

In this seminar, Jamie walks you through an overview of the Christian Scriptures showing God’s preference for the poor culminating in the life and teachings of Jesus. She shines a light on the very raw, and frankly, painful realities that many of the poor are experiencing around the world today. Jamie holds in one hand “the way things are,” but with the other she points to “the way things ought to be,” and she inspires hope that not only is heaven the Dream of God for the people of the world, but it is a future reality that each of us can be involved in bringing to the earth now.

This seminar can be done in a two-hour or three-hour format.

There is a vast difference between knowing about God and knowing God. We can spend hours in church- attending worship services, participating in outreach ministries, teaching Sunday School, hosting small group meetings- spending ourselves in service to the Lord. Yet in the midst of all the activity, it is possible for us to remain void of relationship and intimacy with Him. The more we strive, the more God seems to be an impersonal, mystical, distant being. Many of us sense that something is missing and woefully inadequate in our spiritual pilgrimages. We see others leaving the church and the faith, as their excitement and passion for Jesus wanes all too often because we have perpetuated the lie of church-ianity, seeking relationship through ritual. We have lost our simple obsession, the grand, wholehearted, unifying pursuit that becomes our center of life. Speaking from her own experiences as a fellow journeyer, Jesus-follower and missionary trainer, Jamie paints an honest picture of her own search for a meaningful, passionate, transformative relationship with God. Her insight into God's desires to be our closest friend, our compassionate father and our tender lover will soften and restore any heart. For all who are struggling or simply going through the motions, this seminar will launch you into an exciting new level of reality with Jesus. Jamie will show you a way out of unfruitful religious wastelands and into abundant life with your simple obsession.

This seminar is based up the information and stories in Jamie’s book, Simple Obsession. The seminar is best formatted as three hours of teaching.

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With his signature humor and passion, John highlights what Jesus meant when he spoke of the Kingdom of God, the seeds of the revolution that Jesus began, the expansion of this transformation since its inauguration and what is left to be done to see the fullness of heaven come to earth.

In a world filed with political rhetoric, the people of Jesus need to be energized by their true alliance with the Kingdom of God. What is the King accomplishing on the earth? What is the agenda of the Kingdom and how do we get in line with it? In our world today, we need to see why Jesus’ original message of the Kingdom of God (found in over 100 places in the New Testament), is largely unrecognized by Christianity today and is the key for fulling God’s Global vision.

The seminar will unlock your understanding of the Bible as perhaps never before, helping to re-discover the true center of Christianity. From the beginning, the Kingdom of God (The Community of the King) was the focus of Jesus’ ministry and teaching and needs to be the center of ours. This seminar serves as a fast paced introduction to the Kingdom of God—the notion that the Kingdom is “already," and "not yet,” explaining how the Kingdom of God is breaking through into the here and now.

We all pray, “Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth,” but too often we slide into hopelessness that God’s will can be done on earth, and in our hopelessness we can descend into faithlessness and worse the apathy of inaction. This seminar will challenge long held assumptions that keep the people of God from aggressively working for the King in the here and now.

This seminar can be formatted as a three hour or four hour teaching time.

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John skillfully uses storytelling, humor and passion to reveal where the message of the gospel of Jesus meets the beauty of other world religions to dynamically bring about the reality of the Beloved Community here on the earth.

Take yourself to some remote part of this world with a culture vastly different from ours in every way and yet you will find congregations sitting in a building that looks remarkably similar to ours, singing songs that are familiar. If God is the God of the whole earth, then this is not His design but the work of western churches who don't know the value of other cultures.

Contextualization may be one of the most important issues in mission today. The Community of the King must learn how to discern culture in order to communicate the Good News of the Kingdom in a way that is clear and penetrating to the hearers.

The concern of contextualization is ancient—going back to the early church as it struggled to break loose from its Jewish cultural trappings and enter the Greco-Roman world of the Gentiles. Yet in many of today’s churches, and in the missionaries that they send out, there is a latent imperialism of cultural superiority. Rather than taking the pure seed of the Gospel and planting it in the soils of a very different culture, so that it might bloom and flourish in its own way, we have tried to make all the tongues, tribes and nations follow our patterns.

God has been preparing the peoples of the world to receive the Good News of the Kingdom. This seminar will introduce the ideas behind finding that preparation and drawing people to Jesus through their own culture. This is crucial for missionaries who are going to the other side of the world and critical for churches who are trying to stay relevant to the quickly changing terrain of our own home soil.

Often fear keeps us from asking deep questions, and all too often missionaries and the western churches that guide them revert to the default of bulldozing all we do not understand and replacing it with our own “superior” cultural model of Christianity. In this seminar, John draws from the depths of his own experience and study and that of missionaries all over the world to show the beauty of culture, how to know what should be kept and what needs to be discarded. This is a must class for all who are serious about seeing the Kingdom of God spread to every corner of the planet in our generation.

This seminar can be formatted as a three hour or four hour teaching time.

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