Throughout my whole life I would say “Yeah my parents are divorced but it doesn’t really affect me, I was too young to know what was happening and by the time I did, it had been so long I didn’t really feel anything anymore.” But I thought to myself why would God bring this up 15 years later if it truly didn’t affect me? There must have been a deeper reason. In fact, the !gnite conference was just the beginning of what God was planning on revealing to me later in the year. The following October, God revealed the reason He gave that person the vision for me. He did it purposefully to get me actively thinking about the past I repressed, then ultimately told me my parents’ divorce was the root of my biggest sin—people pleasing. Also, a lot of other junk in my life was brought up during the women’s seminar and other services. I came to a point of desperation for God to deliver me of my sins and I realized the huge need for Jesus in my life. I realized that deep healing does not come from time or my own self-help methods but that true healing only comes from God. Upon this realization, I was burdened for others that do not know God for themselves or have a personal relationship with Him. I wanted to share how God had been working through me in hopes that others will be moved to seek God for themselves and ultimately receive complete salvation.

Therefore, because I was so thankful at what God had done for me as well as what He is continuing to do in my life I decided to commit to the Community Summer Missions Project (CSMP) for this upcoming summer to go out and share my testimony. Being a senior on the verge on graduating, I could be using this summer to be applying for jobs but I feel like God is calling me to something greater. I’m really excited to see what God has in store for me this summer!

Jeanne Kim: I remember flying into Ann Arbor from Philadelphia for Ignite 2011, heart pounding, not knowing what to expect. My first impression of meeting members from other church sites was that they were different form HMCC of Chicago—yet something was still familiar. HMCC of Ann Arbor had their own building and definitely a lot more people (including little children!), yet I felt connected to the church and the people there. It was like a family reunion with ALL of the extended family. My small group had people from all three US sites. During some of our “chill times,” we talked, familiarizing ourselves with each other, the other pastors, as well as the growth of the churches. It felt like I was listening to stories of distant relatives I never knew I had. And the fact that we could use words like “LIFE Group” or “ACCESS” without ever having to explain what they meant because everybody was on the same page was very thrilling.

One in heart. If anything, that’s the biggest thing I took away from Ignite last summer. Not just in the US but overseas as well, our churches are one in heart and one in vision, working for God’s kingdom. Sometimes life gets tough with school, personal struggles, and so forth, but I have found strength and renewal in seeing God’s bigger picture for the world. And the amazing truth is that the entire HMCC family is united in this cause, fighting together for the Gospel.

Leon Yung: One thing that really stands out in my memory from !gnite last year was seeing the power of the whole HMCC family coming together. In one of the sermons, we were reminded of how all the different sites have the same core DNA, that we were truly brothers and sisters fighting alongside each other to further the gospel. It was also evident by how close our small groups became. Even though it was the first time I met most of the people in my small group, at the end of the conference, it felt like we were closer than some LIFE groups were at the end of the year: Convictions were shared, fears were shared, and lives were shared. During the worship times, I could feel the Spirit of God moving when all of us gathered together to praise and seek Him. Even though I’ve known people from other sites and heard about the work being done, it was the first time I could see the potential that we all held.

One thing that I’m excited for with this upcoming !gnite conference is once again seeing and hearing about the work done at each site: The freshmen that joined, the lives that were saved, the leaders that are being raised up. I’m looking forward to the sending off of the missions team the most. When we did it last year, it was such a powerful time of asking for God’s provision and guidance. Hoping that it will once again be an “Acts” moment where the Spirit of God will be so evident.

“All the believers were one in heart and mind” (Acts 4:32) It is with great anticipation that we look forward to the !gnite Conference as a time for all the churches gather together for mutual edification               and to encourage each other to pursue God’s vision. Praying that He will ignite, in our hearts, a passion for His Name and for the nations. Can’t wait!

One thing that stood out the most from !gnite 2011 was when Pastor Jimmy spoke about a movement. He said something along the lines of, “In a movement, everybody needs to contribute. If we don’t, there will be no domino effect.” In order to create a domino effect, there must be contact between the dominoes. I’m excited with the vision and mission of our church and with what God is doing in the other sites. But here in Indonesia, language is one of the barriers that limits this chain reaction. As one of the nationals here who speak Indonesian, this challenged me to step up by taking more responsibility in reaching out to both international students and other Indonesian students in UPH. I also want to get more involved with what God is doing here in Indonesia through prayer and missions projects.

I’m so excited with this upcoming !gnite. We have a lot more students than last year so when God starts changing their hearts, I can’t imagine what will happen afterwards!

I walked into the first evening session with that attitude and I was met with all that I was expecting: Lasers, fog, band, lights, curtains, and a countdown. The conference finally started and it was everything I wanted and was excited for. The music was amazing, the sermon was great, and the prayer times were powerful. !gnite was amazing… and then the second day came along.

We had a morning session, workshops, a BBQ, and etc. and I went into the second evening session tired and exhausted. Everything, in terms of the setup and music, was the same yet for me, the praise felt emptier and I couldn’t seem to focus on God. Pastor Jimmy ended up speaking that night and it was powerful for everyone in the room… except me. I sat there for the entire however many hours it went for feeling absolutely nothing. It wasn’t even like I felt sadness or anger but I literally felt like God was ministering to everyone except me. I was confused and wondered where all that excitement and zeal went within a 24 hour period. During response time, I started praying for something… anything. I wanted to feel Him again, I wanted to cry, I wanted to feel something. And that was the problem. I related a powerful sermon or praise time to feelings. I related the Spirit moving to me crying. I related emotions to God. Looking back at !gnite, God started teaching me the hard truth that regardless of however I feel, He’s still God. And from that conference on, He started the refining process. Later that same night, we were told to pray for a brother or sister around us and even when I felt nothing, even when I was bargaining with God asking to Him to show me a sign so I can “feel” good and worship Him again, in that moment, He decided to bless me with a spiritual gift. When all I was to Him was a little child asking for a toy so I would stop crying, He let me bless a brother with a new spiritual gift.

Looking ahead toward !gnite 2012, I have a feeling I might have to re-learn this lesson again yet I’m excited. Excited to see our other sites come to visit. Excited to grow and see what God has in store for our church, our missions teams, and our lives. Excited to see the Spirit moving powerfully in people even if it may not be me. Excited to kick off our field work and be commissioned off. And I’m thankful. Thankful that God loves our church enough to allow us to have a conference. Thankful that we have multiple sites to share this experience with. And most importantly, thankful that God’s power has nothing to do with how I “feel”. It’s going to be an amazing conference because of who He is and not because of how I feel.

I had no specific inclinations of what this specifically meant, but I entered the conference with a brimful of expectation for something extravagant to happen. Overall, at !gnite I was challenged with the lesson of not letting the ceiling to my prayers be just wanting others to be blessed, but to instead take hold of a desire to be blown away and have a faith that’s instep with that expectation. With the deeper understanding of Christ’s love captured by the sermons preached by the pastors over the course of the few days came a compulsion to be rid of petty, “sideline” faith. Pastor Jimmy had reinforced the notion that the God that we worship cannot be small in our lives, and it was at this conference that this became much more real to me.

I walked away from !gnite with the conviction of knowing that we should be beginning every season of our lives coming into the presence of God, seeing His majesty, and standing in awe of who He is. As I looked to the year ahead of me at the time, and the city of Chicago as a whole, it was this kind of reverent humility that I was praying would be translated in my life…all for the glory of God and the love of Christ to be shared. Nothing more and nothing less.

When I first heard about the !gnite conference, I became excited about all thework that He would do in the lives of many undergraduate students. As a graduate student at HMCC, I am so thankful and blessed by the energy that undergrads bring to all of our corporate church gatherings, but most importantly their genuinedesire to seek God in any circumstance. While I had this heart, I too wantedto experience God myself. So I began to desire such things: God, I want toexperience you and want to know you even though I am not able to participate inthe conference. Will you reveal who you are so that I may find my identity andserve you with all that you’ve created me to do? I served in the refreshmentsteam for the conference with these desires.

Icame to realize two things: one – God reveals who He is through the body ofChrist, two – the joy of serving behind the scenes.

I’ve experienced how great God is through the body of Christ. The !gnite conference was unique in that all the different HMCC sites gathered together to dream bigger dreams about God’s vision for the local HMCC churches and their connection to the world. Therefore, I had the privilege of serving alongside other HMCC members from Austin and Chicago. Even though we didn’t know each other, let alone know each others’ names (we introduced each other later), we were instantly united because we shared the same vision to serve the Lord in any possible way. “…For where two or three are gathered in myname, there am I among them.” (Matthew 18:20 ESV) God, across the three HMCC sites, had been our purpose. It’s from this that I realized how wonderful it is to serve with a group of like minded people in serving our Lord and became reassured that neither I nor any Christian is alone in this their walk with God because there will always co-laborers in Christ. I’m grateful to God for giving me an opportunity to serve Him with brothers and sisters in Christ through HMCC.

Alongwith experiencing God through the body of Christ, I’ve personally experienced God in giving me a greater joy serving Him in the smallest ways. Whilewondering how I can invest in the conference, God tangibly gave me an opportunity to serve Him. Now that I think about it, I realize how funny God is. God used my personal life circumstances to create an opportunity to serve and experience Him through one act of obedience.

About couple of months before the conference, I made plans to move in with a sister from HMCC for the summer. So the week of my move-in day (weekend of the !gnite conference), I emailed the sister as reminder about that weekend. She emailed me back asking if I could reschedule the date because she’ll be hosting eight girls for the conference and so moving all of my stuff would be crazy. But because I had plans to leave town that weekend, rescheduling to another date would have been impossible. Understanding the situation that I was put into, I paused and chuckled at God while I replied back to her e-mail: “Hey sister[D], how about we do this, since it will be too hectic for me to move all of my stuff to your place while you have guests, why don’t we switch places? I’ll host the girls in my apartment and follow through with the original plan?” She agreed and there I ended up hosting eight girls in my apartment on the day of the conference. I’m so thankful that God gave me the heart of obedience and allowed me to follow through it. I’m also thankful that God used my personal circumstances to serve Him in this way. I don’t know how each of those girls from Austin and Chicago experienced God during the conference, but however they’ve experienced Him, I’m really honored to have been part of their overall experience in personally encountering Jesus.

I look forward to all the ways God will use me in serving His people. I think it really makes sense that we are called to be His stewards of all the things of this earthy because all that you and I have and will ever have all belong to God. I’m fully convinced that God will do anything to reveal His glory even with the five loaves of bread and two fishes that we have; God can do wonders. I’ve learned to freely surrender them because I know that God wants me to experience joy in serving Him. I hope everyone in HMCC can experience God in this way.

SUSTENANCE | There was a lot of preparation leading into the conference that should have left me pretty tired once the first day of !gnite came around. However, from the start of the week during the last days of preparation, there was this very steady, very strong feeling of expectation. Perhaps physically I was pretty dead, but spiritually I was very much alive. And even after the conference began, there was a constant drone of God promising that he was doing something, that he had something in store. And he kept my heart eager and expectant so that there was never a moment of laziness, doubt, waiting for everything to be over. HOW REFRESHING, to feel so expectant for two and half days straight? I don’t know if I can ever say that I’ve experienced that long a period of constant floods of pure joy in the Lord.

FAMILY | The moment I stepped into the sanctuary on Thursday night as people were milling around waiting for 8pm to hit, it was nostalgia central. All the pastors (minus P.Andrew.. =/) and some previous members of HMCC of AA who are now at other sites all in one room? Dang. Didn’t realize how awesome it would be to see and feel that. It’s a great joy to know that they have been sent and are impacting lives elsewhere now, but what a great experience to have had us all in one place once again. Some of them I know better than others, but just the familiar faces made me truly feel like this was a huge family reunion.

OTHER SITES | The first year I truly felt the joy of being a sending church was the year HMCC of Jakarta was launched. However, as with many things, that heart of joy faded over time, and I started to feel behind in being able to keep up with updates and everything from the other sites. A great turning point was Jackson and Rachel’s recent visit from HMCC of Singapore. I was so encouraged by what they had to share, and their visit made it so much easier to conceptualize and visualize what their church is like and how now to pray for it. HMCC of Chicago was the greatest encouragement for me through this conference. I had three Chicagoans in my small group, one of which is a new believer. He was able to share a part of his story the first night we met (along with a couple other new believers from AA), and he continued to share very openly throughout the conference. He has quite a powerful testimony at work in his life, and God is definitely not finished with him yet. The night that P.Jimmy preached, a video of their most recent baptism was shown, including the full testimony of the new believer. Sure, two testimonies of transformation from a church is “nothing new” per say, but God was speaking powerfully to me through the overall testimony of this church. As they hit their 5^th anniversary this year, I’m blown away that he’s used this very first HMCC church plant to do AMAZING things in people’s lives. It all started with just a few people who were sent or called upon in that town of Evanston to start something up and see if this church plant thing was really it, and it’s now a thriving place of transformation and growth. Amazing.

FAMILY, cont | Something we prayed for was for connections to be made and opportunities for people to encourage one another across sites. I didn’t know exactly what this would look like. But wow, it was great seeing how God was using the simple fact of being in the same space to influence us. Ann Arborites were able to be humbled by how much work and load of responsibility there is for the smaller sites. The church plant sites were able to experience the environment of an older, “more established” church, and see the roots of everything. And for all, I really believe we saw how BIG this vision is. No, it’s not just a handful of people from Austin or Chicago or AA or JKT or SGP that are doing their own little projects. It’s a worldwide vision, so much bigger than even all our churches and people combined, and it’s real. This is a God thing. Only he was capable of coming up with such a crazy idea as starting these churches, and only he is the one who’s making it happen, growing it, thriving it, multiplying it into what it’s becoming. And the best part of it all is that we’re just a small family working together, keeping in touch with one another in such a genuine grassroots way, all the while trying to follow after our Father, and feeling so privileged to be involved in the hugeness of it all.

LOVE&FREEDOM | My personal prayer request for !gnite was to first off get refreshed and really encounter God. And specifically what I realized I needed in my relationship with God was to experience his love again. I was at a point of desperation…so I had full faith that God would answer these prayers. I didn’t really have anything else to rely on. He actually did something pretty cool. He spoke in a way where he intertwined my story with the powerful story of HMCC of Chicago that I just wrote about. It’s pretty much that year (my sophomore year) when we planted that church that my own story really picked up and began getting fleshed out. So during this conference he actually assured me of the power of his love in my life by taking me step by step through my own testimony alongside the testimony of the Chicago site. It was nothing short of breath-taking, and I couldn’t deny any longer that I belong to him. He also spoke to me about the Father’s love very personally in a new way that has given me a new sense of freedom.

I’m so thankful for all that God poured into our churches and into my life through this conference. I’m excited to see the fruits during this upcoming year at each of our sites!