Dear Friends,

Lisa and I have traveled a few miles since we sent you our March newsletter. Our schedule has gotten very busy, as we knew it would. Right now we have a little time to catch our breath and remember what Jesus accomplished for us through His death and resurrection.

Then we approach another busy season with our students’ graduation, conferences and our annual trip back to the USA.

Highlands Mission Trip

Last month we took a group of our second year Bible college students up to the Highlands and Outer Hebrides. We started by driving up to Tain in the Highlands. The town is about an hour above Inverness and happens to be the home town of one of our first year students.

Our connection there was pastor Marie MacLeod with New Wine Church in Tain. We connected with some other ministries in town and our students were able to meet some practical needs. Then the church hosted an event one evening where our students shared some teaching and testimonies about the goodness of God in their own lives.

The students also prayed for many of the attendees. The very first person up for prayer was pastor Marie and the back pain that she had been struggling with for quite a while completely left! She was dancing and laughing and shouting. That was the start of a week full of many healing miracles!

Leaving Tain, we drove up to the ferry and crossed over to Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis. There we connected with pastors Donnie and Catriona Stewart, who lead New Wine Church, Stornoway. They hosted an event where our students ministered to the people there on Friday evening and Saturday, in addition to their Sunday morning and evening church services.

At one point on the Sunday morning I was talking with a guy who said he had a bunch of stuff going on that he wanted prayer for. Since the students were all busy praying for others, a couple of us staff offered to pray for him. His most visible symptom was a problem with his right foot that caused him pain and made him walk with a pronounced limp.

I shared that I saw him completely healed and dancing a jig on two good feet. Then I simply released the life of Christ into his body and commanded his foot to be restored healthy and whole. Even though his symptoms didn’t change outwardly at all, he said he felt something was different, that the pain was reduced, and that he believed he was healed in that instant.

When we saw him again that evening he was walking normally! He said that as he walked to his car that morning his foot just straighten out and the rest of the pain left. He was so happy at receiving God’s goodness that he danced a little jig right there in front of me!

Blessing the Pastors

Pastor Donnie shared something that really impacted our hearts. He said that many people and organizations have come to their church over the years one time and then were never seen again. But he pointed out that Lisa and I have now made the trip up to Stornoway and visited their church three times in the past year.

Pastor Donnie thanked us for that and asked us to keep coming back. He sees the same thing that we do. God is doing something in that place. We simply want to be a part of what He is doing on the earth and in Scotland.

I mention that to say thank you to our ministry partners. Your support allows us to continue to impact lives, both locally in Dumfries, as well as in the places we travel on mission with God!

Open Day with Wendell Parr

When we returned from the Highlands we had a couple days to finish getting ready for our Open Day at the Bible college with guest speaker Wendell Parr. It was the first time Wendell has been able to visit us in Dumfries and teach in the school.

It was a very successful event for us with four new applications submitted for the new school year in September! Wendell was a tremendous blessing for us, our staff, the students, and the guests who attended.

We did not get as much time with Wendell as we would have liked because we had to get a bunch of administrative stuff done on Sunday so we could fly to London on Monday.

Helsinki Mission Trip

We booked a hotel near Heathrow airport to be down there for our early morning flight to Helsinki with the rest of our second year students who didn’t go to the Highlands with us.

Finland was much different than I expected. Everything was tidy and well taken care of. For example, they figure they’ve had the last of their big winter snow storms so the workers were cleaning the grit and sand from the roads. The Finnish people are very welcoming and conscientious. I don’t really know how to put it into words. The best I can say is that I found the country far more appealing than what I expected. It was also surprising to find that such a large percentage of people in Finland speak English well. That made communicating with people easier, though we still needed to work through translators when ministering.

Even through translators, our students saw much the same results in Finland as the other team of them saw in Scotland. No wonder. God is the same in Finland as He is in Scotland. And it’s the same Holy Spirit inside each of them too. Lives were touched and people were set free, praise God!

This trip was special for Lisa and I because we reconnected with two of our classmates from Charis Colorado. Vesa and Maria Seppälä are now lead pastors of Majakka Church in the city of Espoo, which is a suburb of Helsinki.

It was obvious to us that Vesa and Maria are walking in their God-given calling as pastors. Watching them interact with the members of their church, and hearing their hearts for the people of Finland was inspiring.

It was good to reunite with our friends from school. Even though we had not seen them in nearly 6 years, we picked up right where we left off.

Lisa and Maria are especially close because they spent a lot of time together together during our second year at Bible college. That was easy to do because we were neighbors in the apartment complex we all stayed in.

Also, because our primary reason for being in Helsinki was to give an opportunity for our students to minister, Lisa and I were able to hang back and focus our attention on strengthening relationships with the local leaders like we did in the Highlands.

Godly Man in Government

One of those people I was able to get to know just a little is a man named Antero Laukkanen. (He’s in the middle in the photo to the right.) He is the founding pastor of Majakka Church when it started about 25 years ago.

His journey is inspiring. God told Antero to pray for Finland, specifically to pray for a room in the Parliament building where he could pray for the nation. He was not at all interested in politics when he started praying.

Even so, God provided Antero with a room and 70 pastors showed up for the first prayer meeting they held there about 20 years ago. He said they still have 20-30 pastors show up for their prayer meetings!

Now Antero is also a member of the Finnish Parliament, where he was first elected in 2015. He met with us and our team of students for a couple hours on Thursday, even though it was the last week of campaigning before their national election, which was held on Sunday. We were inspired by his journey. And we were pleased to learn he was reelected to another four year term in Parliament!

Because of his passion for praying for his nation, Antero has been invited to attend the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC by our four most recent presidents. He was the driving force behind Finland starting their own National Day of Prayer and has helped seven other countries get their own National Day of Prayer events up and running.

What’s Coming Up

Now we enter the home stretch towards our first ever graduation ceremony for Charis Bible College Dumfries. That happens the middle of next month.

The week after that we head down to England for Andrew Wommack’s Grace and Faith conference. This conference is one of our biggest student recruiting events of the year. Please pray that God will touch the hearts of many people to enroll at our Dumfries campus to get their minds renewed by the power of God’s word.

The week after that Andrew Wommack will be in Dumfries for an evening and morning Gospel Truth Seminar. That event will be held right across the street from our Charis Dumfries facility. We expect it to be another good recruiting opportunity. We appreciate your prayers for that too!

Then in June we head back to the USA for a few weeks of meetings.

As I’m sure you can appreciate, I have not had much time to work on my Rejecting Mammon book since our last newsletter. Even so, I only have gone through and made final edits to all but the last two chapters. One of my mentors has gotten back with me, and had very complimentary things to say about the book.

I will hold off releasing the book until after I hear back from my other mentor. Hopefully that will be soon. But I am respecting his very busy schedule too. Therefore I don’t want to say for sure exactly when I will publish the book.

Hopefully everything will be ready before our next newsletter! Fortunately God is faithful and I know it will be released at just the right time.

Let me close with a huge thank you to all our ministry partners. Those of you who pray for us and financially support the work we are doing are an integral part of our ministry team. We would not be able to accomplish what we do, and be so effective doing it without your support. God is producing good fruit through the work of the ministry, and you share in the reward for that.

Remember, Jesus Christ is risen! He has raised each one of us up in newness of life too.

Abundant Blessings,

Chris & Lisa Cree

P.S. We have several costs coming in the next months. Our first big expense is we will be taking our annual trip to the U.S. for five weeks. We are responsible for Lisa’s airfare, our lodging, rental car and eating expenses as we will be attending our annual Directors conference and taking care of our stateside affairs.

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NewCREEations Ministries
120 N. Elm St
Wooland Park, CO 80863