Tag Archives: Bristol

August Travels

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Dear Friends and Family:  photo

The Philmont Community Healing Day was beautiful, thank you for your prayers. The Holy Spirit filled the pavillion, lots of little and big children comfortably  enjoyed being there, sat rapt.. listening to the worship music and occasionally making art that got pinned up on the stage for all to see.  One young man made a decision that day to quit drugs and he started at teen challenge the following week. Please keep him in prayer for full recovery and for he and his two local friends who have also gotten off drugs to receive all the support they need to stay clean.

Michael is helping with two more community outreaches in September being organized by an ad hoc group of pastors working under the name of, ‘God Belongs in Our County.’ It is a small beginning but these outreaches are gathering steam and inviting people to work together from different streams.photo
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A sad note: one of our friends from when we held the Revival in Philmont about 6 years ago, a lovely lady in a wheelchair died suddenly when she was hit by a car last week in the village. At the revival she was powerfully touched by God and ever afterwards was active in the local church and ministered to the local kids on a daily basis. She was loved by many. By the grace of God, we just happened to be coming home from out of town that night, dropped in at the Cumberland Farms to pick up milk and heard that she had been hit.  As we drove home, we saw her, still at the street corner, with the police and a small crowd. We ran over and prayed with her.  She said to Michael “Don’t stop praying”.  She looked ok and refused to go to the hospital, but after Michael and her friend Skip helped her get home, she decided to call an ambulance. She kept saying to Michael, ‘Don’t stop praying.’ She died that night. She is missed by many._MG_7597 (1)

This month we will be going to the UK for our niece’s wedding in Leeds. We will be in Bristol for a very quick visit on August 29. Then up to Leeds on August 30. Let us know if you’re in Bristol and would like a quick cup of tea and catch up!ChristineHales_SavetheDate

I’m having an exhibition of my paintings at the McDaris Gallery in Hudson in September and will give a talk there on September 26.

We love you, pray for you and thank you for your prayers. With God’s help we can bring his Kingdom here on earth.  Don’t stop praying!

“Because of Christ and our faith in him, we can now come fearlessly into God’s presence, assured of his glad welcome.”  Ephesians 3:12

Love and Prayers, Christine and Michael

www.christinehales.com              www.mickhales.com                          www.newchristianicons.com    www.americanassociationoficonographers.com

 

Graduation and Pentecost!

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Hello Friends and family:photo copy 5

Last Friday night was our Kingdom School Graduation at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church, Colonie, NY.  Our speaker was David Graham, a youth minister with  Victory Church in Albany. photo copy 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9Ew73YeNmQ We are so happy to have been able to watch our students grow in spiritual maturity, understanding, and experience.  They are all interns with the youth ministry at Christ the King Spiritual Life Center in Greenwich, NY.  Summer Camp will be very blessed this summer by their work with the youth!

Michael participated in the National Day of Prayer rally on May 1 in Catskill. Here’s a link to a short video. So important to pray for our country, and for other countries.  photo copy 2

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We were blessed with a visit from Pastor Dr. Tom Litteer and his beautiful wife, Marilyn.  They will removing back to their native Iowa so we wanted to have some time to show them our part of New York before they left. We visited Thomas Cole House in Catskill and also Olana – Frederick Church’s mansion in Hudson.

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I gave a talk at WAAM-Woodstock Artists Association Museum this month on Icons and contemporary art. It was well attended and I think people were excited to think about Icons alongside artists like Chagall, Matisse, etc.  The exhibition of icons at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Woodstock was very well received too. I was invited to speak there twice, and we blessed the icons when the exhibition was over.

My Pope Francis is above!

“Blessed is the person who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him.”  Jeremiah17:7  My drawing of Lincoln: photo copy 8

Bristol 2014 Pentecost Celebrations

Our friends in Bristol are still carrying on Revival in GB, and we are so happy to see how it is developing and growing.

Michael met Rodney Howard Brown recently in Baltimore and ministered in the streets with him and his team. Rodney is spending time in Washington DC and putting his prayer focus on Congress and the military. Here is a link:https://www.facebook.com/pages/Rodney-Adonica-Howard-Browne/31553452437

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Until next month, here is a blessing I would like to give you:

“I bless you with a strong sense in your Spirit of standing on the solid rock of God’s faithfulness and timing.  I bless you with unshakeable confidence that your Father is in charge of your circumstances.  I  bless you with allowing your Father to replace your burden with His faith, your disappointment with His hope, your doubts with His love. ”            ( excerpts from Arthur Burk”s  “Blessing Your Spirit” book.)

Please keep us in your prayers – we can feel the blessings everyday from your prayers and you are in ours,

In His love,photo copy 6

Christine and Michael

 

 

 

 

Hello England!

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Dear Friends and Family:

We have just – last night- returned from our UK mission and have lots of good news to share.  In Bristol, there were prophetic declarations at the river gate, the exchange of the prayer baton to coincide with the passing of the Olympic torch through Bristol, a Praise bus on College Green playing praise music all afternoon preceding the Olympic Torch, and of course the Arise conference on Pentecost.  

It was really great to see some of our old friends and spend time praying together over the week.  When the Olympic torch came through Bristol we did a lot of prayer, particularly on Hanham Mount – John Wesley’s place of preaching to people of  Bristol.  You could look down across Bristol from there and several of us prayed for breakthrough in Bristol and for re-opening the gates as Wesley had done before us.  This photo is of the New Room- Wesley’s first chapel where the prayer baton was passed and we had worship to commemorate the event.

Over 6000 people and 75 church leaders across the denominations assembled at Ashton Gate Stadium for an afternoon of prayer and declaration over Bristol.  I was asked to give a prophetic workshop for the children to listen to hear God’s word for Bristol.  Some beautiful responses from the children but one in particular showed an arrow pointing forward said,”… the ministers in Bristol have done enough.  Now God is going to do a new thing, and for them to keep going, onward to the “new thing” God has for Bristol”.

Sheena Tranter who was our partner in the House of prayer we had in Bristol was the carrier of the vision for Arise Bristol.  She and her teams of intercessors organized all these events which we know will have lasting effect in the Kingdom for Bristol.

England is preparing for the Queen’s 60th year jubilee this coming Sunday and everywhere there are flags and bunting. Especially in the shops and streets of London where a floatilla will be on the Thames Sunday afternoon. Through the last 60 years there has been incredible change in England. In terms of Christianity there has certainly been a shift to a secular society in that time. There has also been a large influx of ethnic groups bringing in their own forms of religion. At the moment one can see them co existing with toleration on all sides but it does not mean that it will always be the case, especially if Northern Nigeria and the Sudan are examples of what can happen after a tipping point has occurred. So the work for the Kingdom of God that is going on now in England is particularly important and there are many signs that revival is imminent. Certainly what has just happened in Bristol probably could not have happened a year ago. This is being repeated all over the country to some degree or another as the prayer baton precedes the Olympic torch. People are gathering in the streets and gates of cities interceding and declaring. We just pray for more of the presence of God in that nation as the cry to ‘Awake, Awake, Awake’ is beaten into the soil by praying intercessors.

We also heard from our London friends that 16,000 people filled Earl’s Court Stadium to worship God the Friday before Pentecost in London.   

We left Bristol on Monday morning to head up to London to visit with our friend Keong who has a heart for hosting missionaries.

We were so blessed by our visit and particularly want to thank all those who have been praying for us and also have been directly supporting us in this mission.  We remarked every day how blessed we felt and how grateful we were.  We could feel your prayers!

Love you guys!

Here is a link to the Arise Bristol video from Bristolnetworks  :  Arise Bristol and Beyond

Thanksgiving!

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Dear Friends and Family:

As November draws to a close, we have so much to be grateful for.  

Having Thanksgiving in Boston with our son, daughter-in-law and new grand daughter was delightful!  Being able to visit my mother who is recovering well from a broken hip and seeing her smiling, settling in back at our house, seeing old friends and making new friends.

But I wonder if you are experiencing the battles and seemingly unending difficulties that we are?  It’s almost becoming funny, that the moment we solve one huge problem and feel we can relax-BOOM!- another one hits.

And they all seek to distract us from the things that really ARE important.  Like prayer, worship, fellowship with God.  

This is our back garden – can you see the little deer?  There’s a family of them that live back there by the cross.  In a way, our succeeding in all the recent battles secures the safety of their home.   I think that is the way of intercessory prayer, too.  People willingly taking up the battle in prayer wins
peace for many others who are unaware of what it costs.      We are praying with a couple of icons these days -like this detail of Saint Anthony, the father of monasticism.

He was a great intercessor for his time and withstood many temptations and assaults from the demons. In 2 Chronicles 5:13 when Solomon completed the House of the Lord, and brought the Ark of the covenant in, it was the duty of of the trumpeters and singers to praise the Lord saying “For He is good, for His steadfast love endures forever.”  I think this is the task – no matter how awful the onslaught is, to sing praise that God is good, He is always good, and His steadfast love endures forever.  When the people praised God with those words, the Glory of the Lord came down and filled the temple.

We are the Temple and what could be  better than being filled with the Presence of the Lord?  This photo is from the blessing of the icons and the iconographers’ hands at Saint Nicholas’ Church where I teach, in Cohoes last month. It was a joy and honor to be there.

We are planning for  a January start for a house Church in our home in Philmont, a small discipleship group, and Michael will be doing some Bible teaching.  We plan to be praying and asking to see if God is calling us to start a Global Awakening satellite school of ministry in this area in September.

Back in Bristol, we are so encouraged by all the prayer efforts that are happening there. It seems that people are uniting across the denominations to pray together – outside and inside churches. Dec 1 there is a UK wide prayer on the streets which some of our friends in Bristol are participating in, and John Mulinde’s World Trumpet Mission is having a strong prayer presence too.  There are many more prayer events and we are really thrilled to hear about each one, and we pray together with each one.   

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We are also seeing a very powerful presence of the Lord in some of the prayer meetings at St. Michael’s Church in Colonie and experienced being held on the floor by His Presence. We have both started prayer walking on the streets and find it a way to hear God’s heartbeat for the village. There was recently a death in this community which has shaken the village as it happened so quickly and it has opened up opportunities for us to pray for people. It has also revealed a strong masonic presence in the village. The words keep coming to my mind as we discern what God is doing here from a prayer session in June, “Build an Ark, in Philmont. A place of my powerful presence.” So we ask for your prayers for this that we would build God’s ark here, it so desperately needs it.

I prayed for a lady in the drug store in Boston the other day for her broken wrist, she literally said before I started to pray for her, ‘I wish someone would come along and bless me and get rid of all these demons attacking me.’ God had it all planned for me to be there. We always need to remember God has so much more for us than we can possibly imagine and when it seems to be so dark we need to hold on to God with all our heart, for He is really all there is and His love endures forever.

We hope you have a Happy Christmas with the true blessings of the good news of the birth of Jesus Christ our savior, born so humbly yet full of so much power in each of our lives today.

PS  We REALLY want and need your prayers!!! It makes a huge difference!!  And we will continue to pray for you too!           Love,            Christine and Michael.