Their hospitality and welcoming spirit toward our team blew us away. As some of you know Steinbach is actually home to NET iNFUSE team 2, so the parish was already anticipating us. The iNFUSE team had also been preparing for our arrival by promoting us.
We were featured in the newspaper and James was able to do a promotion for the Youth Rally on the local radio station.
We started the week off with the Parish Mission. These are always a joy because of the parishioners that come out. They were enthusiastic and so welcoming and their smiles always make us feel like we are making a difference. We had three great nights.
On Friday was our Youth Rally. Our venue was a huge Mennonite Church that is next door to Christ Our Savior Parish. Steinbach has a strong Christian community so the iNFUSE team invited all of the youth groups of the city out to the rally. There ended up being 250 people! It was amazing to have so many faith-filled people from the Catholic Church and different Christian denominations all praising together and just having a great time. There was even a youth minister from a different church that was saying that he was so happy that NET team had come to Steinbach because he had never learned so much about the Catholic church before and that he is going to be sad when they leave. He was also very interested in Massive Worship's mission because he was also a musician.
Then on the weekend we put on a Massive Worship Encounter weekend, which consists of talks, sessions, and instrument training.
There were basically two main groups, teens and seniors. We worked with both choirs and the whole group was open and enthusiastic from the beginning. One senior lady was even moved to tears at the end of the first night when we all prayed together. It was just an awesome weekend all around.
A few days after this weekend, the choir director of the ladies choir gave Riane a call. Riane was the leader of the vocal workshop, along with Christian. The director said that the ladies came to choir practice and they all did the warm ups they learned on the weekend and they were all talking about how they could redo all of the songs and layer their voices and do more phrasing. The choir director said that Christian and Riane had a huge impact on the choir and she affirmed them on their work. She also went on to say that she had such a good week and was so impressed with all of the events that she went to. She was very thankful and concluded that, “MW doesn’t stand for Massive Worship, but miraculous works.”
It was a bit sad to leave because we had made so many great friendships among the whole entire Parish. There were definitely a few tears shed saying goodbye.
Well I guess that wraps it up, since being in Steinbach we have made our way back to Ontario, and I just wanted to mention something that I think is really cool:
While on our travel days, we always stop for gas, the cool thing about these two gas stops that is that people recognized that we were Netters, even if they didn’t necessarily know what NET is.
The first was a man at a gas station, I don’t exactly remember the name of the place, but it must be a stop for a lot of NET teams because he asked where we were headed and then said that he had seen a lot of NET vans over his years working at this gas station and was beginning to recognize the vans. It was so exciting. The second was a woman working at 7/11. She asked us if we were Netters, we said yes and she had actually hosted Netters four years ago and she didn’t remember the name but she was able to describe one of the people who she hosted. We easily identified this living room “Good Morning Baltimore” singer as staff member Caitlyn Bondy and had a good laugh.
These two encounters just made me so happy that people all across Canada are recognizing our ministry. Even if most of them do work at gas stations.
I wish you all a very prayerful Holy Week and a Happy Easter!
God Bless,
Brandi Olson
Definitely what I have been aspiring to be: a famous living room singer!
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