Exciting New Beginnings

An update on our journey into full time ministry

all credit for this photo goes to the insanely talented Javier Elizalde: www.elizaldephotography.com!

This week marks an exciting milestone in our lives. Daniel has officially bid farewell to AT&T and turned his whole focus toward support raising for the IT Director role at Perspectives.

For those of you who are hearing of this for the first time, this has been a long held dream for us to be able to dedicate all our time, effort and skills to seeing God’s Kingdom come and His will done, within every peoples. We believe that God has been guiding our steps over the last 7 years and uniquely equipped us both these specific roles and the needs the ministry currently faces.

Perspectives needs the skill and dedication of Daniel and Lauren Bodnar right away! We’re poised on the brink of expanding the Perspectives movement but to accelerate that growth we must have better, sharper technical tools in order to deepen our capacity to shape lifelong passion for Christ’s global glory. Supporting their work now will bring about lasting mission commitment in many thousands of Christians for years to come.

Steve Hawthorne, Co-Editor, Perspectives Study Program

In January we set a goal to raise enough one-time donations to cover our living expenses so Daniel could resign from AT&T and finish raising the remainder of our recurring support over the next 2 quarters, with an anticipated start date of Sept 1st.

It’s been harder than we expected to balance building a support team with a full time job as a software engineer while also not neglecting our marriage / parenthood and it has taken a little longer than planned, but we made it through :)!

By God’s grace we have the next six months of living expenses covered making the transition away from AT&T possible and are at 10% of our recurring support goal. We continue to be in awe of the ways God has provided thus far and look forward expectantly, knowing that if He is calling us to this work He will also make a way forward.

Thank you to all who have already partnered with us in so many ways: through prayer, encouragement, babysitting and financial support! You are an incredible blessing from the Lord and none of this would be possible without you!

Prayer requests

The next six months are going to involve a lot of phone calls, emails and text messages to set up face-2-face meetings. Please pray for focus, perseverance and a positive outcome in that.

Daniel would like prayer specifically against perfectionism in the administrative and resources / materials. In the past it’s been easy to prioritize the quality of non-essential tasks and assignments, ultimately distracting him from making the phone calls required to reach fully-funded status.

Please also pray for our marriage during this season. That we would not neglect one another for the sake of our to do lists and that we would continue to learn to lean on one another focusing on each others strengths and not our weaknesses.

1st & 2nd Quarter Progress Report

We’ve had a full and fruitful year so far. Here’s what God’s accomplished in our lives during the first half of 2017, in no particular order.

1. By God’s grace we’ve exceeded our one-time donations goal and everything necessary to quit Daniel’s day job at AT&T. This is a huge answer to prayer because it means he can now spend all of his time focusing on getting fully-funded.
2. Daniel quit AT&T (Friday the 14th was his last day)!
3. Lauren took on a new role with the Perspectives Regional team as Coordinator of Regional Projects and has been helping the Reg. Director with a myriad of events and new projects in the works.
4. Daniel has begun joining in on the national team weekly tech meetings which has allowed him to get acclimated to the team and also created the first version of an IT Roadmap to document his vision and goals so the team can get a head-start planning things while he’s raising support.
5. Lauren served as a loop coordinator for 3 Tarrant County classes this past semester. In these classes 61 new students graduated and are praying over their next steps.
6. Daniel built an internal software application for Frontier Ventures (parent org to Perspectives) that automates the process of emailing out hundreds of ministry account expense reports (that was previously done one at a time by hand).
7. Selah mastered potty training! PRAISE THE LORD!
8. Building relationships with 3 families in our neighborhood and looking for opportunities to serve them and share the gospel.

Q3 Vision and Goals

Here’s what we’re working on over the next quarter. Please join us in prayer as we commit these to the Lord for the glory of His name.

1. 50% fundraised: Our primary focus for this next quarter is to reach 50% of our recurring donations goal. We’re currently sitting at 10%, so please pray for additional partners to join our team.
2. Quarterly Investor Updates: We’ll be sending out quarterly “investor updates” to keep you informed of the fruit God’s producing through us with your generous partnership. We know each one of you is inundated with opportunities to invest in Kingdom work (locally and cross-culturally), and each one of us have been commanded by God to be good stewards of the resources He’s entrusted to us, so we want to keep you informed of the fruit of your investment.
3. News and Updates: We’re going to be working on publishing short “morsel” updates here on Medium for anyone who’s interested in more frequent updates. These may include things like misc prayer requests, occasional family pictures, or even random guest posts from people impacted by our ministry.
4. Others: There are many other goals planned for the 3rd quarter (especially for Lauren) but these are the major goals we are committing to for now, and any additional accomplishments will be included in the next Q3 Investor Update email.

“And they conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.” Revelations 12:11

Thank You’s and Accolades

Words fall indescribably short of articulating just how blessed we are by each one of our partners and want to take a moment to express how thankful we are for each one of you.

We pray daily that God would produce fruit through the work of our hands to raise up millions of believers to taking His Gospel to every corner of the earth (both locally and globally) so that the knowledge of the glory of God will cover the earth as the water covers the sea, and He would redeem for himself people from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation by the blood of the Lamb and you would receive an overflowing return on your investment and partnership with us.

This would not be possible without you.

Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest! And he who reaps receives wages, and gathers fruit for eternal life, that both he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together.

John 4:35–36

If you are interested in linking arms together with us, we’d love to break bread with you and share specifics about what God has called us into, and why we quit an amazing job to step into a full time ministry position as the IT Director at Perspectives.

If we’ve already had that conversation and you’re just looking for where to do that at, here’s the link: https://secure.frontierventures.org/donate/details/2028