Our Mission
The Word of God and the Presence of God are the most life changing, powerful, restorative things we have ever encountered. The Word of God was left for us by Jesus, in the form of the Bible, to be taught and preached to us. The Spirit of God was given to us in the person of the Holy Spirit to be our comforter and guide. Access to both is provided by through the work of Jesus by receiving His free gift of a renewed relationship with God that is no longer tainted by guilt and shame.
The mission of
Bruised Reed Ministries
Is to provide tools and services to Christians and to those seeking God that will inspire them to seek an intimate relationship with God and experience his loving kindness. Our desire is for all to receive the abundant and fruitful life on this earth that He longs to give to all who turn to Him and ask.
The vision of
Bruised Reed Ministries
Is to provide tools and services to Christians and to those seeking God that will supplement the offering provided by churches. BRM is not an alternative to church, but a supplement. There are some benefits from living segmented lives in which awareness of God is present on Sundays and at religious events, but they do not compare to the comfort, healing, peace and power to live a fulfilled life that one experiences when The Word and The Holy Spirit are regular parts of our lives when we are away from church. We hope tools and services we provide will encourage more people to integrate God, his help, his word, and his presence into their daily lives.
The tools and services BRM provides make the Word of God in its preached form and presence of God in the person of the Holy Spirit accessible to more people, with more consistency. Technology enables BRM to do this by allowing us to provide The Word in clearer, easier to understand forms without losing the power of the presenter.
The Word of God
The Word of God has life changing, life altering power. The power of God’s word to heal and redeem is something that many people are unaware of. I’ve been a Christian for forty years but did not fully experience this power until the last ten years of my Christian journey. I was in many aspects of my life in bondage, including financial, sexual, mental, and emotional, despite being a devout Christian who was in love with God. I even went through a period of hopelessness, marked not by bemoaning how terrible life was, but by living a numb life, without much enjoyment, fulfillment or hope that it could truly be better. I was content to accept that I had failed God, people, and myself, that I had wasted my potential, and that I would never enjoy the abundant life on earth that Jesus promises to those who believed in Him. I was prepared to simply live my life as best I could and then go to heaven.
But as I began to read the word and listen to the preach word, and learn how to appropriate it in both selection and persistence, my hope and my life were restored. I have more peace, laughter, joy, patience and goodwill towards others than I’ve ever had. I am excited about this life and not just the next one to come. The most unusual thing is that, despite the fact that the world has grown scarier over my lifetime, I feel safer than I have ever been. It is all because of the power of God’s word and God showing me how to appropriate it. I fervently hope that BRM can assist you and others to have more abundant life in the same way that I have been helped.
The Spirit of God
God will make Himself known to you in a way that is experiential, nearly physical, so you will know that He is speaking to you and that He is with you. These encounters strengthen your trust and assurance that He is on your side. Being in his manifest presence for short periods of time has a profoundly transformational effect on us and gives us the strength and ability to fully experience life. Over the past century, there has been rapid acceptance of the Holy Spirit’s manifest presence among all Christian denominations, following centuries of dispute and controversy regarding God’s manifestation of Himself in this way.
God’s presence brings comfort, healing, guidance, peace, a clear vision for one’s life, and mental clarity. Even though many individuals have experienced these manifestations of God over the past 100 years, many remain reluctant to receive the Holy Spirit in this concrete form and collaborate with Him in day-to-day living. The goal of one branch of our ministry (Sycamore Tree Ministries) is to assist individuals in taking a step toward partnership with the Holy Spirit by walking alongside them through the process and demonstrating the advantages of the Holy Spirit’s manifest presence in actual worship sessions in their homes. Personally, I don’t think I could have survived without experiencing the Holy Spirit in this manner. BRM is dedicated to assisting others in reaping His blessings. It’s difficult to describe. For this reason, we try to show people the way rather than directing them to the Bible passages or making attempts to verbally explain it.
Access to God
Since I was a teenager, I’ve dealt with low self-esteem and shame. Sometimes my esteem issues had crippling effects, such as depression and feelings of failure. Inside, I knew that I wasn’t experiencing life to the fullest and living up to my potential. I simply was not the person that I somehow knew deep inside God created me to be. And this knowing was often torment, frustration, and at times, a loss of hope. Despite becoming a Christian over 40 years ago, I endured this bondage for the first 30 of those years. I knew I had Christ. I knew he loved me. I knew I was redeemed. I knew I would go to heaven. Yet, I wasn’t close to experiencing the abundant life that he died to give me.
Coupled with my self-shame was a shame of being a Christian, for being a Christian, with all of its many benefits, also draws unavoidable persecution and criticism. So the shame of myself and the shame of my faith were tied together, inhibiting and strangling my self-expression. To not be self-expressed is a deplorable state of existence, for it feels like dissatisfaction with who God made you. It’s a feeling of brokenness, incompleteness, and a deep sense that God made a mistake with you and that there was no hope. And there’s nothing that destroys a human being like hopelessness. Hope is what keeps us alive when things don’t look like they should in our lives. With no hope, there’s only one road to take, and that’s giving up. I believe hopelessness is the predecessor to death. And if it’s not physical death, you’ll just experience life as the walking dead, numb, with very little joy and very little happiness.
My deliverance began when I truly began to understand Jesus’s death on the cross and God’s unconditional love and forgiveness, which had nothing to do with my successes and failures but was solely a gift from Him. In our faith, it can be difficult to fully embrace God’s unconditional love. God created us to exercise dominion over our lives and our surroundings. The part of us that wants to accomplish on our own without partnership with God is very strong. When we fail or fall short after giving it everything we have, shame is waiting to condemn us. In God’s perfect timing, He introduced me to the preaching and teachings of men and women who had experiences like mine and whom God also set free from condemnation and shame.
Experiencing shame for such a long period of my life has given me a deep appreciation for the freedom that Christ has delivered me into. It has created in me a burning passion to prevent this from happening to others and to help set free those who are suffering from the same thing. This is at the heart of my calling to ministry. Because of what I’ve been through, I long for anybody who lives in shame and low self-esteem to be set free, and I know Christ is the answer. And I know that freedom, self-expression, and God-expression are the antithesis of the numbness and hiding that are the fruits of shame and low self-esteem. Our mission is to help people fully embrace the work of the cross and forgiveness of sins, and all of the benefits—the healing, freedom, and abundant life that it brings. We do this by properly teaching the efficacy of the cross and the correct understanding of what Jesus meant when He said that our sins are forgiven.