Animari Mission – Report for the six months ended 31 December 2024

Rather than send out a regular newsletter, we aim to write fuller reports but less regularly.  The nature of our ministry is that things tend to make more sense when considered over a longer period of time and there’s more to say.  If we did this more regularly, we would be sharing bits of information but without really communicating the whole story.  Reporting every six months allows us to write longer and share the whole story without being repetitive. 

Our ministry has become significant enough to formalise our reporting and this is therefore the first formal report. 

As a point of principle, we are sustainable in the sense that the ministry is supported financially by our family’s business interests.  We therefore do not currently seek donation support, but more importantly we do not charge for any of the things we do.  We believe it is important that Animari’s ministry operates in a way that enables us to help people the Lord brings us without needing to consider money.

At Animari, we currently have five main areas of activity:

-              Ministering to ministries

-              Supporting organisations and leaders

-              Training and development resources

-              Supporting worship

-              Redeeming and developing land.

We cover each of these in turn below.  But overall, there has been a lot going on.  Unusually for our mission, the recent period has been much heavier on the training and development resources.  This has impacted the amount of time spent on the other areas, but the feedback we are receiving so far from people on the material we have produced is very encouraging.  We hope it will be a blessing for people’s walk with the Lord!  It should certainly help us in our other ministry areas.

Ministering to Ministries

There has been a lot going on in this area, even though this ministry is relatively new for us.  We are working with a number of ministry leaders, whom the Lord has brought to us.  We’ve found that their needs are quite varied, and when the support is given that they need, it is proving transformational. 

We’ll say more about this part of the ministry next time, as the nature of what we are doing involves individual stories and as such we have to be careful what we say.  However, to illustrate an important link between different parts of the ministry, much of the development and testing of the God’s calendar work is coming practically from this area. 

Supporting Organisations and Leaders

We have had a fairly normal level of mentoring and support to leaders in the most recent period.  Generally we are working with between 10 and 20 individuals at any point in time.  Much of our work has been applying the thinking laid out in our paper on the training and development resources section. 

Rather than talk about individual stories, what is interesting is there are a couple of themes emerging, we believe, in this work:

-              The idea of being in order is becoming more urgent/important.  We are seeing the Lord make clear how important it is not to let little stuff go that isn’t quite right.  Being intolerant of things that can be undermining is important.  Once the “worm” is in, it doesn’t go away by itself, even though often people behave like they believe it will.

-              People are giving a lot more thought to the balance between tent-making and ministry.  We’ll write more on this next time.

The bigger development is we are working on the Board of a ministry to help with a transition and specifically to keep faith at the heart of the ministry.  We have learned a lot about how to apply our experiences and thinking through a Board process, and mentoring of the leader in that context.  We believe this will move into another very important area of faith that is not – to our knowledge – generally considered by a Board.  We are very excited by this development and will share more when we’ve done more.   

We believe the Board work could be valuable for other Boards but how the Lord wants us to do this we do not know yet.  More on this when He tells us.

Training and Development Resources

We have seen the development of a significant amount of resources during the period.  This has been very God-led!  The entire covenant series, the work on reading the Bible and sound doctrine, and the paper on “where is God going with this?” were all written and issued during the six months. 

Even more, all of the development work on God’s Calendar was done during this period.  This has been a significant undertaking – much more will occur on this during 2025.

It is worth telling some of the stories around why we are developing this material.

One of the things that became clear in our work with organisations is that often we would meet people who are “business mature” but “faith immature”.  So they were very capable people who just hadn’t managed to develop their faith significantly.  One of the reasons this has been a struggle is the ability to absorb what the Bible is telling them.  Whether it should or it shouldn’t, this seems to impact their prayer lives.

The Foundations of Faith series was developed specifically to help provide the foundation in the faith to kickstart how they may read the Bible and a more vibrant prayer life.  We then added the paper on reading the Bible that gives suggested books to help understand things like Jewish culture, etc that is important in reading the Bible.  But the real objective was to get them to a point where they can engage with the covenant and shepherds work, as in our view understanding those principles is critical to walking out Jesus’s commands.

Similarly, part of the challenge for these people is to help them understand sound doctrine, and what the New Testament is teaching about how the should approach their lives with the Lord, in a way that honours the Lord’s commands “not being burdensome”.  That led us to develop the paper on doctrine.  But this single paper was underpinned by significant study into the New Testament letters that are focused on dealing with behavioural issues in the early church.  The findings of this are used in the doctrine paper to summarise a simple way of thinking about what the Lord is asking of us.

Separately, the work on God’s calendar has been very involved and we have been living it out in our own family for much of 2024.  But the work was really pulled together in recent months.  It is a substantial piece of work and speaks for itself.  We will spend probably most of 2025 understanding the specific nuances of each month and will write significantly more in light of that understanding.  We believe there is something very fundamental in the calendar that is well worth everyone understanding in the journey with the Lord.

We think the basic idea underlying all of this comes back to the nature of God’s will.  One of the problems we find in our work is that people misunderstand – or think unhelpfully – about God’s will.  They see it as aspirational – “God’s will for my life is…”  As if it’s a choice, such that the wrong choice by you could subvert God’s will.  In our view that’s a wrong and unhelpful way of thinking about God’s will.  It is better thought of as a river that you can choose to get into.  By all means, you can choose not to get in, or to swim against it, but the river is going to flow whether you like it or not.  It’s a force of nature and it’s part of the system.

In the same way, God has designed our calendar in such a way that different things are favoured at different times of the year.  Want to celebrate freedom?  Do it in April (or more precisely the Jewish month that follows Passover).  Want to pray through honour?  January.  Focus on the awe in the Lord?  December.  Because God’s timings are forces and you can choose to get with the program or not, but it’s going to happen as He’s designed, not as you choose.  This work is an ongoing undertaking for us and we will share more as we develop the ideas.

Supporting Worship

We ran a major worship event with Everfree ministry in July, help at Kevin Charles Salon.  We want to do more of this type of work, where we bring together worship and business, at the business location.  We believe that businesses can and should be houses of worship and we want to do everything we can to help this to happen.

We have also continued to support worship leaders operating in different countries and different approaches to worship. 

Our activities in worship have be less than usual because of the focus on training and develop resources.

Redeeming and developing land

We have had a lot of work done at our Asheville location.  It is mountain land (as doubtless you can see from the pictures on the website!).  So the first step is to clear the land and build the paths/roads through the land so we can develop it.  That has been a significant undertaking, but is now largely complete.

We have a God story to share with you on this.  Our ministry partner Chris, who is doing the work on the land, was there during the hurricane that devastated North Carolina.  He was prevented from working on the land for a few days, and was concerned he had lost time, and that some of the work he had already done would be ruined.  But in fact, what happened was the work he had done was impacted, so the storm reinforced it.  Also, the trees that Chris was seeking to remove were removed by the storm, and only those trees!  The work the storm did was equivalent to the work that Chris would have done in the time he was confined to the trailer. 

Our next step was to determine where to build the house of worship, but from the pictures on the website you can now see the Lord has told us.  So we are waiting now to hear what He wants us to build!

Summary

This has been a productive period for the ministry and we are thankful to the Lord for His guidance, insight and wisdom, and His ability to surprise us!  We are also thankful to all of our partners and supporters for their commitment and willingness to go on this journey with us.

Until next time!

Becky and Mike Faulkner