Author: Jacob & Samantha McRae

The past couple of months have marked a season of significant transition for the McRae family. If you read our last blog post, we have quite a few updates to give, so buckle up!

The first and most important update is that our family is now quite a bit larger than it was at the time of our last post.

Meet Charles (left) and James (right)!

We could not be more happy or blessed by these two beautiful boys, and we thank everyone who has been praying and helping us prepare for this moment. The delivery went well, Samantha and the boys are healthy, and the older kids are loving their new siblings. Praise God! We have also had a great amount of help with meals from our friend/work/church community here. And we also had the blessing of family coming to greet the new additions and help out.

We wanted to take a moment to update you all on three amazing answers to our prayer requests from our last blog post.

1. Our first and most important request was the safety of Samantha and the twins during delivery. We’re happy to report that all are well and there were little to no complications during the delivery process. Samantha was a champ! Praise God!
   
2. Our second request was the provision of a van because we didn’t have a vehicle to fit our growing family. God provided through the generosity of some family friends who donated their used van to us. Praise God!
   
3. Our third request was concerning the tuition for my Seminary schooling, which we had no idea how we were going to pay. But praise be to God yet again, I was able to get enough scholarships to cover my first two semesters (at which point I’ll need to re-apply). All we’ve had to pay for so far are books and student fees.

Thank you all for your prayers and support!

As for our work with Emmaus, things have been moving forward. As some of you may remember, our ministry underwent a massive transition in June due to multiple staff (including our Executive Director) following God’s call into other areas of ministry. This was not a sudden or unexpected transition–we had been working through it, and its ramifications, as a team for a considerable amount of time leading up to this moment. But it has meant that things have looked different this year in a number of ways, and there were still logistical challenges to face. Early this Fall, we were approached by our ministry’s host home, University Carillon, and were invited to provide Biblical training for their new Awakening Apprentice program.

A lot of Emmaus Ministries’ attention has been set on this program and building out new Biblical training curiculum. But that’s not all we’re doing!

I also personally had the recent privilege of speaking at our local C.S. Lewis Institute on the topic of “being transformed by Scripture.” It was an amazing group of people.

Prayer Requests and Support

1. This new season has had too many blessings to count… so many that we’re slowly being crushed by them 😉 Between kids (+newborns), work, and seminary, thing have been a bit crazy in the McRae household. Pray for our sleep, sanity, patience, and anything else good you can think of.
   
2. As always, finances remain a huge prayer point for us. It cost about $250 a month to purchase what we’ve needed for the newborns in terms of formula and diapers. This has been particularly difficult since I had to drop some of my part-time work outside of Emmaus in order to attend seminary and help with the kiddos at home, which lost us about $500 a month in income. If you or someone you know would like to consider partnering with our family financially through a one-time or recurring donation–you can do so on our Ministry’s website here.
   
3. If you would like to help support us by joining our mealtrain, it’s not too late! It has been an absolute lifesaver for us on the days when we can know that the dinner battle isn’t looming over us in the evenings. You can find our mealtrain here.

Thank you all for your support.

Love,

The McRae Family

Greetings

Hello again! Samantha and I recently posted an update sharing some big news for our family, you can read the original post here. If you’d like the short and sweet, read on!

Recap

Back in January, we felt that the Lord was inviting our family into a new season. At the time, we discerned that this May (current) would be our last month with Emmaus as I transitioned into full-time Seminary. Since then, we found out that we’re not only expecting a new family member, but twins! Because of this new development, we made some changes to our original plan. We have now committed to finish out the calendar year with Emmaus (through December) in order for us to have the twins where we are, and to give ourselves some time to acclimate to all the new challenges and rhythms of life that will accompany their arrival. But our newest piece of information is that I’ve officially been accepted to Asbury Theological Seminary! Rather than the original plan of attending full-time and on campus, I will begin part-time and online this Fall. I’m nervously-excited to begin this new journey, and I’m hopeful for whatever God has in store for our family in this season and beyond.

What’s New at Emmaus?
This month we celebrated the graduation of our School of the New Testament students. For the majority of these students, this is their second year of journeying through the Bible with Emmaus, with their first year focused on the Old Testament. We’re so proud of them and their willingness to commit two years of their lives to studying the Bible.

As a ministry, we’ve been encouraged by the fact that Bible engagement as a whole has taken a positive turn in our country recently, statistically speaking. And because engagement with the Bible has historically remained the most consistent predictor of ongoing spirtual growth and discipleship–the apparent hunger of our students and the desire for what Emmaus Ministries provides in Bible training has been incredibly encouraging lately. You can check out the most recent State of the Bible Report from the American Bible Society for a more in-depth analysis of the current trends in Bible engagement. Things are looking up!

As our 2024-25 school year came to a close and we celebrated our students’ journey through Emmaus, we also celebrated 3 of our dear friends and fellow staff members moving into new seasons of life and ministry. And while our team lineup has changed, our passion remains constant. Emmaus Ministries exists to teach people how to engage the Bible and grow as disciples, and we’re incredibly excited about the future of Emmaus as we continue our mission of helping others know God through His Word. Stay tuned for more details on the future of Emmaus, there are new and exciting things ahead!

Prayers And How You Can Help

With all the changes ahead, we desire your prayers more than ever. And aside from our constant prayers for safety and health for Samantha and the twins, here are our most pressing requests:

1. Family Van – Needing a new car feels like a running gag for our family. But with the imminent arrival of two new infants, our current obstacle is now having a car that can fit all our kids. Please pray for the McRae’s to find a van (and as our son Benaiah prayed this morning–preferably the kind that never breaks).
   
2. Seminary – While I’ve been able to recieve some scholarships for Asbury (praise God!), there’s still a lot of tuition costs that we’re honestly not sure how we’re going to pay. Please pray for the provision of finances. You can also give directly to our family by joining our support team or giving a one-time gift on our ministry’s website. Link here!

Lastly, for those of you who have asked how you can help us prepare for the arrival of the twins, you can access our Baby Registry here.

As always, thank you so much for your support, encouragments, and prayers!

– The McRae Family

Here are some recent memories from Mother’s Day, Eleanor’s Birthday, and a trip to the zoo:

Greetings

Hello Friends and Family and Happy Easter! After our last post, many of you have reached out to us to ask if there have been any recent updates concerning our future plans. For those who missed our last big blog update, you can read it here. As a brief recap, Samantha and I shared back in January that we felt God calling our family into something entirely new. The plan we shared with you all was that this would be our last school-year working with Emmaus Bible Ministries and that I (Jacob) was beginning the process of enrolling in seminary out of state.

Update

We had hoped to share an update with you all MUCH sooner, but the enrollment process into seminary has dragged on much longer than we had anticipated and we still don’t have a sure answer on that front where we had hoped to be able to give you one now. But more significantly, Samantha and I only recently discovered that God truly did have something entirely new in store for our family’s future… we just had no idea how different it would be from the plans we had in mind!

That’s right folks, we’re expecting, not one, but TWO new baby boy McRaes this Fall. It perhaps goes without saying, but twins were not on our family’s 2025 Bingo card and this has caused us to pause and re-assess what lies ahead for us and to continue discerning what the Lord is leading us into. Because the babies are due to arrive right around the time I had planned to start seminary full-time, that plan has begun to take on a new shape.

1. First, we had planned to move this summer in order for me to attend seminary full-time and on-campus in the Fall. With the new arrival of the twins in the Fall, the new plan (if my application is accepted) is to start seminary in a very limited capacity online–in the hopes that we can resume the original plan of me attending seminary in a greater capacity (and on-campus) once our family is ready to make that transition. With this plan, we will remain in Florida throughout the pregnancy and delivery, and until such time we feel it would be more practical to resume our original plan.
   
   
2. Given this extended stay in Florida, we have also decided to extend the timeline of our transition out of Emmaus. We have so far committed to remaining with Emmaus throughout the remainder of the calendar year (December 2025) and will continue to discern throughout this time what the right next steps may be. Even though we had initially felt that God was leading us to begin something new on a much quicker timeline, we LOVE Emmaus and I’m excited to be able to continue helping in whatever ways I can over this next season. As a ministry, Emmaus has some exciting things ahead, and I’m glad to be able to continue my passion of teaching the Bible while we wait upon the Lord’s timing in all this.

Prayers

Please be praying for us throughout this process, as all these decisions have felt very weighty to us and the unexpected nature of the timing still has us internally reeling in some ways. While we’re very excited for what’s ahead and we’re rejoicing over what God has already revealed concerning the future of our family–there are a lot of practical things we still need to think through and figure out. Of our many prayer requests, one of the more immediate prayer requests (which feels like a constant one for our family!) is: a vehicle. While transportation is currently not an issue for us, we do not have a vehicle that can fit four kids, and we’ll need to figure something out before the twins come.

Closing

Because this is a lot of new info for an update all by itself, I’m going to try and release another more ministry-related update in the next couple of weeks detailing some of the work and exciting things going on with Emmaus. 🙂

We love you all and we deeply appreciate your prayers and support!

– The McRae Family

Please enjoy some recent photos from our family’s Spring Break trip and Easter:

Dear friends and family,

Happy New Year! This past year at Emmaus has been a beautiful one. It’s been really special to see the specific ways God has been working in and through the various programs of Emmaus–but even on a more individual and relational level, I think God has been doing wonderful things in our personal relationship to him and in our relationships among the staff of Emmaus. It has caused me (Jacob) to reflect upon our story with Emmaus, beginning with the day I felt God calling Samantha and I to join the mission. According to my journal entries, this was on May 18, 2017. Since that time, Samantha and I have had two kids, lived in 4 different locations, and owned/drove 8 different vehicles (yes, really, the vehicle journey has been a sad one…), but we’ve also grown a lot personally in teaching, prayer, as a family, and as a husband and wife.

Over the years, Emmaus Ministries has gone through multiple evolutions. When Samantha and I first joined, it consisted of one program, our School of Biblical Studies: a one year, residential school that required 45+ hours a week of our students. Now, Emmaus has grown in resources, programs, staff, and reach. A school that used to only have 5-10 students has turned into a multi-program Bible training ministry that cumulatively reaches a couple hundred people every year. We feel incredibly grateful to have seen these changes occur and to have played some small part in them along the way. It feels like it would take forever to recount all the testimonies of students having their hearts captured by God revealed through his Word–stories that still fill our eyes with tears of joyful gratitude. 

The most exciting part of all this (though perhaps also surprising) is that God is now doing something new once again in our lives. Over the course of the past two years or so, Samantha and I have continually felt an invitation from the Lord to step into something new and out of our roles with Emmaus Ministries. More specifically, we have felt that this school year (ending in May of 2025) will be our final year working full-time with Emmaus. This discernment process has been long, confusing, and honestly very painful at times–but ultimately something that we feel is good and right and (most importantly) the Lord’s doing. We are so grateful for the community of Emmaus that has supported us, prayed with us, and cried with us along the way–in many ways, they’ve been not only our friends, but our surrogate family for the past decade. 

This blog post is one of our first attempts at making this transition out of Emmaus public, so please forgive the lack of precise details, many of which we hope to share with you as we continue down this road. To be honest, we really need your support and prayers in this. While we truly feel that the Lord has called us into something new… we’re still not fully sure of all the details of what’s ahead. As of right now, I’m currently applying for seminary with the hope of starting in the Fall of 2025. Right now, we believe this is the next step God is leading our family toward–with the hopes of a future in continuing to be a resource for the church in the realms of Bible engagement and spiritual formation. We also plan to take a yet-to-be-determined sabbatical period over the summer after this current school year ends in May.

Moving Forward

Some of you have only recently joined our support team while some others have been a part of our team since the very beginning. In both cases, we once again want to emphasize the way you’ve not only blessed our lives, but contributed to a mission far greater than just our family. Literally hundreds of people have come to experience God through the Bible because you chose to be generous and love our family with your lives and your resources. On behalf of our family and all of our students, thank you and God bless you!

Connected to this, we would also like to humbly ask that you continue your generosity toward us as we finish out our time with Emmaus and transition into what’s next. The reality is that there’s a great many unknowns still ahead of us, and if we’re honest, some measure of fear in facing the changes. While some steps have become more clear, the clarity has so far not extended to what our future financial or housing situation will be 6 months from now, and we would love your continued help and support as we look to follow the next step in God’s plan for our family.

We hope to be able to share more details for you over the course of the following weeks and months to come leading up to our departure, and we of course love to follow up with any of you on an individual level to try and respond to any specific questions you may have. For now, we ask for your continued support and prayers as our family seeks to navigate this very new territory faithfully. Despite the unknown, we love God, we trust Him, and we’re excited for what’s next.

Love,

The McRae Family

What’s New?
I’m afraid we’re long overdue for a newsletter update such as this, our apologies! I’m writing this current letter while I sit in the classroom where our School of the New Testament just had its first day. It was a day that caused me a great deal of personal reflection for a number of reasons. One of those reasons being the fact that our classroom was populated by a certain percentage of students who had just gone through our previous year’s School of the Old Testament–but we also had a number of alumni from previous years join our class once again to take on a new challenge of not only studying the Bible, but learning how to teach it themselves (a new learning track we’re piloting this year). Seeing faces from across the years of Emmaus all in one classroom, continuing to seek God through His Word, was a powerful experience!

As I was getting ready to welcome our students with a quick message about the heart of our mission and ministry, a particular passage came to mind from the book of Hebrews:

The journey that these students are about to embark on is no small thing. According to a 2021 study done by Barna, 75% of U.S. adults reported reading the Bible anywhere between once a week and never. And yet the Bible remains the most accessible source for knowing the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature through the person of Jesus. What could be more important?

Ministry Update
Below is a digital brochure you can flip through to see what else has been going on with all our staff and programs so far this year:

Personal and Family

Prayer

We’d appreciate prayers on a less fun recent development: the vehicle I used to drive every day to work recently broke down and out of necessity we had to buy a new car. While we’re super thankful that we were able to find another car, it has been an incredible financial strain for us in this season.

We’d also appreciate prayer for this future year of learning how to homeschool and also for our ministry at Emmaus, especially our staff and students.

Help Support Our Family

We’d really appreciate your support as we continue to seek God’s will for our family’s life. If you’d like to help us continue our work with Emmaus Bible Ministries, you can click here to donate online through a one-time or recurring payment. Just follow the prompts and select our names 🙂

You can also donate by mailing checks to:
Emmaus Bible Ministries
P.O. Box 620473
Oviedo, FL 32762-0473
**Please include a note with our names designating the check as staff support.

Thank you all for your continued love and support for our Family and Mission.
– The McRaes