Author: Jacob & Samantha McRae

Verse to consider: 1 John 3:23-24
“And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God, and God in him. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us.”

School Update
It’s been well over a month since our last update, but not without reason! Our Spring Semester has ended and we wanted to wait until we could give one conclusive update for all that has happened and what is to come.

Before classes ended, Samantha and I had another opportunity to teach. I began by teaching the book of 1 John, and Samantha taught 2 and 3 John.

These books are so rich in statements concerning truths about Jesus and our identity as believers. 1 John in particular seems to serve almost as a list of “creedal” statements by which believers may look for guidance and assurance; “By this we know…” being a key repeated phrase to John’s writing.

One of the duties that Samantha and I share is to cook breakfast for the students and staff before each class, so the students decided to bless us in return and cook breakfast for us on our last class day!

We wrapped up the semester with a week of “debrief” for our students, where we took the time to affirm them and reflect on all that they had learned from their journey through the New Testament. What an amazing group of disciples they’ve been!

And finally, we held an end of semester celebration for our students where we invited all of our local ministry partners and the student’s families. We’re so proud of these students!

Summer Plans
Heading into summer, we (Emmaus Ministries staff) will be busy planning for our next semester. Not only will we have students from our current semester returning to study the Old Testament, but we will be adding a handful of new students that we’ve accepted to attend our next semester. It’s going to be a full classroom! As many of you know, we spent last summer doing a lot of planning and restructuring of our school to make it what it is today, and now we will look at fine tuning our program from all that we’ve learned. Please pray that God will continue to lead us and bless Emmaus Ministries as we do our best to help others know God through his Word.

Along with preparations for Fall semester, Samantha and I will being doing a bit of traveling in order to visit friends and family and work on raising support. Between the 4th-18th of June, Samantha and I will be traveling to Homer, AK to stay with family there.  And then we will be traveling to Virginia around the first two weeks of July. All of you from either of these places, we’d love to connect with you!

Our Fall semester will pick back up on August 13th.

Prayer Requests and Baby news
Samantha is currently in her 27th week of pregnancy and is doing awesome! She’s such a trooper!

We’d love for your prayers for her especially as we look to our traveling plans and think about her comfort. Along with that, we’d also appreciate your continued support as we are still trying to find a more agreeable living situation. Simply, we need to increase our monthly donations in order to afford alternate housing. We’re currently living on about $1500 a month. And with your help, we’d love to see that amount reach $3000! If you’d like to contribute to our mission, please take a moment to visit our donation page.

Also, if you would like to contribute by helping us prepare for our new baby, you can also visit our baby registries at Target and Amazon:

Click here for Target registry
Click here for Amazon registry

Thank you all so much for the encouragement and support that you’ve shown us, we could never express how much it has ministered to our hearts and blessed our lives.
– Jacob and Samantha McRae

More Pictures

Verses to Consider: James 2:14-17
“What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”

Hello to our readers once again! As our title suggests, the last month has been a crazy whirlwind of various events. We’ve had some ups, downs, anxieties, joys, and we’re happy to be writing to you now as we look back and see God’s faithfulness.

Here are a lot of pictures to show you our recent life!

Samantha and I cook breakfast for our students before each class. We often have to improvise when finding space to cook…

Over Spring Break, we decided to visit Virginia to see my family. Unfortunately, an hour into the trip our car broke down and we had to wait 4 hours for a $1200 fix. Those were our faces of determination on the left. But as you can see on the right, we eventually made it to Virginia and had a nice time with family.

We were also able to see our baby nephew and help my parents put together some new furniture for the church’s nursery.

After that, we celebrated our good friend, Tom Philips, as he completed his ordination ceremony to become a priest, and attended his first Easter Service.

We then were blessed with the opportunity to accompany some friends to St. Simon’s Island for the weekend, where we also happened to help the same friend, a member of our  staff, propose to his girlfriend. Woo!
We came back from our island getaway weekend on Sunday and I taught the book of James that Monday. Whew!

Prayer Requests/Other News
Over the next three weeks Samantha and I will have a few more notable events that we would love your prayer for: 1. We have family visiting from Alaska for the next 2 weeks, pray for their safe travels! 2. We’re also hosting one of our Emmaus Ministries Narrative Series lectures. For this particular lecture, we are taking 45+ people from local churches and the community on a 3 hour overview of the Life and Ministry of John. This will include all of his Biblical works: the Gospel of John, 1-3 John, and Revelation. Please pray for a blessing over this night, that we would be able to help our community grow in their knowledge of God’s Word. 3. On the 30th, exactly 3 weeks from today, I will be teaching another book for our school, please pray for me as I try to faithfully prepare my lecture!

Also, as most of you know, Samantha and I are in the midst of expecting our first child (due Sept. 2). Please pray for our hearts and minds as we do what we can to prepare ourselves for parenthood. Along with that, please pray as we seek to increase our monthly donation income, so we can move out of our single room and have more space for a baby (and our sanity).

If you are interested in helping us through donating, we’d love to talk with you and answer any question you might have. If you’re ready right now, you’ll find instructions on how to give here.

Thank you!
– Jacob and Samantha McRae

Verse to Consider: 2 Corinthians 2:14-15,
 “But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.“

Greetings and Testimony
Hello readers and welcome to our monthly update! Samantha and I are continually being reminded of the encouraging and generous hearts that surround us as we work here in Florida with Emmaus Ministries, and we are eternally grateful!

We love our job! It’s difficult for us to express the level of joy that comes from being able to take an active part in seeing lives transformed by the gospel on a daily basis. It’s so easy to take for granted the power of knowing God through His Word.  Samantha and I both went through this transformation when we became students of the Emmaus School of Biblical Studies, and we’re so excited to now work as staff, helping to equip people with tools, in order to more effectively study God’s Word.

You’ve heard all of this from me before, and since I can’t do it justice, we’d like to share with you a testimony from one of our current students, Morgan Phaneuf. We had recently asked Morgan if she would be willing to briefly share how this school has impacted her, and this was her reply:

“Most often, we aren’t aware when we are in the midst of a moment or experience that is shaping us into the person we will become. I don’t mean things like weddings, births, or deaths, but more the things that happen that deeply and truly impact the way we see the world around us. The things that dictate how we relate to other people, how we see ourselves, how we interact with life in general, are usually things that are reflected on later, rather than watched in real time. My name is Morgan Phaneuf, and I have the honor and the unexpected privilege of actively participating in one of those experiences in real time. Emmaus School of Biblical Studies has changed not only the trajectory of my own life, but also, how I see myself and more importantly, understanding how my Creator sees me.

I’m a very nontraditional student, my husband and I have been married almost 11 years and we have two children, an 8 year old boy and a 6 year old girl. I’m not fresh from a DTS (Discipleship Training School), I don’t have a passion for missions (in the traditional sense of the word), I’m a stay at home mom. However, I knew that my Bible was supposed to mean something to me, and it just didn’t. I wasn’t just Biblically illiterate, I was Biblically ignorant. I couldn’t have discussions with my children after church on Sundays because they were learning stories I had never heard, Keep in mind, I have been a believer for almost 15 years! Emmaus has pioneered a way for people just like me, your average mom, to know my Bible in a way that was absolutely not accessible to me before.

There is no way for me to express how just 3 short months have changed my life. I could go on for hours about revelations, surprises, frustrating passages and truths that I have needed to hear my entire life! However, there’s no time for that, so I will just say this: I am not just having an experience that is changing me forever. I am on the cusp of leaving a legacy so that my grandchildren’s children will know God. Emmaus is teaching me how to love scripture so much, that I want to write it on the hearts of my children in a way that I know they won’t be able to help but write it on the hearts of their own. I am living out Psalm 78:6-7:

‘…so that the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children, so they would put their trust in God, and would not forget his deeds.'”

This is the type of impact that we seek to have among the community here in Central Florida. And we feel so incredibly humbled by the chance to see God working so powerfully in the lives of our students. To you who have supported us along the way, this is your legacy as well! Thank you!

Other News
In other recent goings ons, I (Jacob) just finished teaching through the book of Titus for our school, and it went great! It’s a wonderful book for exploring the inseparable relationship between “sound doctrine,” “good works,” and the gospel of grace that works through both of these in our lives.

And with the conclusion of Titus, we’re now heading into Spring Break for our school, where Samantha and I will be visiting family in Virginia, pray for our journey!

Prayer Requests
– For those who missed the announcement on our last blog, Samantha and I are having a baby! Expected arrival: Sept. 2. We were so blessed by the people who responded to our needs and gave towards our mission here after our announcement, thank you! But Samantha and I are still in need of further financial support. Our current living space consists of a single hotel-style room, located here on campus. With the expected arrival of a new family member, it would be an incredible blessing to us if we could manage finding a small apartment to move into. We’re still trying to increase our monthly support by about $1500 a month, but in order to meet our more immediate need of finding a new home, we need to increase our income by at least $800 a month. If you have questions, we’d love to talk with you. If you’re interested in starting a monthly support plan, or if you’d like to make a one-time donation, you can find directions on how to do so by clicking here.

– We would also love continued prayer as we seek to prepare faithful class lectures for our students. To be quite honest, neither Samantha or I are public speakers, so it’s a challenge each time! Our aim is for the students’ relationship with God to deepen with each book we study together.

– Our staff also seems to be fraught with car troubles! Every time one car gets fixed, another breaks down ha. Please ask God to bless our vehicles!

Thank you for your love and support 🙂
-Jacob and Samantha McRae

Verse to Consider: Titus 2:11-13, “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ…”

Greetings.

Hello everyone and happy Thursday! So much has happened since our last update that it feels like forever since we last wrote to you all! In our last update, we had just held our first School of Biblical Studies class with our new students. Here they are! (And Staff)

These students have proved to be such a fun and amazing group. Their passion and commitment to seek God through His Word have been a truly wonderful inspiration to our lessons. How incredible it is to see 9 people who have chosen to spend their time studying the Bible! We’ve been running at full speed these past months as we take our students on a journey through the Scriptures.

What’s Happening?
Our School of Biblical Studies (or SBS) is made up of 2 semesters (one for both Old and New Testaments). Each semester is made up of “units” that cover specific collections of books of the Bible. For instance, we just finished up our first unit called “Christ to the Church.” In this unit, we covered the the following books: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Acts. We are now just beginning our next unit: “The Life and Ministry of Paul.” As you probably guessed, we are covering the 13 epistles written by Paul in this unit. There are two more units within our New Testament semester: “The New Testament Church” (Hebrews, James, 1-2 Peter, Jude) and “The Life and Ministry of John” (John, 1-3 John, Revelation).

To compliment our School of Biblical studies, we also run another program called the “Biblical Narrative Series.” Each time our school starts a new unit, we host a Narrative Series night where we give a simplified overview of all the books contained in that unit in one night. This series is open to the public and designed to give those who can’t be a part of our SBS a chance to get an overview of the entire Bible over the course of 10 months.

Since we just started our “Life and Ministry of Paul” unit, we held our second Narrative Series lecture this past Monday. In two hours we gave an overview of the structure, themes, historical background, and timeline of all 13 of Paul’s epistles! Take a look at the turnout…

At 40+ people, our Narrative Series is constantly growing! It’s been so encouraging to see the reception we’ve had among the local churches and ministries. This is easily one of the most impactful things we do as a ministry. So many people feel that having a good grasp on the content of their Bible is out of reach, or only for those who are able to attend Seminary. Emmaus Ministries seeks to provide opportunities for anyone who desires to study their Bible inductively and know it in a deep and personal way.

Big News!
Finally, Samantha and I have some exciting news to get out in the open…

That’s right! We’re having a baby!!! 😀

With a due date of August 30th, Samantha is 12 weeks along, and we couldn’t be more excited about this wonderful gift!

Our Need.
Because of this recent development, Samantha and I have some important changes to make. Given our small, single hotel room, we’re in desperate need of a new living space. This has been a long standing desire for us since we’ve yet to have our own space in 4 years of marriage. And now we feel the need more than ever. In order to make this change, Samantha and I need to increase our monthly support. We have been operating under budget since we started working with Emmaus Ministries, gaining just enough support to cover our essential bills. Our current goal is to have $3,000 in monthly support. We’re currently sitting at around $1,200. We need some help.

We’re so thankful to be working here with Emmaus Ministries, seeing people’s lives change as they encounter God through His Word. It’s been incredible, and we’re not done yet! If you or perhaps someone you know might be interested in supporting us in this mission to equip the body of Christ with God’s Word and helping us find a home for our new baby, we would love to talk with you and answer any questions you might have. To see directions on how you can begin giving immediately, click here.

-Jacob and Samantha McRae (and baby)

Verse to Consider: Philippians 1:27 – “Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.”

Hello everyone, and happy late-Christmas/New Year! This update is a bit overdue, but we decided to wait so that we could include Christmas and the start of our school semester.

Much of December was spent finalizing preparations for our School of Biblical Studies (SBS). We had just spent months revitalizing and changing the format of our programs and how they operate, so there was a lot of work to be done in terms of updating our resources and manuals for the students. It was tedious work, rewriting the policies and manuals, but it also helped to inspire and excite our team as we looked over all that we would be teaching during the semester.

After the long work of making sure the student resources were updated and ready, the staff of Emmaus Ministries were gifted by friends of the ministry with the opportunity to stay two nights at a local resort on the beach! What a blessing! It was a wonderful chance for us as staff to enjoy each others company and unwind from the long hours of work. And to top off the experience, we got to witness an incredible meteor shower during our stay on the beach!

Once our short adventure to the beach was over, we were fortunate enough to head right into our trip to see family for Christmas. Samantha and I started off our Christmas by seeing our immediate family in Virginia, followed by a trip to Oglebay Lodge, in West Virginia, where we spent a few days with extended family.

Samantha and I were also able to take a quick trail ride in the snow. It was extremely beautiful and fun! (Fun fact: it was also my [Jacob] first horseback riding experience!)

But alas, our Christmas break had an end. And it was back to work in Florida! Unfortunately, we landed ourselves in the middle of a huge storm and traffic jam on the way down, and our 12 hour trip turned into a two day trip.

Once in Florida, we used the next few days getting everything organized and cleaned up for the arrival of our students on the 8th. I am now writing this blog after having held our first class with our new students. It went great!
This week of class is an orientation for the students, where we are introducing them to the inductive study method. Once this week is over, we will start having regular classes on Mondays and Wednesdays as we journey through the New Testament. The Old Testament portion of our school will begin in August.

It was an incredible feeling to see students walk into our classroom after months of prayer and planning. It was a wonderful moment of fulfillment that could only truly be appreciated by the staff here at Emmaus who sought for God’s direction during the biggest transformation this ministry has yet seen. We’re so thankful for everyone who helped to carry us through their prayers and support. You are part of the reason that these students are able to be here. We loved meeting our new students and we’re so excited for them to experience God and His Word in a whole new way!

Prayer Requests: We would love prayer for our school and students as we iron out the kinks in this first month of our program. We want this school to be the best possible version for our students!

-Four years into marriage, Samantha and I have still never experienced a living space that consisted of more than two rooms. We’re currently living in a slightly cramped, single, hotel-style room and are hoping for the opportunity to upgrade to an apartment (or something of the like) within the next year. We would love to do this simply for our own sanity, but also in the hopes of starting a family in the near future. Part of this is going to necessitate reaching our fully funded goal of a $3,000 a month income. We are currently making about $1,200 a month in recurring donations. If you’re interested (or maybe someone you know) in learning more about our ministry and how you can participate in helping us reach this goal. Please contact us through one of the methods listed here, or click here to donate..

Thank you for all of your support. We’re so grateful!
-Jacob and Samantha McRae