Greetings!
We’re Bruce & Deborah Crowe, welcome to our site.
Our adventure began in 2008 when we packed up our belongings with our six little kids and moved across the ocean to serve as missionaries in Ukraine. There, we unpacked our Western selves in a new culture, putting down roots for the following 15 years. We even added two more children along the way. Our entire journey is detailed on our blog.
During this period, though busy with meaningful projects and surrounded by interesting people, our spiritual lives began to lose vitality. Formed within Western evangelicalism, the answers that had served us so well began to lose their luster, and new, disturbing questions were emerging in our souls. Unaware of the nurturing necessity of soul care and the importance of solitude, these 40-somethings were running out of steam on the proverbial hamster wheel, and fast.
Life on the outside seemed grand, but our inner world was shifting beneath our feet. Our marriage of 25 years grew loveless, and our work was lifeless. It was as if we were being pulled off the dance floor to the balcony to observe our lives from a new place.
Who exactly were these people? How did we get here?
Was this a mid-life crisis, a dark-night of the soul?
We began to sense the dangerous invitation of the Spirit to start over, but how? The initial months were filled with intense soul-searching and difficult dialogue with God, and one another. What would starting over look like? Everything was on the table as we wrestled through this newly recognized inner dissonance. The lives we had been living were wonderful, we were grateful, but they weren’t materializing from an authentic place. The Spirit, we were learning, was inviting us to surrender our first-half living clothing, and discover God’s imago Dei garments, and it was legitimately terrifying.
Was this process normal for lifelong believers? There was no turning back. Our lives were about to be transformed it seemed once again, from the inside out.
The invitation was to solitude, the place where communication with God turns into communion within the Father, Son, and Spirit’s love. We slowly embraced those difficult questions as a deeper, more real foundation of the Father’s deep love emerged beneath our feet. Like the transformation of the caterpillar to butterfly, we began to recognize that the Spirit-led journey encompasses certain patterns and transitions for which we were completely unprepared.
Why hadn’t anyone warned us? We grew up in and around organized Protestant religion, yet our evangelical experience had left us ill-prepared and quite ignorant of the movement taking place in our souls. Being outside of western cultural constructs for so long was forcing us to consider the hidden forces that had shaped our beliefs and experiences. Like many Western believers, the journey of faith was either a super-charged emotional experience, or a crusty cognitive exercise. Our souls, however, were seeking integration, wholeness, and for that, determined honesty.
This invitational journey to be formed, and transformed, comes to us all. It’s scary, but it’s as real as the air we breathe. We aren’t purely products of our earthly parents. We are God-breathed, magnificent beings, cloaked beneath protective layers, forged by the brokenness in the world. As the Greek bishop (c. 130-203) Irenaeus pointed out, God has made us for the middle, and formation is God’s teleological end for humanity, not just the means to get us to heaven. His aim? To shape us back into the image of our Maker, into the unique and free person God has made us to be.
Today, our vision for spiritual wholeness continues to mature and invite us to explore. The sandy foundations of our religious, confident selves are still being unearthed, as the Spirit continues to mend and fill, grounding us in God’s perspective, a perspective that honors our unique selves. Seeking God truly leads us to a true vision of our identity. God has little interest in having fellowship with a projection of ourselves, as much as we may admire the person we’ve believed ourselves to be. We must let go and rest in the deep, deep love of Jesus.
Lord Jesus, let me know myself and know You.”
Saint Augustine
So that’s our story and motivation for this site. To simply promote the sacred journey, and encourage those tempted to let do, and take the steps down the softly lit path of surrender. We’re neither clinicians nor professionals. We are travelers, being formed by an eternal Mercy. We hope our story encourages you. You are not alone on this formational journey into new forms of freedom, and love.
Growing with you!
Mir Ministries, a 501c3 Charitable Organization, has been sharing the love found in Jesus Christ throughout Eastern Europe since the 1990’s. Through creative outreach, mercy ministries, and mentoring, we seek to restore the image of the loving Father through the revelation of the Son.
To learn more, and partner with us, click here to visit our site!
Human Dignity
We believe every human soul has been made in the image of God and is therefore inestimable in value. Though muted by the brokeness in the world, every soul has the capacity to be transformed through the power and revelation of God’s perfect love in the Son Jesus.
Missio Dei
The term mission comes from the Latin “missio,” which means “to send.” It was the Father who first sent the Son, the Father and Son who sent the Spirit. Today, as the present church in history, believers are invited to participate in the Father’s continual sending through the power of the Spirit. As a sent people, we are being formed into embodied ambassadors of God’s mercy to every culture as the Spirit emancipates individuals into their fullest reflection of God’s diverse design. God, therefore, does not have a mission for the church, but rather a church for his ongoing mission.
The Cross of Jesus
Creator’s intention is the healing of the nations through his Son’s life and subsequent death on a cross. The cross emphasizes the destruction of life separate from God. It mediates the nature of fallen humanity while simultaneously demonstrating God’s willingness to renew the lives of all who receive his love.
Scripture
We honor the Christian scriptures as divinely working to guide humanity to the Logos, the living Word of God who is Jesus. Scripture is filled with timeless wisdom, yet is also a literary masterpiece, reflective of specific times and places. We honor scripture by studying its many genres and applying it through the lens of historical context.
Community
Communities that gather under Christ’s authority and participate in ongoing spiritual formation become positive instruments of cultural change. By reflecting the loving, belonging nature of God’s own heart, who offered his only Son as a sacrifice of atoning love for the whole world, the church participates in the Missio Dei. We believe that when people belong, they experience Love, which enables the heart to grow in faith.
Prayer
Coming Soon!