What if it's not what we can do FOR, but what we can do WITH

Pastor Ryan can't stop talking about Ecuador — and in this video, he explains why. Sharing reflections from a recent trip with two fellow pastors from Valley Chapel's Free Methodist network, he opens with the story of a building painted by ten different mission teams, each certain they were the ones bringing help — a picture of everything he's come to question about how we think about missions. What he found in Ecuador was something different: pastors, missionaries, and new believers who didn't need Americans to do the work for them, but who became family the moment his team showed up ready to pray, listen, and simply be present. From a bird-watching metaphor about two very different but complementary callings, to standing beside a friend as she was ordained into ministry, to witnessing baptisms sparked by relationships his team had nothing to do with, Ryan paints a picture of the Kingdom of God as bigger, more alive, and more connected than any single church can see on its own. Echoing Peter and John in Acts 4 — "we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard" — this is a call to every church to stop asking what we can do for the world, and start asking how we can be with it.