Hello Friends,
We are about to embark on an exciting (and slightly intimidating) journey. We feel like God is calling us to do some pretty unconventional stuff with our family, with our finances, and with our ministry. For the last 7 years we have been so blessed to be leading worship at Beltway Park Baptist Church full-time. As most of you know, it is a very healthy and rapidly growing church on all fronts (numerically, spiritually, financially).
However, even though the community we’ve been in is a rare blessing, we began to understand that God was calling us into something a little different. There is a complicated combination of God given passions that we have not yet understood how to fit together into a nice pretty box that we can easily point to. However, we believe God is calling us to take a step of faith anyway and make room for him to direct us into that destiny.
We are definitely uncertain, like everyone, about what the future holds, but we believe that the next step for us is to spend a consecrated season at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City (IHOP-KC). We’re not sure exactly how long that season will be, but at this point, we think it will be about 6 months. Although God recently made it very clear to us that we can’t completely understand why He is sending us up there, we at least have some reasons we feel strongly about and I will share more about that further on. First, we want to explain that we believe God is calling us into an out-of-the-box style of ministry that’s even bigger than just a move to Kansas City. We know we will always be worship leaders wherever we go and will always remain connected to the local church. However, the shift that we’re embracing is that we may not necessarily always be employed by it in a traditional sense. We believe this is God releasing us to embrace a few pieces of our destiny that we have not fully been able to embrace yet. Here are the desires of our hearts:
- Be Artists
We believe this launch will enable us to be the artists we feel God created us to be, using the mediums of music, songwriting, book writing, and who knows what else to create art that is good, true, and beautiful. - Be Missional & Mobile
We both carry a longing for the nations, for traveling, and for a multi-cultural life. We believe God is going to be making room for us to be missional at a new level. We’ve already had the privilege to serve in places like India, Israel, Ireland, Brazil, & Trinidad and it has only increased our longing to be those that go. We believe our worship leading as well as our call to train and disciple worshippers will be a huge part of this call. - Be Advocates for Night & Day Prayer & Worship
We believe God is doing something unprecedented in our day and fulfilling biblical promises to restore the “Tent of David” that had musicians and priests ministering to the Lord all day and all night. It’s springing up all over the world and we want to be a part of that movement wherever we are and hope to see it continually established throughout the world until every nation sings. Our simplified version of why we believe we should combine worship and prayer and do it all day and all night is this: He deserves it.
So, why Kansas City? IHOP is one of a small handful of global organizations that are on the cutting edge of this night-and-day prayer-and-worship movement, the justice movement, and they are also very involved with the missions movement. To put it personally, most of our favorite things are also their favorite things. For that reason, we want to go be there and learn from them. We believe God is going to exceed our expectations in Kansas City, but a couple things we already expect for that season are:
- We expect extended time in the Word and in the manifest Presence of God. We believe this season will result in something we both deeply long for, an increase in personal spiritual disciplines. We expect that this time of intense spiritual pursuit and reflection will lay a strong foundation of intimacy with God for us to build the next season of our lives on.
- We expect to learn the biblical foundation for night and day prayer and worship and how those things are connected to what God wants to do in the profoundly significant days we live in.
- We expect to learn about the ins-and-outs of the prayer room and get behind the scenes perspective on how night and day prayer is facilitated and maintained.
To accomplish all of this, we will be stepping into a lifestyle that would look similar to how missionaries live. Especially in the sense that they are funded by a combination of organizations and individuals that believe in their call and want to financially be a part of seeing it carried out. In fact, we’re enjoying calling ourselves “Musicianaries.” Musicians, with a purpose, backed by an army. God has already started radically providing for us. God is faithful and we know He has the rest covered too. If at any point you want to know more about this journey or you are interested in financially being a part of what we’re doing, you can read more and even contribute here online by going to:
Currently, all donations are tax-deductible and handled through Beltway Park Baptist Church. If giving online doesn’t work well for you, donations can be designated for “Firetown Ministry” and sent to:
Beltway Park Baptist Church
Attn: Receivables
4009 Beltway South
Abilene, TX 79605
You can also subscribe to our newsletter and keep up with us by clicking here:
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If you would, please share this information with anyone you think would like to know about our journey.
Thank you for taking the time to read all of this. We’re grateful to have you in our lives at any level and at any distance.
God Bless You All,
Brenton & Cara Dowdy
