Presentation given at the AMEN Australia 2018 annual conference held in Adelaide, Australia, www.amenaustralia.org.

AMEN Australia 2018: Healing, Surviving, Thriving

<p>Presentation given at the AMEN Australia 2018 annual conference held in Adelaide, Australia, www.amenaustralia.org.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Camila Skaf

Seeds Project Mission Report

I'm going to talk about today a personal ministry that my husband and I started in Newcastle in 2016.

And that we have a desire to model it for other people, not to use the same exact thing, but to inspire others to be people of influence wherever they are.

So I think that's what we want to uplift here today, and praise God for what he has done.

So my husband right in the middle, Joseph Scaf, my mother on the right side, And this is me and my daughter, Katarina.

We were coordinating a medical missionary trip and that was with mainly volunteers from our community and most of them non-Adventists and some Adventists that actually came together.

It's about being people of influence in your midst, but also training others to be people of influence.

All the small prophets have a lot to teach us.

And 1 of the things is in Malachi chapter 4, I just grabbed a couple of verses there.

The 1 that says, "'But to you who fear my name, the son of righteousness shall rise with healing in his wings.

But if we believe that we have Jesus Christ as the son of righteousness and healing, we are going to stop looking at our own faults, at our own problems, at our own sickness, and we're going to start looking at others.

There is a phrase that I heard from my music teacher once and he said, when you take care of God's business, He takes care of yours.

And I'm challenging you today to think that when you take care of God's people, He will take care of you and your family.

And the other verse that is right on the same chapter, it says, Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.

The prophet here is talking about, I will send you, right, Elijah.

You know the Bible talks about 3 different kinds of Elijah.

The people that are coming as the chapter states after to open the way.

So the whole purpose of being a person of influence and training others to be people of influence is to open the way for Jesus Christ.

And so I want to share with you the pathway starts with a bridge.

When we arrived in Newcastle in 2016, we were invited to be church planters.

I won't have time to go through my background, but Joseph and I, we were working investment banking.

Joseph was at Credit Suisse, I was at Goldman Sachs.

1 was electronic trading, which usually people don't know anything about algorithms, all this IT stuff.

And it's usually deal with complex products and new things in the market.

And the third ones was prime services, you deal with people, with very difficult clients.

So there you go, I was selling difficult projects or products to difficult people.

And my husband, he was in derivatives, structuring products in Credit Suisse.

So he was building these difficult products and also dealing with risk for difficult clients.

When I met my husband, he's 8 years younger than me, he was friends with my interns, I was a bit embarrassed, okay, I was a vice president, I was the boss, and I meet this guy and he just got baptized, he's so hungry and passionate about Christ, and he comes to my small group.

And he comes and he's so passionate, and I thought, wow, God, I wish you could send me a husband like this, but a bit older.

And As he saw me speaking, he said, oh God, I wish you send me a wife like this woman, but younger.

Anyway, long story short, we end up getting married.

But 1 of the things that got me to marry this man, because I was hard to get, I have to say, not because I am good, but because I'm hard to deal with.

So he, I said, God, I will only marry with a person that will be my missionary partner.

I had this feeling I don't need anything, as a woman sometimes does.

So when I met my husband, Joseph said, do you want to be my missionary partner?

And I was like, God, that's what I've been praying for.

And then he had a very hard question for me.

He said, Camila, would you leave everything to become a missionary with me?

At the time I froze, it was our second date.

And he said, he follows, he didn't even wait for my answer.

He said, look, I you want the same things that I want.

In a year and a half, if we get along, we'll get married.

And then we're going to, and we get ready in this year and a half while we're dating.

And then we're going to quit our jobs, and we're going to become missionaries.

I have to say, I thought as a woman of my wardrobe, I'm not kidding.

I know it's shallow, but that's what I thought of.

Okay, missionary, I thought of like going to Africa, having no clothes, no sheets to sleep on, sleeping on the floor and all of these things.

But then the other voice said, Camila, you've been asking me, you wanted to be a missionary, remember?

You want this kind of man in your life, remember?

So everything you ever look for, it's being handled to you and now you're thinking of shoes.

And I'm just giving the example, there's more things going on, but that was 1 of the things.

And I said, but God, just now, I'm just getting promoted again.

You know, my boss had just left a year before and I had inherited his businesses.

And so it was a great opportunity for me.

And for those that might know Goldman Sachs in the US, that would be the top of the jobs.

And being in Brazil, I didn't know anyone of my age that had the best job that I had.

But then I looked at the people that were partners right after me and I said do do I want to be like them?

And Jesus said to me, I have a better thing for you.

So we end up here in New Castle, Joseph and I.

I know I'm cutting it short, but we decided to come and we got trained at Arise.

And then we went to a medical missionary college in the US.

And then we end up here, planting a church in Newcastle.

And the president, Justin Loman at the time, told us, I do not want you to go to any church.

Because I want you to plant a church in a community organically.

So first Sabbath, it's Joseph and I in our house, and we're looking at each other.

We were giving later some Bible workers to help us, but basically it was just him and I.

And that Sabbath there were just the 2 of us.

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Seeds Project Mission Report

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