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art of training camp is breaking down our squad (of nearly 50 people) to smaller teams of six or seven people. We go through two days of team building exercises so our squad leaders and the staff can pray and decide who needs to be together on a team. From team building exercise number one they had our team pretty much nailed except for one change, in which, we gained such an awesome teammate. After our teams were official we were to come up with a team name and mission statement.Let’s start with our mission statement and work towards the team name. When we were at star bucks brainstorming what we wanted to be described and defined as a team by, the phrase GROW DEEP…LIVE TALL came to mind. From here our ideas and hearts really took off. This became our mission statement, along with verses 7 and 8 of Jeremiah 17, which reads: “But blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence. They are like trees planted along a riverbank, with roots that reach deep into the water. Such trees are not bothered by the heat or worried by long months of drought. Their leaves stay green, and they go right on producing delicious fruit.”
That passage is so rich and deep and can be discussed for hours, believe me as a team we have dissected this verse inside and out! But for this blog sake, I just want to share a couple things. As a team/squad we want to Grow so deeply rooted in our relationship with God, and become so intertwined with his power and love that we can then become the trees that reach out our hands/branches to the nations. We want to EXTEND God’s Kingdom to the earth, but the bigger the tree the deeper the roots have to be!
Another couple verses that I found go along with our mission statement are Matthew 13:31-32 which read, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed planted in a field. It is the smallest of all seeds but it becomes the largest of garden plants and grows into a tree where birds can come and find shelter in its branches.”
We want to GROW into that kind of tree. A tree where people can find shelter in our arms, which are really Christ’s arms 
extended through us!
This is why our team name is INCREASE. We want to see the Kingdom of God INCREASE it’s territory in the people we encounter. We want to see an INCREASE in the fruit we produce, and an INCREASE in the depth of our roots.
As a symbol, we planted a small tree at camp and had everyone put a handful of dirt in the base to illustrate what our team/squad is setting out to do this year (and years to come)!
