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This week I headed to Huntsville for the FEB Central Pastor’s Conference. Fellowship with other like-minded pastors from whom I have much to learn was a big part of the three days that I spent there. Suffering was a common thread in many of the messages. One spoke of how to deal with disappointment in our relationship with God. His ten-year-old son was hit by a car while delivering newspapers, and having faced such a loss he knew the limitation of superficial platitudes.
The plight of Syrian refugees has largely dropped out of the news cycle, but for most the painful road continues. On Friday evening, I attended “Faith Rising,” an event sponsored by Partners International, highlighting the work being done by Arab Christians to bring help and hope to those still trapped in refugee camps in Lebanon. While the protests of the Arab Spring in late 2010 and early 2011 seemed like they might freedom to many living under corrupt and oppressive dictatorships, in Syria they led to a civil war that has claimed nearly 200,000 lives.
There are a lot of exciting things happening right now in the life of our church! Did you catch the announcement on Sunday about the launch of our Life Groups? We have eight groups meeting in various places and locations this month and I’d love to have you be a part of one.
I have made Biblical fellowship something of a theme over the last several months. I’m convinced that we need one another to grow. But it’s something that I need to model also. And so I’m trying to get to know other pastors and churches. This morning I attended a clergy breakfast in preparation for the upcoming Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast. I was eager for the opportunity to get to know other pastors in the area and learn about the churches that make up our city.
Our campus worker with Power to Change invited me to their year-end conference P2C+. I was busy with sermon preparation and other ministry with the short week, and so could only spare half a day on New Year’s Eve, but it was well worth the time. I’m not sure what I expected. There were probably 800 students gathered and it would have been easy to entertain them with light talks on hot topics. What I got instead was a hard-hitting morning on the theme of suffering.
At last week’s Fellowship conference there was a report about a youth ministry in a poor, urban area. A teenage girl had been attending the church’s youth group meetings but her attitude was terrible and unfortunately it had spread to other young people in the group. One week the leader took the youth to an evangelistic event geared towards young people. The speaker asked for a volunteer but no one offered to take part, and so he pointed to someone in the crowd and asked for them to come forward. The person he chose was the teenage girl that had been causing so much trouble in the youth group.
