This past week I’ve been in Arizona with my missionary hat on. Over the weekend, I was involved at a missions conference at Cornerstone Church in Prescott, AZ. Sharing the vision of what we do on our Global Equipping Team, connecting with church members and other missionaries, and offering encouragement about how God is working globally was the main thrust. I was able to spend some time talking with the senior pastor, John Dickerson, who has recently authored a very popular book, The Great Evangelical Recession. In the book, Pastor John documents from extensive research that evangelicalism is in steep decline in many ways, and we in the church must sober up to the reality and do something about it. He offers solutions to the problems we are facing, although it will be a long, challenging road.
The highlight, though, was meeting for two days with 10 pastors and church leaders from places like New Mexico, California, Colorado, Nevada and Arizona. It was a rich time opening the book of 2 Timothy and using our Pathway training tools to explore God’s message in the book. This was the second workshop we’ve done in this location, and several of the participants are nearly ready to be connecting overseas with groups of pastors who are awaiting training in studying, obeying and teaching God’s Word. My co-trainer Mike Gunderson did a fabulous job, and it was so much fun working with this lively group of pastors as we wrestled with the text toward growing in our skills of training indigenous pastors in expository preaching.
One of the participants is eager to take our training to a cluster of 38 Masai churches in southern Kenya. Two others are preparing to take it to Rwanda. Another wants to take it to the Arabian peninsula. The common sentiment was, “I wish I had known how good this training is. I would have brought several others with me.” So we encourage them to take the training back into their communities and pass it on.
2 Timothy 2:2 reminds us that the things we’ve received from the Lord, we must pass on to others. And so with these trainings. May we be faithful to “preach the Word, in season and out of season…” (2 Tim.4:2)
Pressing on, Eric