This is the second workshop from General Conference that I’m going to highlight. I’m not presenting them in the order that we attended them necessarily… pretty much just a random order. My eyes landed on the notes for this one… and it’s a good one!
Rev. Eli Lopez
The first thing you need to know about this particular session is that it was pretty much standing room only! We met someone we knew outside the room and when we asked them if they were just arriving or leaving, they answered that they were just arriving and wanted to enter, but that people were lining the walls. We walked in anyway and a family with a couple of small children got them to move so that Liz & I could have a seat. YES… First victory! (although, you’ll note that I was unable to get a decent photo of the speaker… we were further back than my iPhone could handle)
The second thing that you need to know is who the facilitator was… Bro. Eli Lopez, Director of Ministries and Senior Associate Pastor at Stockton California’s Christian Life Center. He’s got an impressive C.V. and has a great deal of responsibility in this incredible church for such a young man. Definitely Kudos!
Now for some of the highlights:
3 Battles of a Soulwinner
- Complacency: It takes effort to overcome complacency, for it is much easier to do what we’ve always done rather than trying something new. …to stay with those we know rather than get to know someone new. Yet the gospel is not just for us: “Jesus is the propitiation for our sins… and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” 1 John 2.2
- Selfishness: Things will really begin to change and growth will be visible when we get to the point of thinking about others more than we think about ourselves. It’s not about our comfort, but about their eternal life…
- Weariness: Remember… “We will reap, if we faint not!” Galatians 6.9
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3 Things to overcome those Battles
- The Power of Purpose: Truly understanding our purpose will help us overcome complacency, selfishness and weariness… “The motivation that took Jesus to the cross will take us to the lost.” Jesus didn’t consider the harvest a future event, but rather a present and a pressing need!
- The Power of Prayer: Matthew 9.35 relates a prayer request that Jesus made to his disciples: “Pray therefore that the Lord of the harvest sends our workers into the harvest.” If Jesus’ identity, as the Lord of the Harvest, was wrapped up in the harvest, then shouldn’t we, as his followers be likewise? As they began to pray about the harvest, they began to take on responsibility for it… after that, Jesus sent them out into the same harvest that they’d been praying for! Who better to go but them that have taken on responsibility in prayer?
- The Power of the Personal: Statistics vary in different parts of the country, but there’s no disputing that a significant factor in people coming to church remains that of personal contact. We can be active (going toward them) or passive (waiting for them to come to us)… intuitively we all know which one is better. We are commanded to “GO and make disciples…” Give them a compelling reason why they should want to come to church!
“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost has come upon you…
and ye shall be witnesses unto me…”
Acts 1.8
Thank you Bro. Lopez! Really a great seminar!
Upcoming Posts…
- Saturday – An info-graph showing the growth our relationship with, and the call to, western France.
- Next Wednesday – Highlights from General Conference Workshop #3
Prayer
- Pray that God helps us, through his power, to grow as soulwinners while in France.
- We’ve begun the process of applying for our visa from France… (Passport renewal done this week) and we’ll have to visit the French Consulate in Montreal in the coming weeks. Pray that each step in the process goes smoothly and that we find favour among men & women.
Here’s to #Revival_inFrance
We arrived at the back entrance to the White House… well not literally the back door…. the back, heavily guarded gate. We walked to the White House gift shop and dropped a bit of cash at the till in exchange for a few souvenirs and then headed to the south lawn of the White House, over to the Washington Monument down past the War Memorial and on to the Lincoln Memorial
Rev. & Mrs. Jerry Staten pastor the church in Washington and we connected with them upon arrival. We were able to join them for their “Evanglize D.C.” prayer-focus meeting on Saturday morning where some 40+ people had gathered. Later that day, we joined them for their Spanish service “Esperanza Viva”, and of course for church the next morning.
Part way through the tour, the kids were thankful to be escorted first to the candy-stash closet where they got to fill a ziplock bag full of goodies, and secondly to the Missionary Kids’ Lounge where they could hang out and play Wii 
The next day saw us head to downtown St. Louis where we would see St. Louis’ famous landmark, the Gateway Arch.
Exploring God’s Word for the then Home Missions Division.
The kids got to spend lots of time with their friends Winston & Olivia Wojciechowski, whom they’d only met in November 2013, at the French National Youth Convention…. but even then, they hit it off so incredibly well it was amazing.
Bro. Neyland’s church has a double-wide mobile home that is used for visiting ministers which he graciously invited us to make use of. Later, we had supper together and the kids were able to play on the trampoline – entertained by the pastor’s son – before capping the evening off with a bowl of Blue Bell ice cream (oh my word, that’s good ice cream!!).
This year’s Canada Conference was hosted by the incredible church in 
Tuesday Night
residency permits for a 1-year term, meaning that after only about 6 months, you have to already begin the renewal process. Having citizenship does away with that.
At the time the book was published, in 2012, Gregory Berns was a neuroscientist at Emory University, in Atlanta Georgia. He was doing research wherein volunteers played a game while in an fMRI machine. They were shown, on a computer screen, two 3-dimensional objects and asked whether one could be rotated to match the other. When participants played the game on their own, they gave a wrong answer only 14% of the time. When they played with a group… they gave the wrong answer significantly more often. The trick was… in the group-play version… other “players” unanimously gave the wrong answer… and the individual player themselves gave the wrong answer (in conformity to the group) some 41% of the time (as opposed to 14%, when playing alone). Berns took pictures of the brain while all of this was going on and saw that, when playing with a group, the individual displayed more activity in the part of the brain that dealt with visual and spatial perception: People were not consciously choosing an incorrect answer in order to conform to the group… Playing in a group altered their perception.
More recently I was reminded of the sacrifice of missions with the passing, while on the mission field, of 
I really appreciate Bro. Coltharp’s message from last night… he talked about how warfare has progressed from being a “hand-to-hand combat” situation – a “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” kind of proximity – to a point where, thanks to technology, one can wipe out tens of thousands of people, unseen, using missiles, satellites, etc. from great distances.
AIM Long 