Put it on your calendar:

 

The Center for Ministry Effectiveness and Educational Leadership is sponsoring a conference titled Conflict Resolution in Baptist Churches.  The conference will be on June 12 from 10 AM to 2:30 PM.  Lunch will be provided during a break.  It will be held at Baylor University on the 2nd floor of Carroll Library in room 201.

 

The main speaker for the conference will be Sonny Spurger of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. 

Other speakers include:

Dr. David Hardage, Director of Missions, Waco Reginal Baptist Network

     and

Donald D. Schmeltekopf, Provost Emeritus and Director, The Center for Ministry Effectiveness and Educational Leadership

 

 

For more information, call Julie Covington at the Center for Ministry Effectiveness, 254-701-4677

Sunday morning the youth at Park Lake led the church in the worship service.  They did a good job.  They stumbled a few times, but didn't give up.  The church was very supportive of the students.  Becky, our interim Youth Minister this Spring, brought the message.  She had us standing up a sitting down (in a good way) as she preached on spiritual gifts.  Way to go students!

Saturday the oldest of my foster sons graduated from Bryan High School.  We did not get to attend even though we had planned to.  For the past weeks we have had lots of rain in the area.  There has been flooding in the areas just south of Waco and Saturday morning was no exception.  We headed off about 7 AM and the farther we got the worst the rain.  Rather than risk becoming the evening story on Channel 10 we decided to turn around.  Weather was nicer that afternoon.

 

I miss him and his brother.  They left my home six years ago and it has been a blessing to still get pictures and news.

Happy birthday to me. My parents took my brother and I (I am the one on the right) to eat for our birthday tonight. Actually, tomorrow is our birthday. Today is his son's birthday (Cameron). We will celebrate his birthday tomorrow. I think we flip flopped days so everyone could come to Cameron's party tomorrow. We went to the Samurai Japanese Steakhouse. Mmmm...good.

My brother is a good guy. It is nice to be living close to him and my parents again. When we left for college I never came back home for longer than just visits. Now, the Lord has put us all back together. My parents moved to Hewitt this past summer so we are all now minutes away from each other.

This morning our staff devotional was on "Your Calling and Success." It seemed to warrent an entry in the blog.

 

Evidently, God's calling on a person's life is meant to benefit the body of Christ, not the individual.  That does not take away the fact that God's gifting is an expression of His love for the individual.  Through our circumstances and passions God communicates our calling and when we put ourselves in a place God can speak to us through His Word and Spirit we can find fulfillment through living out His purpose for us. 

 

Calling is such an important part of being employed at a church, minister or non-minister.   There are ups and downs and sometimes calling is all you have to keep you at it.  Bro. Wally Goodman told me when I was ordained, "remember your calling."  To this day I keep that reminder taped to the back of my office door so when those times happen that I close it shaking my head, I remember and press on. 

 

MasterWork: Essential Messages from God's Servants, Spring 2007

Got another one.  Craig Golden has just accepted a call to be our Interim Youth Minister. 

Craig and his wife Melissa are coming to us from Arkansas.  He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Williams Baptist College in Walnut Ridge nine days ago.  He has served as Youth Pastor at First Baptist Church in Viola since 2004.

He will be attending George W. Truett Theological Seminary this fall.

We just called a Dr. Bill Austin to be our Interim Pastor at Park Lake.  For you Baylor people he was your university chaplain  back in the 90's.  We are looking forward to his first day in the pulpit (June 3).  He and I will be getting together before that to look at things and chart a course for the interim time. 

last week we had some bad weather here in Waco.  Wednesday morning we came into the office and the phone system and the phone lines were down (internet too).  We thought we got off lucky.  Unprotected computers merely tripped off and started up with no data loss.  Everything else seemed to be working, until I tried to adjust the sound system in the worship center for the choir.  I couldn't believe it, half of the channels on the board were dead.  By the time I finished crawling around and making it so we had sound on Sunday I found we had lost several pieces of equipment.  O, and then there was Sunday.  We found out our organ had two voices: one for the top keyboard and one for the footpedals.  The bottom keyboard and everything else was shot.

 

Luckily we have insurance.  We are about to find out how good that insurance is.  I've got a good guy coming to look things over.  I'll let you know how things pan out.