Ministry Leaders’ Family Camp Highlights
How good it is to gather together as a family. Ministry leaders from all across the diocese spent the weekend at El Rancho soaking in worship, teaching and relationship with one another.
Rev. Bree Mills was pleased to finally join us in person after Covid upset her plans to visit us last year, commenting that “it is much nicer talking to actual people than talking into a camera!”
We were also blessed to have Rev. Dr. Christian Selvaratnam join us from St Hild College in the North of England where he is Dean of Church Planting.
Bree spoke about Relationship and Responsibility, how it is out of our covenant relationship with God that we outwork our kingdom responsibility. Our questions of ‘who am I?’, ‘where do I belong?’ and ‘what is my purpose?’ are all answered when we enter into relationship with God. She spoke of the importance of abiding in God for that is where fruitfulness happens, and that God prunes the fruitful – he will never do anything through you until he has done something in you.
Christian spoke on the Marks of a Movement:
Contagious evangelism
Fervent prayer
Locally adapted vision
Discipleship system
Working with the poor
Empowering women
Servant leaders
And on making effective missional disciples. Most people come to faith before the age of 18 so effective discipleship starts in the home. Our disciples need to be diverse and reflect our communities. We need to be raising resilient disciples who are prepared – Jesus not only modelled ministry, he trained his disciples for their journey ahead.
There was a lot of food for thought, here are just some of the take-aways:
How are we doing family on a mission? We’ve decided to spend the rest of the month discerning what our family home life will look like next year.
The energy of the children’s activities and the centrality of it to the camp feeds into the adults experience. It’s really life giving.
Importance of briefing and debriefing mission stuff with kids, and showing them passion we have for Jesus.
It remains a time and place that we can be ‘real’ with others in casual conversations and in the discussion groups after the talks.
Reinforced my value for hospitality - in a holistic sense… and made me think more about how to encourage this collectively in our spaces and practices as a community.
We will be uploading the resources from camp to our website over the coming week so check back regularly.
