A Saturday Story - update

Part One

I’m going to take today’s Saturday Story article to give you a brief life update. I don’t want it to be too long because I know you have other things going on in life, so I will break it up into several Saturday Stories.

PART ONE:

Back around 2011, I began to feel the pull to see if I couldn’t use my energies and gifts more fully in training pastors in underserved areas of the world. Ever since I began pastoring, I have been involving the churches I was a part of in mission work. Men like Herb Hodges and Fred Hyskell had an influence on my thinking about the need for training and discipling other leaders.

I had just turned 50 years old a few months prior and the Lord brought back to my mind an experience I had not long after I first entered the pastorate. I was at a conference, although I can’t tell you what the conference was and what the name of the speaker was. The man who was talking had been a pastor in California and said that when he turned 50 he resigned his church and dedicated the rest of his ministry to helping younger pastors. At the time, I thought that was a great idea and that maybe the Lord would allow me to do something like that.

That had completely disappeared from my thinking as I got busy with family and church life. Twenty-five years or so had passed and I hadn’t thought about that since that day. Then, the Lord reminded me of that.

This was around the same time that I had attended a conference in Colorado Springs put on by an organization called BEE World. I had been working for several years with tribal people in India and had just started to focus on helping their pastors with some biblical training. I wanted to get some ideas and help on doing that better, so I went to this training conference.

As a part of the conference, the attendees were required to come up with a teaching plan and then do a small group session with BEE World staff, implementing the things learned during the conference. We were eating lunch after our small group session when I was approached by one of the staff members and they asked me if I would be willing to meet with the board and President after lunch.

At that meeting, they said they didn’t usually do things this way, but they wanted to ask me to join BEE World and become one of their facilitators…