Following the under 30’s conference in October and in preparation for the next conference weekend this October, the under 30’s leaders at OMF met today in Reading. As I am shadowing Andy Stephens who is on the OMF youth council I was offered a special invitation to join them and yesterday I volunteered to host a devotional slot to precede the meeting.
Last night and this morning (because I was tired last night), I prepared the devotional by searching through the moorlands college library, with the wide range of areas to investigate with prayer and discussion I simply could not choose alone which book, or which item within a book to use. I gave this decision to God. I was lead to use an old devotional written by saint Benedict about the 12 steps of humility.
After the drive to Reading with Andy we arrived at the house where we met Ray; his wife Emily arrived later after picking up Andy and Jon from the train station. I opened in prayer and ran our devotional section. It went good, stimulating hearty discussion.
We followed this with some survey exercises prepared by Andy for his masters research. this involved the group of us as under 30’s and Christians with mission on our hearts to arrange in order a list of 5 statements about what our aims should be as a missionary. we were consistent as a group that proclaiming and teaching the good news of Christ was a high priority, whilst maintaining the earth and restoring justice were lower priorities (although they should be side effects of achieving our primary goals). A second exercise was with a list of 10 statements all reasons why under 30’s might avoid taking on missionary work in the future, we were asked to rank the top 5 in order of most common. most of these were fair and even reasons such as “it had simply never crossed my mind,” or “I do not feel called to be a missionary.”
after this we ate a buffet lunch and then had the council meeting.
the first part of the meeting was to debrief the conference held in October and analyse what worked and what didn’t work. Then we discussed items about next October’s conference.
We closed in prayer and went our separate ways home. In the car me and Andy talked about what to expect during the placement weeks ahead.
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