Louisville—Through the months of August and September, nearly 2,000 Kentucky Baptists gathered in six locations for a time of fellowship and practical ministry training. On Sept. 16, approximately 530 of those met at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville.
Steve Rice, Kentucky Baptist Convention’s church consulting and revitalization team leader and organizer of the event, said the goal is to bring the bi-annual conference within an hour drive of every Kentucky Baptist Church.
Attendees gathered for a short time of worship, information and prayer before dispersing to various workshops led by KBC and church leaders throughout the state. This year, they used a model of three workshops versus a main session and a workshop or two.
“What we’re finding with doing the one-hour conference is that people are coming just to learn. We’ve had a number of people in our conferences this time that don’t have any kind of WMU work in their church, or they have some missions but they want to find out what WMU could do to help them enhance missions in their churches. It’s been more of an exploratory thing for a lot of people.
“What we’ve tried to do in our approach to the conference this year is to really deal with why WMU matters, why missions matter, why we need to keep that in front of our churches, and why are we trying to raise kids against the tide,” Bolton continued.
During her session, she shared that WMU believes in missional living through praying for missions, engaging in missions, learning about missions and supporting missions. This leads to developing spiritually towards a missions lifestyle and ultimately participating in missions.
We’ve found this year, we’re seeing a lot of different people. I’m not seeing my regulars,” she added. “I’m seeing a lot of new faces, which has been a lot of fun.”
Judy Stallard, financial secretary at Walnut Street Baptist Church attended the sessions geared toward church finances for the first time this year. “It was great and so helpful,” she said.
So helpful that she’s going to tell all of her church staff they need to come next time, Stallard added. (WR)
Myriah Snyder