Perspectives Annual Leaders Conference
A couple weeks ago marked an exciting new beginning for me as I was able to attend my first annual Perspectives Leaders Conference held in Kansas City, Missouri. Perspectives is a grass roots type of ministry with the majority of it’s leaders working all over the country and a small group of national staff based in Pasadena, CA. Once a year this whole group is able to meet together and enjoy the camaraderie of each other’s company, learn from each others successes and mistakes, and discuss new policies and plans for moving forward in ministry.
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Phil 4:13
Steve Hawthorne opened up our week encouraging us from scripture referencing Philippians 4:13. He reminded us that we often read this through the lens of a utilitarian use of God’s strength. That is, that we need to go to Christ to get our strength tanks filled by Him so that we can do our ministry work. Rather, Steve explained that instead we should read this through a relational lens. It is not that Christ is just the source of our strength, but that He IS our strength. Christ in us, us abiding in Christ. We are doing it together with Christ. In other words, God is doing something and invites us to participate with Him in what He’s already doing!
So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. John 5:19
During our meetings I was able to share the IT Roadmap with everyone. This is my grand plan for big picture IT projects along with the prioritization of these goals. I’ve been working on breaking down our existing monolithic infrastructure and application into smaller microservice oriented apps and dashboards. It’s exciting to get to share the vision for Perspectives IT 2.0 with our regional and national leaders. It was encouraging to see how excited everyone was and many of them approached me afterwards and told me how long they’ve been praying for this.
Part of our time was spent simply enjoying one another and continuing to build our friendships and team dynamic. We did several leadership and team build activities and had lots of one on one quality conversations. For me personally, the time here was incredibly encouraging and recharging. We are in a long and challenging season as we continue to work on support raising to begin ministry full time. Being near to these brothers and sisters was a gift from our God.
