Spiritual Emphasis for Your Church
Last year and now this fall, our church partnered with another local C&MA church to put on a Spiritual Emphasis week for our congregations, and we brought in Andy Lambkin to be our guest speaker. A part of our district family, Andy is a church planter and the Lead Pastor of Simple Churches in North Vancouver, and prepares great teaching material for this kind of event. We hosted Andy at our weekend services to give an introductory sesson, and then he taught on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights bringing some phenomenal insight to our church family and challenging them to move forward in serving Christ.
In February of this year, he taught on the Kingdom of God (a series entitled, 'Is Jesus the Christ? Or, If Jesus is the Christ, what does that mean and why should we care in [insert your city name here]?"), bringing out the picture of God's Kingdom all through the Old Testament, then through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Andy drew in many of his first-hand learning experiences from travel to Israel in his teaching, which really helped to deepen the learning for people.
This fall, Andy returned to teach on the book of John, and again he was very well received by our church family. We have still been hearing about what people learned back in February, so it was an easy choice to have him come back.
It is easy to see how the learning from these Spiritual Emphasis Weeks is impacting our church family, with many conversations about life and other learning's coming out of these sessions together. As we've been challenging people to root their lives more deeply in the life of Christ in order to engage the broader world around them, what Andy taught and challenged meshed right in with where we've been going.
I wanted to pass along our experience as a church to you to encourage you to look into having Andy come and bring some great teaching to your church. He is articulate, well-studied, and very engaging to a wide ranging audience, and I would give him a very high recommendation. While there is cost associated with Andy coming to you, I would contend that it is well worth it for the benefit you and your church receive (the cost is how Andy offsets his costs as a church planter in Vancouver, so it's a way to bless him in his ministry there while also receiving as a church.).
I've included Andy's contact information and some links to take you to the Simplechurches website where you can read more about Andy and these two teachings as well as listen to the audio he recorded when he taught this at the Whistler school. We also received recordings of when he did the live presentations at our church so we could pass those along to those who had attended for further reflection and review.
I hope you'll take the time to check out and talk to Andy so that he can support you in continuing to serve God where you are!
Dave Driedger
Lead Pastor, Lakewood Alliance Church
andy@simplechurches.ca
778-885-5961
http://simplechurches.ca/home/
Teaching on John: http://www.simplechurches.ca/home/node/1095
Teaching on the Kingdom of God: http://www.simplechurches.ca/home/node/1027
