A YEAR OF BUILDING IN OUR COMMUNITIES
by Richard Wade
We start the new year with the encouragement that God continues to build His Church with relentless passion. He breaks and He binds up, He nurtures and restores. He rebuilds the walls of the city with living stones.
“The Lord builds up Jerusalem. He gathers the scattered people of Israel. He heals those who have broken hearts. He takes care of their wounds.” Psalm 147:2-3
With this as our vision for 2016, we’re going to focus on being present in our communities, building on the foundation that God has given us as a church and as individuals.
how does this impact our conferences?
Our conferences, Convergence, Awaken and Men’s Camp, have become annual highlights and significant milestones in recent years. The much-anticipated conferences have seen year-on-year growth exceeding our expectations and developed their own identities and flavours!
As a global church, we’re constantly assessing and reflecting on how to improve, adjust and fine-tune our ministry activities and events. Hours spent on each endeavour are counted as precious and as such we’re conscious of how we spend our time and resources towards building God’s Kingdom.
After careful consideration, we’ve decided that part of our aim for 2016 is to make the following changes concerning our conferences:
Convergence will continue as our annual global conference, set aside as a time of worship, growth and vision sharing, forming an important part of our identity as a church.
The Awaken Women’s Conference and the Men’s Camps are becoming regional events, planned and hosted by Shofar congregations in their areas and each region will have the opportunity to decide whether they have the capacity to do so.
Our hope is that we’ll reach even more people through regional events – bringing Men’s Camp and Awaken to where our congregations and their communities are. We look forward to sharing what’s been established over the past few years!
As encouragement, we’d like to share some projects that have been supported through Awaken and Men’s Camp in the past few years and that have made an impact in their local communities. Together, we can start to have a greater influence in our respective regions.
Hi. Thank you for the update. Obviously I will miss the whole experience of a lot of ladies attending at one Awaken but we do understand the new idea and are looking forward to the new season. I would like to know if there will be ‘general correspondence’ regarding regional Awaken events as I am obviously not in the correspondence list of each congregation in the Western Cape. Maybe on Shofars Website all the events can be loaded so we will have the opportunity to join other congregation as well. I would love to visit Somerset West and Gardens and Stellenbosch etc Awakens evenings or weekends as well. 🙂 God bless
When or what are the dates for Awaken Woman’s Conference 2016?
Dear Thandeka
The Awaken Women’s Conference and the Men’s Camps are becoming regional events, planned and hosted by Shofar congregations in their areas and each region will have the opportunity to decide whether they have the capacity to do so. Contact: Christelle Myburgh (Awaken Women’s Ministry) at christelle.myburgh@shofaronline.org for info on an event in your area. Hope this help.