Twice a year, the pastors of the Gulf States Conference gather together to learn, grow, fellowship, find inspiration and energize their ministries. The first meeting of 2024 took place on February 21-22 and was led by VP for Ministerial Josh Murillo.
During the two days together, pastors were inspired by guest speaker Roger Hernandez, ministerial and evangelism director for the Southern Union. Pastor Hernandez challenged attendees saying, “I think it's important to know the times that we are living in. It would be unwise to act as if everything was normal, everything was the same, we have no challenges.
I think a good pastor will be intentional about finding out what the demographics say, what the surveys say and what the Bible says, and put it all together and have a strategy and a clear direction on where to go.”
Local church associate pastor David Donaldson appreciated the time together and the importance of the meetings saying, “I believe this is extremely important not only for the individual pastors but also for the membership of local churches and the conference...The experience that I've had has been very informative and to a great extent inspirational. I had a very good time.
Highlighting the opportunity, Josh Murillo, VP for Ministerial at the Gulf States Conference stated, “it's such a joy to have our pastors over at the Conference office. And you know, the purpose of these meetings is to provide the right training and the information that they need.
We've been talking about their benefits. We talked about leadership. We're talking about goals. We're talking about ideas. We want to dream big. We want to work together. We want to network, and we want to inspire our pastors to go back to their churches and continue serving. They've been doing it.
We're very proud of them. We're grateful to have them serving in our territory. So, these meetings are just pure oxygen coming to their lives and are helping them to grow as we grow together."
Pastor Agnes Lucas, who was in attendance at the two-day retreat, shared his appreciation for the weekend saying, “It's a pleasure to be here because it's good to gather together with other pastors to listen to their experience and also learn how to improve my service -- how to improve my ministry with my churches.
I'm sure that I'm going to take good things from this meeting. And also, I'm going to put into practice a lot of things that I have heard here so far.”
We invite everyone to continue to pray for our pastors and their ministries to the local churches.