The CBWC church family has a long and encouraging history of the time spent together at Assembly. We have for some years now had biennial assemblies, with the alternate year a focus on the Regions having their own gatherings. We have moved, starting this year to an annual assembly which will also afford time for the regional clusters to meet, encourage and resource together. Why move from biennial to annual? We found that every two years was too much of a gap between meetings losing the momentum of re-building a sense of family together. If you missed assembly on one year, say 2009 you will have missed four years by the time you attended the next one.
We are committed in these gatherings to:
- Worship the Living God
- Experience His gracious love, work and presence amongst us
- Covenant to work together and serve each other, our communities and the
larger world.
This is crucial time as we wait on God, celebrate His presence and live out what He has called us to.
Assembly is the responsibility of the Board and its wishes are enacted by staff along with a whole array of volunteers. The Assembly committee is chaired by Pat Flaten and I am grateful to her for leading the planning process with such care and thoughtfulness. The committee members are: Lisa Gould, David Holten, Jeremy Bell, Devin Seghers, Mary Dyk, Jan Paasuke, Shelby Gregg and David Simpson.
When we gather together at Assembly, our primary purpose is to worship our living and loving God. Worship comes before everything else, and from that comes everything else. This is not spiritual spin or correctness. It is simply true. You leave Assembly saying: “I was in the presence of God, I heard God, I heard His stories, I heard about His faithfulness. I know that He is faithful. He will be faithful to me, even as He has been faithful down through the years to others.” That’s all anyone needs.
Now is the time to make your plans to attend our annual Assembly in Banff. This year, Assembly is being held April 23-26 at Banff Park Lodge. I would like to encourage all pastors, moderators, diaconal leaders, church staff, church members and leaders of our partner ministries to join our larger community to proclaim before God and each other our unity and our shared desire to glorify God. Worship is the unity we have in a denomination so diverse in geography, ethnicity, culture and theology such as we happen to be.
We will have Mark Buchanan, author and pastor of New Life Church in Duncan as our keynote speaker addressing the topic of Leadership. We will tell stories, sing together and listen to each other, eat meals together and have special break-out groups. And, as usual at Assembly, business will get done and decisions affecting our future service to God together will be made.
Rev. Joan Dosso from Emmanuel, Victoria, will lead worship along with her brother Ken Dosso from Lethbridge. Knowing that the Lord Himself is our audience in all we do, one of the primary purposes of Assembly is to resource our churches. We will also highlight several missional networks with short power point sessions. There will be discussion time and time to network with these ministries to explore ways of partnering with them or doing something similar in your own church. By doing this very specific resource-based work around what God is calling us to do, we can build community. By asking one another “can you help me with this and walk with me and mentor me?” we develop friendships, mutual resourcing, affirmation and prayer together. It sets up a paradigm where by acknowledging the faithfulness of God by sharing with each other, we experience God’s faithfulness. That is the essence of our community.
Krystaal, an internationally known music group whose members are from Zaire, Saskatoon, and Toronto, will be sponsored by CBM for an evening of celebration. Dr. Bruce Milne will preach Sunday morning.
The Information Package is being mailed to churches this week. It is also available on the website at www.cbwc.ca.
Please make every effort to attend.
Warmly
In Christ,
Jeremy