Willow Creek Leadership Summit
In early January, Willow Creek Community Church sent their advance planning team for the Global Leadership Summit.
It is a leadership development conference held every August in Chicago at the Willow Creek Campus, and broadcast via Satellite to multiple locations throughout the country.
The videos are then edited, dubbed into Spanish, and then we in Panama would have a leadership summit held at our church for pastors around the country, and perhaps from neighboring countries like Costa Rica and Colombia.
In 2006 alone (Source):
- 85,000 leaders were trained
- 176 cities in 18 countries hosted events
- 10,000 volunteers participated
- 8,000 churches were represented
We met the Willow Creek team at our church, together with about 20 pastors from various different denominations. When each pastor was introduced, most every one was also a supervisor of some kind in their denominational tradition. I had the chance to speak with several of them, and invitations are beginning to come for evangelism workshops.
The group did decide that they would form the local planning team and I will be a part of that team, offering the administrative gifts as necessary.
Foursquare Church Pastors
Also that week, we had a visiting Foursquare pastor from the US who brought us the Word in church, and he invited me to dinner with nearly 15 other visiting pastors from the United States. It was a good dinner at an ocean front restaurant. We ate outdoors to enjoy the breeze.
The pastors were here in Panama to learn about the History of the Foursquare’s work in Panama. Panama was the first country that Foursquare missionaries went to when the denomination was in it’s infancy.
That same weekend, I also met people from the Foursquare Press who are in town working on some youth material – they have not yet made contact with Vida Joven (young life) to get their input and I will put them together.
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