Pastors’ Conference 2023

God blessed our pastors’ conference, September 26-29!  I am very thankful that Elga and Stélio, who joined our administrative team in the past year, handled the registration and bookshop, respectively, with minimal support from me.  Their capable service relieved me of two huge tasks which demanded my attention at past conferences.  Keeping up with the large inflow and outflow of money during the week required concentration and long hours, from 5am to 10pm, but God blessed my accounting and there were no significant financial discrepancies to wrestle with.

A wonderful new challenge for me at this year’s conference was translation.  A friend capably translated our American preacher’s four messages from the stage.  But during all the other messages, preached in our national language, I sat by his side in the audience and translated them quietly into English for him.  We were grateful for a keynote speaker eager to hear all the other lectures so he could adjust his own to fit in well with them.  Though this delightful task occupied a good deal of my time, it allowed me the blessing of hearing most of the conference preaching for a change this year, and I still managed to fulfill my other responsibilities at other times — or in some cases, even while translating.

Due to my long hours of work and the possibility of being called upon to attend to emergencies during the night, I stayed all week at our organization’s headquarters where the conference was held.  Our guest house is nearly completed, and I had the luxury of its master bedroom to myself.  Its proximity to my office allowed me to plop back into bed after handing the driver money for his daily early morning market run, and even to take a few quick naps when I ran out of energy in the afternoons.  I was still completely exhausted when I finally wrapped up the conference finances at midnight on its final day, and I spent the next two days in bed recuperating.  But it was definitely worth the energy expended to provide logistical support for teaching African church leaders about — in the words of our conference theme — “The Power of the Gospel”!