My ORANGE Experience #4

The first thing I would like to say about the Orange Conference is what an honor I felt being asked to attend being that I’m “just” a volunteer. But being “just” a volunteer means I’m “just” one of the biggest influences in the lives of many children each and every week. I “just” may be the only one who tells these kids about the love of Christ and how very special they are to Him. I’m “just” the person that they can talk to when they don’t talk to their parents. One of the speakers at the conference pointed out that being “just” a volunteer can change the lives of many, many children and we have one of the most important jobs in society.

This really challenged the way that I think about how I serve and interact with the kids AND their parents. Part of what we do is try and get the parents involved more in the spiritual development of their children because they have much, much more time than the approximately 40 hours a year that we have at the church. When you’re as busy as most of us stay running around getting things set up, broke down, fixing , finding, etc., it’s easy to lose sight of this. Because as Francis Chan, the pastor of Cornerstone Community Church, stated the church is all about community. His message burnt like a branding iron on my heart because I’ve often noticed when reading the New Testament how much more devoted to each other were the members of the early church. They gave sometimes all they had in order to support each other. They broke bread together, which was a really big deal in that time. Pastor Chan told of how he and many members of his congregation had taken vows to support each other and their families to the extent that some were canceling their life insurance, others were living day to day from where they could (even out of their cars) and giving the money to the church. They are taking the idea of community to the Apostle’s level.

I think I can speak for all who attended, from FRC anyway, that it was a life changing experience. Some of us arrived as strangers and went home as a community of FRC believers with heads full of ideas and hearts full of desire to make the children’s ministries at all of our campuses better, growing and alive in Christ.

Mac Cumpton, Storyteller, Sawgrass Campus