The Bethlehem Star_March 2013.pdf

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At our most recent quarterly strategy meeting, Pastor Ken Currie suggested that Bethlehem’s new leadership trio host Q & A forums. This new trio consists of:

Pastor Jason Meyer, Pastor for Preaching & Vision

Pastor Ken Currie, Pastor for Strategic Implementation

Pastor Sam Crabtree, Executive Minister

During Pastor Jason Meyer’s keynote address at the Desiring God Conference for Pastors earlier this week, I started taking notes with the intention of blogging some of the highlights.

• Pastors are people who cannot do their work without words.
• Our words are massively important. But if we think our words are decisive in bearing spiritual fruit, then we have become “professionals” and stopped relying on God to do the decisive work.
• No words are effective if God withholds his power.
• The great Actor is God, and our words are instruments in his hands.
• The “poetic effort” to say something freshly is the effort to see it freshly, strikingly, and beautifully.
  

Yesterday I introduced Mark Dever who spoke to about 900 pastors at a “pre-conference” sponsored by the Fidelis Foundation. Here are seven excerpts:

Highlights from the January 27 Quarterly Strategy Meeting include …

• Elder News
• a Membership Report
• a Treasurer’s Report and Financial Update from 2012
• Campus and Department Reports
• approval of the proposed 2013 Church & Missions Budget
• discussion and adoption of new job descriptions for Pastors Sam Crabtree and Ken Currie
• an Update on the South Campus
• a motion for the elders to draft a statement, regarding church membership and elder oversight

Elder News

Hats off to Chris Powers and Jonathan Davis for recording and editing the mini-documentary shown at the Jason Meyer Installation Service Sunday, January 20. (And more hats off to Rick Busch, Laur & Nick Weisensel, and Francis Cheung who were scurrying around capturing photos.)

We just marked the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. One of Bethlehem’s “Ten Dimensions” is racial harmony.
 
A legitimate question has been, “When John Piper steps down as senior leader at Bethlehem, what will happen to the value placed upon racial harmony?”
 

The evening of Sunday, January 20, 2013, Bethlehem Baptist Church installed her 15th senior pastor, Jason Curtis Meyer, as Pastor for Preaching & Vision.

What a helpful tool to bolster your soul for the love affair with prayer! The Prayer Week Guide is a string of lights along your path to guide you.

With insights and heart fuel from Pastors Jason Meyer, John Piper, and David Livingston, the concise guide also supplies the praying saint with bulleted requests from various ministry departments of Bethlehem.