The Thoughts of a Young Preacher

Today was a great day for me. As I get back on track with my blog journey I find myself going through a cool experience. This week I am at the Waterview church of Christ going through a type of preacher mentoring program. Waterview is a great church! They have a great youth ministry, A Chinese ministry, a Spanish ministry, and that is just to name a few. They have more ministers then I can name on staff and an impressive membership that is highly involved! I am so excited to learn( every for just a week) about what makes this church tick. If you are a reader from ACU and you happened to be in ministry department then you had classes with Robert Oglesby Jr. He is a great man and I learned alot from him during my time at ACU. Now here is the cool thing, I am now learning from Robert Jr's dad , you guessed it Robert Sr. The cool thing is that he has been the preacher here for over 40 years and if you know anything at all about ministry you know how impressive it is. What is even more impressive is that the church started at 20 people and Robert Sr. over the years built it up to around 2,000. This week I am under this ministers wing. A kind of a mentoring type deal. The great thing is that this guy is humble and yet he really does know what he is talking about. Plus know that I have close 3 years of ministry experince under my belt I know alot more about what questions I need to ask. We are talking about group dynamics, sermon structure, conflict management, and many other things. Today I felt like a kid in a candy store as I have so many different questions and he really does have the answers. He doesn't claim to have the only way to do this thing called ministry and yet he is very effective at what he does. I am only in day one of this experience and I already feel like this trip was worth my time.

On another note I different experience tonight. After spending the day at the church Robert and I headed to one of the members homes where a group was meeting that was connected with the Chinese ministry. The people included a bunch of young Chinese people from the People republic of China Ministry of religion. I might be wrong but my guess is that they are some kind of government watch group or who knows maybe they are trying to create more religious freedom, but given China's history on the matter I doubt it. I had an amazing talk with one of the guys that was about 30. He asked me what I did and I told him that I was a minister. That really got him interested and he asked me question after question about my faith. He want to know more and so we traded e-mail. I am excited about this possibility. Who knows what could happen. I would to open this up to the readers. What should I tell this Chinese official about Christianity? I would like to hear some suggestions! Great to be back on the blog! Hope to see some of you faithful readers soon!