Men's conference

Just have to write something really quick here... Hillsong Men's Conference just finished and I have to tell some people about it. There's the usual stuff like we had great speakers, great messages, great stories of old men hitting on young women who were helping out at conference (oops, did I say that publicly?) but what I want to highlight is something that will be news to people and some of my friends and family and friends at home will be quite excited about. No, I wasn't one of those old men - although I almost bought a coffee for one of the ladies working out in the rain and only 15 minutes after I decided not to did I realize how it could have come across. Whew, was I glad I hadn't done it.

So what I'm excited about is there's a new Mercy Ministries home starting in Lima, Peru. Now, I know that many people knew there were plans of one, but it's now one major step closer to reality. Some people have been working towards it for a while and they have trained staff ready to go who have actually been working with women in their own homes - doing what they can until the home can be purchased. Well, a couple of our pastors went over there in the last couple of weeks and checked out the place. What they didn't tell the pastor out there was the plans for us to give them the money to buy it. We took an offering at the men's conference to pass along to them to help with the home and after the offering was received, a phone call was made to the pastor heading up the plans in Peru and they were told they now have all the finances in place to buy the home. The offering was enough to cover the purchase and likely the furnishing of the home. What a blessing to be a part of. Needless to say, that pastor was quite ecstatic!

I really believe it's time for those of us in the wealthier nations of the world to give more money to qualified people in poorer nations to do God's work in their own home instead of spending our money sending people from our home to theirs. Now I fully realize there is a place for us to send people too, but I believe we have focused on that too much and spent too little helping people in those nations do the work that they can do better in their own homeland than we ever could.