ACU wants to help facillitate N. Dallas ministers' meeting

[James Nored]

Hey guys. Douglas Fair works for ACU and lives in this area. His role is to help serve churches through relationships and bringing in various resources from ACU. I really appreciate this approach, and certainly there are many ways that ACU could help us in this area.

Doug has asked me to work with you in getting together a local ministers' meeting/luncheon in the N. Dallas area. We could meet monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly. Doug could help us organizationally and by trying to bring in some ACU professors to talk about issues of interest. Doug is on this network, and a very personable guy.

So I wanted to enlist you guys' help in this. What topics, speakers, meeting times, formats, and places would be of interest to you for a ministers' meeting/luncheo?

[Trey Finley]

I'd lean towards 4-6 times per year. Of course, an ongoing conversation on how they're training ministers coming out of GST and what we're experiencing working with churches would be helpful for them and for us.

Book studies would provide an opportunity to make our own personal reading more collaborative in nature.

My only preference would be to steer away from traditional "training sessions" that are essentially one-way communication.

[James Nored]

Thanks, Trey. I'm a big book study fan too. Greg Ziegler, a minister friend of mine from KC, is interested in us doing an online book study. We could do both.

4-6 times per year sounds like a good number to me right now.

Most everything is becoming more interactive, so it would make sense for this to have some of this component as well.

[Tanner King]

Ditto what Trey said about training ministers coming out of the GST and engaging in book studies in order to make our own personal reading more collaborative.

More specifically, something we're experiencing at North Davis due to a deficient economy is an increase of people in need coming to our front door for assistance. I'd appreciate some dialogue on what others are doing in order to best assist the marginalized of our society.

[James Nored]

Thanks, Tanner. We have been flooded with people coming in needing economic help. We have responded by handing out about 30 bags of groceries each week and praying for those who come in. We also are clothing about 100 families a month. We're adding more follow-up to these ministries.

You can check out some great stories in the Clothes Closet group and Food Pantry group.