Over 1,000 church leaders gathered 14 different countries for our annual Bible Conference in Bela Tserkov this year. In addition to those who attended we also reached thousands more with over 10,000 downloads of video and audio recordings.
“The Minister’s Family” was the theme for this year’s conference. Our speakers spoke on Biblical principles of marriage and family. They brought Scriptural truths to bear on the relation between church ministry and family and they helped the participants develop a God centered view of vital importance of a strong home life as a foundation for ministry.
If you would like to see video, audio, and sermon notes from the conference in Russian, you can find them all here.
For the first time we decided to dedicate a full hour to prayer from 7-8 AM each morning. As I planned for this I wasn’t sure what to expect. The first day I invited men to come and pray for their wives. To my surprise about 500 men showed up and together we spent 60 mins praying for our marriages, our wives, and for each other. I’m not sure I can communicate to you accurately the experience of so many men kneeling their knees before our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and interceding on behalf of their wives. As I led this hour of prayer I was humbled, refreshed, and encouraged.
On the second morning I led both husbands and wives in prayer. We spent another hour at the foot of the cross praying for our children, for schools in Ukraine, and for teachers. 
One thing we realize is that unless a pastor has a strong God centered family life he can’t expect to have a successful ministry and probably won’t have a long ministry. Unfortunately sometimes church culture honors forsaking family for the sake of ministry. This should not be the case. Many pastors and pastors wives heard clear Bible teaching about God’s priority to for the family in the life of the pastor.
One pastor’s wife wrote this to me following the conference:
“This conference gave me the chance to view my marriage as a unique part of God’s plan and helped me to see my husband from a different perspective. God did a miracle in my heart and now I understand why it was so difficult for my husband to follow after God, I was the main barrier with my very demanding personality, instead of supporting and helping him, I contradicted him, demanded things from him and did many other things that were not helpful. After the conference and after God worked in my heart there was a noticeable difference in our home and in our relationship.”
Another conference participant shared the following:
“The sermons were very useful for me, especially Benjamin Portnasky’s “Resolving Conflict.” For a long time I thought that Christians should never have any kind of conflict. However, I learned from the sermons that sometimes conflict is inevitable and you need to be prepared to resolve them quickly.”
As always we choose speakers who had years of pastoral experience and could skillfully exposit God’s Word. One of our goals for these conferences is to present good examples of faithful and accurate Bible preaching.
Thank you for your prayers and support for this important conference. God has used the collective effort of many people to equip, encourage, and edify thousands of church leaders through this event.
