SPC '12

This past week we headed 8 hours south to a town called Dakabin, right outside of Brisbane, to attend the South Pacific Convention (SPC) for Wesleyan Churches.  It was a great time to get together with churches from Australia and surrounding countries to praise God together and look forward to the upcoming years.  This conference is held every 4 years so there are heaps of business meetings that took place to make decisions that would affect the Wesleyan church!  One exciting bit of news is that the Wesleyan church here in the South Pacific has grown large enough that it no longer has to be under the leadership of the North American church.  Prior to this, a General Superintendent from America has had to attend the meetings and be a chairperson.  Now, the South Pacific Church is self governing.  It was neat to be able to be at the meeting and see history in the making!  We also got to see the new National Superintendent be elected in.  Rev. Rex Rigby is our new Superintendent.
  

Dr. Wayne Schmidt, who is the Vice President of Wesley Seminary in Indiana, was the guest speaker for the camp.  It was so nice to hear someone with an American accent!  Even though we don't really know Dr. Schmidt, it was just comforting to hear someone speak the same as us AND talk football! We actually helped Dr. Schmidt move into his home a couple years ago so we kind of know him.

This is Pastor Shae Taylor.  He works at a church about 3 hours from where we live and ministers to Aboriginal people.  Here he is leading devotions and playing a didgeridoo.  Want an amazing instrument!

  

Mr. and Mrs. Rigby after he was officially elected in as the National Superintendent.  

These are all of the new directors and board memebers that were elected in

Games, a movie and turkeys

On Friday night we had the youth over for a movie and game night.  Since things are pretty quiet around the church in the holiday season, we enjoy having them over and spending time with them!  They really are great kids!  It's fun to have them all together!  We played the groups favorite card game, spoons, as well as a new one for us called "Man Bites Dog."  It's a really fun game...you should look it up!  We had some pizza and watched the movie "Evan Almighty."  It was such a fun night with the youth!

When my parents came out in November we were planning on doing something with the youth for Thanksgiving but unfortunately it didn't work out.  My mom had bought all kinds of American candy and brought it over to make little Turkeys with the kids.  Well, this candy has just been sitting around in our cabinet since then so I decided that we should make the turkeys in January.  A little late but they still loved them!  Here are some pictures of our turkeys :)

We might have already eaten the candy that was supposed to be the face, so we had to improvise and this is what we came up with...gigantic marshmallow eyes!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!  Wow, I can't believe it's 2012!  We did something different this New Years.  We had a New Year Eve's party at our church that was full of worship music, prayer, family games and food!  It was such a neat way to bring in the New Year.  The evening started at 8:00...well it was supposed to.  We had a few technical difficulties.  The computer that we used to project the words for the songs decided to keep shutting down on us.  Thankfully, one of the guys on our worship team is a computer guy, so we pretty much got it sorted out. So everything started going at about 8:30.  I'll give you a run down of the evening.  We started off with some worship music, minute to win it games, music, more games, food, hour of prayer and finished off the evening with more worship music.  It was so neat to come together as a church and dedicate this New Year to the Lord.  My favorite part was the hour of prayer.  We split the hour up into 12 different sections that were about 5 minutes long.  We started with praise and thanksgiving then every 5 minutes we would pray for something different...for example: our church and church ministries, our community, our country, our church leaders, our family and friends, etc.  It was great!  I can't wait to see what the Lord has in store for our church this year!!

Here are a few pictures/videos from the night!         

Me with the other Sam!  We did the sound and data for the night.

The is one of the minute to win it games.  One partner had to stand on the left and toss tennis balls to the player holding the tube.  The adults had to catch 20 tennis balls in 1 minute and kids had to catch 10.  

Hour of prayer

The countdown!!  Sorry about the poor quality!