Thursday, November 09, 2006

Good times, PDYM style.

Had lunch over in Vacaville today with a group of youth pastors, as part of the PDYM (Purpose-Driven Youth Ministry) national luncheons happening all week. Jeremy White from Valley Church of Vacaville hosted, and did a great job. Kinda reminded me of Josh Griffin. Only with fewer children.

I'm involved with a couple of local groups of youth pastors in our area, but it was good to connect with an entirely new and different group of leaders. Most of the folks today were from the Vacaville/Solano County area, but a few of us made slightly longer drives; about 45 minutes for me.

The event's highlight had to be a "degrees of separation" revelation for me. I attended college at Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri. TWO OTHER GUYS at today's event attended college in the same town: one at Baptist Bible College, and another at Central Bible College. Evangel and CBC are both affiliated with my denomination.

Ah, but it gets better. The CBC grad, John Buckner, is good friends with Daniel Matsunaga, a missionary-in-training to Japan that our church supports. And the BBC grad, Travis, has a girlfriend who goes to church in Turlock -- the town where I grew up!

On the serious side, it was good to get together with a bunch of people from all sorts of denominations and backgrounds, and spend time enjoying the conversation, company and community.

Oh, they gave away some free stuff. And of course, I didn't win. I never win stuff from Simply Youth Ministry giveaways.

1 comment:

Ken Leslie said...

Jeremy is a good guy! Nice to hear things went well for you. It is amazing how small our youth ministry world is sometimes!