Do You Love Your Haters?

This last week I got to go up to our National Conference in Auckland and hear Ps Chris Hill (who is a part of Bishop TD Jakes' team) ... I just got to say... there just isn't anything quite like black preaching!!! What a phenomenal mind blowing time we had!

On the opening night Ps Chris' message really spoke to me and added a steel-like resolve to a few issues I had been dealing with at home. Over the past 6 months I have had increasing pressure to remove te preaching from our Friday night youth service. People were asking for more games and entertainment.

This continued and now I have all my leaders wanting the same thing. I began to really doubt my leadership and ability to lead teens... but during my leave I got to speak at Gatecrashers (Gateways youth ministry) and I really felt like I was in the right place... ministering to young people.

And since then I have been building coviction about our purpose and the centraility of the preaching of God's Word to see life change.
Hearing Ps Chris' message just continued to galvanise my decisions to stick to my guns. (This isn't to say I'm ignoring what the kids are saying... I have built a creative team that meets monthly and we are working on ways to up the fun in the service... but we will never touch the preaching of God's Word or the Worship of our wonderful Abba Father).

Ps Chris expressed it like this in his message on Joseph:

• We need haters (refering to Josephs brothers who hated him so much that they sold their own brother into slavery). They teach us to press into God!

• God asigns people to hate us for this season.

• Learn to turn your haters into esculators.

Do you have any haters at the moment who you need to thank God for?
They turn us toward God and force us to become clear about who we are and what purpose we are striving for.
Thank you Jesus for my 'haters'! Help me to be the leader that brings you glory and sees 1000's of teens running to you!!

I'd love to hear your comments on this post.

Godspeed & Kaizan
Clive