PALCON

My graduation went great.  Our motel was about an hour away from the campus which made for a lot of travel, but other than that it was a wonderful weekend.  The graduation was held in the football stadium.  I had been praying that we would have sunny weather, but I soon realized I should have prayed for sunny and cool weather.  It was hot!  Around 4,600 graduates attended the graduation which was about half of the number graduating.  Liberty University has really grown over the past few years.  Our son graduated from there in the mid-90s, and I think we had about as many attending graduation as the school had for total students when he attended there.  They announced they now have over 60,000 students attending on campus and in their distance learning program.

I am in Illinois to speak at the PALCON conference for the Church of the Nazarene this week.  I'll be speaking in the morning plenary session in a couple of hours and will lead two workshops today and tomorrow.  I think there are around 400 pastors here for this event.  Today is Bivocational Day so I hope to meet many bivocational ministers and be able to visit with them.

It seems more denominations are realizing how important bivocational ministry is to their churches and are trying to host some events specific to their needs.  That is a great step in the right direction.  I received some complaints from a few bivocational ministers about having Bivocational Day on Tuesday.  I understand where they are coming from, but we need to realize there are some scheduling issues with anything we do.  When I was a bivocational pastor I would try to reserve 2-3 vacation days to attend events that I thought would be helpful to my ministry.  I believe there needs to be some give and take on both sides.  Denominations and judicatories need to offer more events for bivocational ministers, and many of these need to be on Saturday.  However, bivocational ministers need to understand that not everything can be offered on Saturday.  We need to be willing to invest a vacation day or two to attend some events as well.  With a little compromise on both sides, we could see a lot more events geared specifically for bivocational ministers and much better attendance at the events that are offered.

I need to finish getting ready.