Missions

We recently hosted seven of our globalx Partners and had a few guests for a two day conference called OverDrive immediately following North Point’s Drive Conference. I learned when you have some Moldovans, Macedonians, Estonians, Brazilians, South Africans, Philippinos, Venezuelans and a touch of France and Germany, look out! Things are going to get a little crazy!

We started our two days together with an Amazing Race adventure game on the North Point Community Church campus. It was so much fun to watch each group of five, comprised of people from different countries with different personalities, work together to try to win the race. We had some of the ladies running in high heels faster than some of the guys in tennis shoes! This game was a great way to get them connected with each other right off the bat.

We then dove into what their impressions were of the Drive Conference. Drive was put on by North Point Ministries for more than 2,000 leaders from around the country and world. We spent most of our debriefing time discussing the major points from Andy’s talks in the main sessions. Our partners got to hear how the messages impacted each leader from different parts of the world.

After spending the late morning and early afternoon debriefing Drive, we all headed off for an International Whirly Ball Championship with all of our globalx partners as the participants. It was quite a tournament. Whirly Ball is basically croquet in bumper cars. We had two courts and the teams would finish the game and run to the next game. After some fantastic goals and obnoxious penalties, a champion was crowned and we headed to an evening picnic together. When we have all of our partners in one place, we feel it is so important to have connection time socially as well as time to dive into what’s happening in their ministries and churches.

Friday we got into some new subjects and had people gather in groups related to the area of the church they work in. We split up into communicators, service programming, and people that work in family ministry or administration. We finished up our time hearing about the export tool that some of our staff members at North Point are working on. The tool will be online and will help all of our partnerships, foreign and domestic, to implement different environments in their own churches. It will be a great “How-to” guide.

The globalX team did a great job working together as one to make a great event for our international family. I recently got comments from some of our partners and guests and thought I’d share those with you:

“It was so great to get to know other partners and their team members better.”

“I was encouraged to see and hear some new faces on the block who seem to have really caught the vision, like Lorenzo [France] and Theo [Germany].”

“We really enjoyed having the time to process the DRIVE messages and it was great to interact with other teams as we processed.”

“Our guys really loved the time together at OverDrive. It was great to spend more time with our international partners. It doesn’t feel like they are NP partners, it feels like they are also our own partners.”

“I also loved the way your team seemed to be united and behind the same vision. You could sense it.”

“I guess the best way I can put it , once again we were able to feel how you care and love us as people. That means so much and is the biggest encouragement of all.”

Rod Brown