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Prayer partner conference 2013
'Developing partnerships that bear fruit'
 Great Shelford Free Church was the venue for this years annual Prayer Partner Conference, when on Saturday 29th June over 100 TFM supporters and staff met together. The day opened with an introduction by John Hibberd, TFM's Senior Evangelist, who introduced our theme for the day which was 'Developing partnerships that bear fruit'. Following a short time of worship our first speaker was Peter Adams. Peter has worked for TFM for many years and has great experience of working with churches in mission. Peter spoke of his work with St Luke's church Prittlewell, an Anglo Catholic church near Southend in Essex. Peter emphasised the need to be humble and respectful towards the churches we are working with. He talked in particular on the importance of prayer before and during missions highlighting that this was a great strength of St Luke's who had prayed every morning and evening in the run up to missions and had prayer walked the streets of Prittlwell.
 Our key note speaker for the day was the Rev Dave Richards. Dave, minister of St John's Stratford, talked about his long standing links to TFM going back to a training event in 1998 and his walk with TFM in 2003. This long standing partnership lead to the very successful link up between TFM and the churches in Stratford for the 2012 Olympics. Dave recalled that on hearing on the news that London would be the venue for the 2012 Olympics his first thought was of working with TFM to do a mission during the Olympics . Dave spoke of the detailed preparation for the Olympics mission that the partnership with TFM had allowed including missions in 2010 (Ultimate Goal) and 2011 (Ultimate Dream) culminating in Ultimate Gold during the Olympics in 2012.
Dave spoke of how the partnership had been successful in helping his congregation to grow in Evangelism, encouraging them to step outside the box resulting in a number of them volunteering for missions with TFM in other areas.
The key points in Dave's talk to the advantages of partnering with TFM were:
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Partnership - TFM works WITH churches
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Mission Enabling - Bringing wisdom and experience
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Contextualisation - Focusing on what can be done / being realistic in the given situation
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Training - TFM has lots to offer
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Ecunenical - TFM strengthens bonds between churches in shared mission
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On-going mission - TFM aims towards a long-term goal of churches being self-starting in evangelism; getting mission into the DNA of the church
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Evangelists - TFM provides genuinely anointed evangelists but also gets the churches to think about finding such people in their own midst too. Raises the issue.
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Click here to watch Richard's video |
The afternoon session began with a summary by TFM staff on recent missions. A video of Richard Scott, who could not be at the conference, was shown reporting on his recent medical mission to Liberia. Roger spoke about his missions to Ireland and how for him the Olympics mission of 2012 was a once in a lifetime experience. John Hibberd interviewed Cynthia Hebden who he had worked with on the recent Shepshed mission and gave us an update on WC2.
The day concluded with a talk by Daniel Cozens, TFM's founding evangelist entitled 'That which pleases God'. Daniel told us Faith in God was the bedrock of our ministry he listed old testament characters whose belief in God had lead them to do great things. He emphasised the importance of being alone with God citing how important this was to Jesus' in his time on earth and how easy it is to be distracted today by modern technology. He also emphasised the importance of silence and stillness.
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