APCE Annual Event keynoter Mark Yaconelli concluded his final plenary Friday with a story you just knew came with a happy ending. It did indeed, but the master storyteller drew it out so well that you were afraid it might turn out unexpectedly. More on that later.
One Sunday, the Rev. Michelle Scott-Huffman had an epiphany.
As the former pastor of Table of Grace, a non-traditional, radically inclusive faith community she planted in Jefferson City, Missouri, she knew that her leadership and preaching were central to worship.
But one Sunday, the congregation showed her — and the Spirit told her — otherwise.
APCE keynoter Mark Yaconelli, whose most recent book holds up the importance of storytelling, told a few compelling stories himself during his plenary talk on Thursday.
There may be no place thirstier for life than the desert after a long period of no rain, the Rev. Melanie Marsh said during Thursday’s worship service at APCE’s Annual Event being held in St. Louis and online. Marsh used a National Geographic clip to demonstrate rain’s dramatic effect on the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park southeast of Los Angeles.
Since the Covid pandemic began in early 2020, we’ve gone from lockdown to shutdown, Mark Yaconelli told those attending the APCE Annual Event Wednesday during the first of three keynotes he’s scheduled to deliver. He saw plenty of examples of shutdown during a 91-stop book tour he completed last year following publication of his “Between the Listening and the Telling: How Stories Can Save Us.”
A spirit of playfulness — which found Christian educators romping around the room in a spirited game of Duck, Duck, Goose despite the early hour — filled the room at one of several pre-events being offered at the Association of Partners in Christian Education (APCE) 2024 Annual Event, “Come, all who are thirsty.”
Birmingham’s history of civil rights set the stage for the Association of Partners in Christian Education (APCE)’s Annual Event, held in the city Jan. 25–28, with pre- and post-event touring and learning opportunities around Birmingham and Alabama available to participants.
Last week as part of the Association of Partners in Christian Education’s annual event, it fell to the Rev. Elizabeth Boulware Landes to lead the workshop “The Language of Grace.”
“We never outgrow fear,” John Pavlovitz said in his second plenary at last week’s annual event of the Association of Partners in Christian Education. “As we get older, we just trade in our terror for more age-appropriate models.” Pavlovitz, a pastor, writer and activist from North Carolina, then described the two responses we have at any age to the storms that scare us: “We become frozen or frantic.”
