After a busy day with Tourformation the evening meeting focused on the needs that we as Christians face everyday. The need is everywhere. The general session started with testimonies from two students who experienced God at the ministry sites they visited. These were just two of the stories that have been told all day - on the bus ride home, at dinner, in the elevator, in hotel rooms.
One Time Blind, the team that has been presenting dramas at Anaheim 07, followed with several vignettes focusing on what the Christian's response should be to the needs that are presented all around us. The theme of their skits was clear: If Christian's declare love for God, they MUST demonstrate that love through their actions. Here's a funny but poignant clip.
Next on the program was a testimony by Tim Peters. Twenty years ago, in 1987, Tim was a conferee at the national Mennonite Brethren youth conference at Glorietta. Tim, a member of the Parkview MB church in Hillsboro, KS, was challenged by Ridge Burns to make a commitment to go anywhere, at anytime, to any place that God would call him. Tim stood up to signal that he was ready to make that commitment. A few years later Ridge asked Tim to come visit the Center For Student Ministries in inner-city Los Angeles. Tim took up the offer and flew to L.A.
Ridge picked Tim up from the airport and drove to a downtown hotel - a hotel with rats, roaches, a room with a sink and broken mirror, a bathroom down the hall, and prostitutes roaming the corridors. The next day they drove to different ministry sites and did a prayer tour in the evening. Tim saw homeless people lining the roads, fires blazing in the street, with smells he had never encountered before. That weekend changed the course of his life. The farm boy from Kansas began a journey of living in the inner-city that has lasted nearly two decades. Today Tim manages a transitional home for homeless families, helping them off the streets and into a life of stability and faith.
Tim gave the same challenge to our students that Ridge gave to him twenty years ago: be willing to go anywhere, at anytime, to do anything. Hundreds responded by standing to their feet signifying that they too wanted to be used by God.
Above: Tim gives his testimony of moving from Hillsboro to inner-city L.A.
Above: Tim and Ridge (he made a surprise visit) after the meeting
Above: Door of Hope, the ministry that Tim directs