This weekend was another highlight of my year. Jeff and I had received an invitation to go again to Central Christian Church - the largest church in Las Vegas. I had been there last year to do an interview with the Pastor during services, about the topic of ‘For Women Only’ and this year …
they invited us back to talk about ‘For Men Only’. It’s always fun to do events together with Jeff. However, since I have been gone so much recently, I realized that we couldn’t leave our kids behind, so this weekend was wonderful because we brought our little ones with us.
So, we loaded the kids on a plane very early on Saturday morning and flew out to Las Vegas, where we got there just in time for Jeff to turn on the television and watch his beloved Michigan Wolverines in the big game against the Ohio State. Unfortunately, Ohio State won, but other than that, this was a perfect weekend. The pastoral interview went extremely well. This is a huge Church of 11,000 people; 11,000 people come every Sunday morning and they had several sites for the services. North Point Community Church in my Atlanta hometown does the same thing, where they broadcast the service into the secondary site, which itself is a Church of a 1,000 people - it’s just huge.
The thing that’s amazing about Central Christian Church is that they know that most of the people that live in their city are un-churched. Most of the people don’t have a context for understanding things of faith, and so this Church has developed an incredibly powerful, non- judgmental way of speaking to the community. That is so much where my heart is- having the ability to share some of these eternal, critical things with people who wouldn’t otherwise hear it. Central Christian has developed a wonderful way of doing that under the leadership of their Pastor, Jud Wilhite, for the past few years.
A young couple caught lounging in the 242 cafe and bookstore at Central Christian Church with their adorable new addition - each reading your books!
Photo provided by Jen Reyneri
We really enjoyed our time there even though it’s always really exhausting to do so many services- one on Saturday night, three on Sunday morning, and one on Sunday night. It makes me wonder how pastors do it every week. Sunday evening we also had a follow-up event, where Jeff and I did a marriage workshop which was also very interesting because it basically gave us a chance to go a little deeper into the issues and have a good question and answer time. All in all, this was a really powerful weekend, and I hope it made an impact in a lot of lives.