My assistant Leslie and I flew out today for this large marriage event at a Church in suburban Minneapolis and I was fascinated to see that like many of the Churches I go to this was a fairly large and growing Church where the average age of the attendees was in their 30s and 40s. I was also fascinated to see that these marriage events which they do twice-a-year attracts 1500 people - one thousand five hundred people roughly at each one of them and that basically represents 700 or more couples which is just a huge response from a Church that apparently takes Marriage Ministry very seriously. The interesting thing was that this was actually arranged by the Small Groups Ministry of the Church as a way to try to get people interested and connected and realize their need for fellowship with other couples and use it as a way to connect people in.
They also did something that I wish more Churches will do. In the lobby of this Church afterwards they had several tables set up where there were people from a local counseling services agency that was there as counselors to be able to sign couples up if issues had been raised during the talk and the couple realized that they needed to go more in depth and deal with some of the issues that they had heard about. I was really blown away by how organized this event was.
I told Mat Anderson, the Small Groups Pastor and Kristen, the woman who organized it, that they were running like a well-oiled machine and that is high praise because sometimes Churches are trying to pull things together at the last minute, but these people had done an excellent job.
To me, though, one of the best things about the trip was being able to travel with my assistant Leslie. I am so incredibly grateful for the team that God has brought me, and I reflect very frequently on how truly impossible it would be to do a tenth of what I do if I didn’t have this fantastic team of Linda and Vance and Leslie and Tally, my Research Assistant and the others who work with me make it so much more enjoyable to feel like things are organized, I can entrust things to them, and know that everything on our end hopefully is working like a well-oiled machine as well. I am so grateful. It is so impossible to do this, traveling and speaking and writings in isolation. I would not be able to do it without a team, and I am just so grateful to them.