Rooted Conference - Equipped

Being a parent isn’t like having another full time job it is a whole life job. That means it has the capacity to feel all-consuming and overwhelming at times. Even when you might not be outnumbered by children you feel up against the emotions, helplessness and inadequacy that often stalks us when we are faced with significant things. With all those things stacking up in our hearts and minds where do we look to for wisdom? What is going to inform us raising our kids? What does God’s Word and the Gospel have to say to us when it comes to helping our kids as they grow up?

It is a common thing to measure life by age of life. Your days, hours and years are regularly measured or given some kind of framework. Your timetable, your birthday or the number of sleeps until Christmas. Yet one of the things we often get hung up on is measuring our size of life. We are troubled by significance, or perhaps our seeming lack of it. How do we process a young age when it sits alongside what feels like a small life? God’s Word tells us that there is no such thing as a small life. Your life is significant… and it counts most when it is making much of Jesus.

This session is going to focus on a verse from a letter sent to a young Christian leader called Timothy. 1 Timothy 4: 12 is going to tell him that he might feel young but his life has a significant capacity to impact those around him by pursuing the kind of life that God is calling him to.

One of the greatest privileges in being part of God’s family is the opportunity He gives us to care for those He has placed around us in the church. The challenge is in having words to say that are spiritually helpful and healthy.

This workshop aims to give you a framework to speak faithfully and a toolkit from which to engage truth in love into the lives of those around you. You might feel speechless but God has given us grace and truth to speak into the situations, circumstances and heart issues that we encounter as we do life together.

Serving Jesus is a challenging thing. The spiritual work of serving Him in the local church tends to confront our notions of self-sufficiency, self-reliance and strategic genius. It is the nature of the work that we tend to come up against things that are beyond our wisdom and capacity and that emphasise our inadequacy.

This session will explore how to serve Jesus and His people in the local church without despairing. It will engage our hearts with the range of feelings from disappointment to dread that ministry can create in us. It will help us think through ways to pursue dependence upon the Lord as the primary blessing and benefit of being in His service.

There is nothing more important in life than knowing God. He has given us His Word, The Bible, as His means of telling us who He is. Yet, we often struggle to get into or maintain good habits when it comes to time in God’s Word and that is without getting into the parts of the Bible that are harder to read and understand.

This workshop will be part history of how we got God’s Word, part help on how to read all of scripture so that as we read it bears fruit in us as God’s work and part heart reset as we learn how to read scripture such as reminds us of God’s worth.

Our days are full of choices. From the simplest questions around food and leisure to the bigger questions to do with purpose and progress we are always making decisions.

This workshop will explore how we can make those everyday choices, whether big or small, through the lens of God’s plans and purposes for our life. It will help us unpack our motivation and provide us with some Biblical methods for making wise, godly and eternity minded decisions.

The more time we spend in God’s Word the more likely we are to see that it is realistic about how hard life can be. We experience that in lots of different ways whether through health issues, things that threaten or sense of security and peace, uncertainty about what the future holds. All those things have the potential to press and pressure us. So when hard things come how do we process them? When hard things happen to those around us where do we take them and how do we walk with them?

This workshop is going to help us think through how to stay faithfully Biblical as we walk through suffering ourselves or as we have the privilege of doing so with someone else.