Concord Baptist attempts statewide marriage event
By Allen Palmeri
Associate Editor
JEFFERSON CITY—Concord Baptist Church here is hosting a Repairing the Breach conference Aug. 6-7 as a free gift to evangelical pastors and their wives in an attempt to address the serious plight of marriage in Missouri.
The conference is the handiwork of Concord Executive Pastor Pete Livingston and his wife, Debbie. Concord Senior Pastor Monte Shinkle, whose 18-year tenure at the capital city church has coincided with the congregation’s growth to 1,000 in Sunday worship, is crafting opening and closing messages.
“Concord Baptist Church is making a generous offer to all Missouri Baptist pastoral families,” said Missouri Baptist Convention Executive Director David Tolliver, who is a Concord member. “I pray that many Missouri Baptist pastors and wives will receive this generous gift and plan to attend.”
The Livingstons are the driving force behind the conference, which is being offered free of charge. (A $10 advance fee sent to the church by July 1 will confirm a pastor’s registration, with the fee being returned at the end of the conference.) They are the founders and authors of the Radically Married curriculum which has been taught around the world in seminars and classes. In August 2006, Pete Livingston left a staff position at First Baptist Church, Del City, Okla., to become Concord’s executive pastor.
“We’re growing steadily,” he said. “Our church family has been faithful in their giving. We’re enjoying a season of good stewardship. Our volunteers are up. Our attendance is up. Our giving is up. We just believe that God has blessed us with some of this for the purpose of helping others, and that includes other churches. We want to see the churches around us get stronger, and ‘around us’ can be as far as the borders of this state.
“God’s call on my life, I truly, truly, believe, ministry-wise, is to help build and rebuild families. I know for absolute certain that that is my purpose in life. I’m blessed to have an incredible pastor who also wants to reach out and change the community and region that we operate in. In addition to that, we have a very stable staff. Our newest staff member has been here over two years now, and there were no changes for three years before that. So we are progressing very well as a team, and we’re fortunate to all be pulling toward trying to impact all of Mid-Missouri. This would be our first effort to try to reach out beyond.”
The theme, which is an original Livingston creation, touches on Isaiah 58:12, which is a restorative passage. The core idea, Pete Livingston said, is that marriages and families in America are crumbling under various cultural pressures, but the faith community has answers when it comes to solving relationship issues and building strong ties.
Pastors and their wives who come to Jefferson City for the conference will be acknowledged as busy people who generally do not have a lot of time for counseling. The goal is to equip them to be first responders who can identify what is troubling a struggling family, bind up the wounds through effective short-term counseling, and nudge people along to a place where they can get excellent long-term help.
“We get a lot of referrals from other churches to help with marital and family counseling, and we’re glad to oblige,” Pete Livingston said, “but a lot of people won’t make the trip to another church, or they won’t go see another pastor, so consequently the issues in their marriage and family relationships fester, become really negative, and even end in divorce because neither of the parties have much hope that it will ever get any better. We believe that the faith community has the answers of hope that couples, marriages, need, and we want to help equip pastors.”
The Livingstons launch out into the area of Christian worldview with their teachings, presenting a session on marriage that contrasts the Christian view with the pagan view and shows how some Christian marriages these days actually are dipping down into the pagan category with some of their practices. They also do a “one flesh” teaching that they label a pivotal point by which couples can rebuild their marriages.
“In other sessions we’re going to actually pull out of our toolbox things that pastors can use with their people in their churches—assessment tools and that sort of thing—that can help them understand how to crack open the can of these lives, so to speak, so that they can then pour the Word of God into them that they will be changed and set free from the sin that is attacking their families,” Pete Livingston said.
The conference will go from 1 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Aug. 6 and 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Aug. 7.
“There are foundational pieces to how marriage is supposed to work, and the church is the one that has the hold on that, because it comes from the Bible,” Pete Livingston said. “If it’s going to happen that marriage is restored in this culture, it’s going to be because those that have the truth bring it forward to those who don’t have the truth.”
For more information, visit www.concordjc.org. or call (573) 893-2876.
